Short term effects of various water immersions on recovery from exhaustive intermittent exercise

This randomised comparison allocated highly trained national/international-level athletes to cold-water immersion, contrast water therapy, thermoneutral immersion or passive recovery after exhaustive intermittent exercise. The extracted evidence confirms random assignment but reports no randomisation method, no participant flow or analysed sample, no outcome definitions or blinding details, and no protocol, so only the randomisation domain can be judged and the remaining domains are uninformative. Any inference about cold plunge benefit from this study should be treated as unverified on methodological grounds, and its elite-athlete sample limits applicability to healthy exercising adults generally.