As one of the customer service specialists, it is particularly satisfying when the products I represent Ice wraps come to my rescue!

It’s that magical time of year when we head out doors in earnest, and like you, I’m no exception to that. One of activities I enjoy is rollerblading! I have chronically bad knees so jogging just isn’t possible for me. Rollerblading is low impact and a wonderful way to get back into shape after sitting indoors all winter long.

This year with the addition of two dogs to my family, I decided a wonderful way to exercise the dogs as well as myself would be to take the dogs rollerblading with me! And for the first few days, it was perfect! Granted…the road was a little rough but I got to move and the dogs got to run! So far so good…

I’m sure you’ve guessed…all was not to end well. One afternoon, I started down the road, the dogs in the lead and I heard a car approaching from behind. Normally, I simply move over to the side with the dogs in tow. Well, on this day I was coming up to a driveway, and thought how convenient…I can simply skate into the drive and stop there. (yes I know the owners of the driveway).

Unknown to me…there was a rather large stone which of course my rollerblade managed to find. Down I went! Fast and hard, knee first. I quickly realized continuing to skid across pavement on my knee was not really the best method to stop and chose to finish off my fall with a head over heel roll. Ouch! It must have looked rather dramatic since the car stopped to be sure I was ok.

Once the initial shock wore off, I assessed the damage (which to my knee was conservable), took off my rollerblades and hobbled home with the dogs untangled and seeming rather pleased with my neat trick!

Once home, I cleaned myself up…bandaged up my knee and grabbed an ice pack since I could see my knee swelling minute by minute! I followed the general suggestion of 10 to 20 minutes on let things warm up for about an hour…and back to the 10 to 20 minutes on. It was so convenient to but the ice insert in the wrap, velcro it in place and let the cold do it’s work.

I continued to ice for the next couple days and much to my delight, the swelling went down pretty quickly and I didn’t even wind up with a black and blue knee! (Road rash however is still plaguing me!)

–Shelly

How do you know if you should use heat therapy?

The first thing I would always recommend is that you check with your physician to be sure you’re using the proper therapy for your condition. Using the inappropriate hot versus cold therapy can actually cause even further tissue damage.

As promised in the Top 5 Reasons to Use Cold Therapy…I wanted to be sure to give you the counterpart to cold therapy…heat therapy!

Let me start with some basic reason why you may want to use heat therapy and then I’ll go briefly into some of the reasons why heat therapy can be helpful.

Top 5 Reasons for Heat Therapy

1. Pain Relief (not a new injury with swelling!)
2. Increase in muscle flexibility
3. Increase in blood flow
4. Reduction of Muscle Spasms
5. Faster healing

Pain relief is probably the most common use of Heat Therapy. You do need to use caution here…an acute injury (an injury occurring less the 14 days ago with possible swelling) should not be treated with heat generally. Of course there are acceptations like when alternating cold followed by heat after a surgery, etc). However, when an injury is considered chronic (long term) such as rheumatoid arthritis or stiff muscles, heat can be very beneficial. It is suggested that heat can block the pain transmitters in the body as well.

Heat can also increase the flexibility in your muscles by causing them to relax and decrease stiffness. The same principal also applies to muscle spasms in that the muscle relaxation heat provides can relax those tightening muscles.

Increasing blood flow and faster healing are inter-related. Heat causes the blood vessels to relax, therefore blood flow increases. This intern allows more nutrients, proteins and oxygen to reach the injured area giving the chronically injured area more of what it needs to promote healing.

Just as in the Top 5 Reasons to Use Cold Therapy, this is a very brief explanation and does not encompass all of the factors involved. Again, when in doubt, please seek medical advice from a licensed physician.

How do you know if you should be using cold therapy?

For the purpose of this article, I will be focusing on Cold Therapy…we’ll get to hot therapy in a future article.

The first thing I would always recommend is that you check with your physician to be sure you’re using the proper therapy for your condition. Using the inappropriate hot versus cold therapy can actually cause even further tissue damage.

Let me start with some basic reasons why you may want to use cold therapy and then I’ll briefly go into some of the reasons why ice therapy can be helpful.

Top 5 Reasons for Cold Therapy

1. Pain Relief
2. Reduction of Swelling
3. Reduction of Blood Loss
4. Reduction of Muscle Spasms
5. Reduction of Cell Death

Pain relief is probably the most common use of Ice Therapy. There are several different theories as to why cold therapy is so effective for relieving pain. Like blood flow, cold seems to also slow down the electrical impulses going to your brain telling you you’re in pain. It also seems to raise the body’s threshold to tolerate pain possibly by the release of extra endorphins (the body’s natural pain reliever).

The reduction in swelling and blood loss is pretty much controlled by the same process. Cold causes the blood vessels to contract (narrow). Since excessive blood flow to the injured area causes swelling, just like a cut or a bloody nose, narrowing of the blood vessels themselves will reduce the amount of blood getting to the area of concern, thus a reduction in swelling and or bleeding.

When talking about muscle spasms, generally you think of heat, however cold can also be very effective in reducing spasms! In a number of cases, pain is actually the cause of a muscle spasm so by reducing the pain, you also reduce the muscle spasm.

As for the cell death, when you have an acute injury, cold therapy can reduce the rate of cell death by reducing the need for oxygen to the affected area by slowing down the metabolic rate.


Obviously, this is a very brief explanation and does not encompass all of the factors involved, hopefully it’s given you a little better understanding of what cold therapy can be used for and why it can be helpful.

As the customer service/sales manager at IceWraps, I have learned that people’s primary care physician or specialist, simply don’t give their patients enough advice on the type and duration of hot or cold therapy they need .

One of the most frequent question I get is “how long do I need to ice/heat and how often.” While I can certainly answer this in general terms each person’s needs are specific to their injury.

You may have one person who really needs to ice/heat for ten minutes another might need to go the full twenty minutes anywhere from once a day to three or four times a day. So while I will share this general information, I strongly suggest each person check with their doctor for their specific needs.

Of course, one of my big concerns is that some customers want to ice or heat an area longer then twenty minutes. Most people don’t realize that over icing can actually cause frostbite (actual damage to the tissue of the skin).

While it’s always my goal to give each person the best advice I can, as an online store, I don’t speak with most people who purchase from us. Likewise I am not a medical doctor nor are any of our other customer service specialists, so we’re unable to give specific medical advice.

So here are some general questions you should ask your doctor before using ice/heat therapy:

Be proactive in your care! Not only will this help you heal faster, this type of information will also help me or one of our other customer service specialists help you get the product you need.

Do you play sports or have a job that requires you to participate in regular physical activity? While these types of actions may help you to stay in better shape, they also put you at risk for physical injury if you make a movement that your body is not ready for. If you think that you have injured yourself in your upper back or shoulder region, and it is interfering with the way your enjoy your hobbies or the way that you perform your job, you should know that you may have a rotator cuff injury that needs to be dealt with by a professional.


If you’ve never injured your rotator cuff before, you might not know whether or not you truly have this injury or not. There are several symptoms that indicate that you might be looking at a rotator cuff injury, including intense pain in your shoulder. The rotator cuff is an area of muscles and tendons that help to connect your upper arm to your shoulder blade. If you’ve ever reached up to get something off of a high shelf or beaten your previous record in the back stroke, you have your rotator cuff to thank for that.


What most people don’t know about rotator cuff injuries is that they are usually able to be healed on their own. Because the cuff is only muscle and tendon, you can’t really put in a cast or prescribe medicine that will heal it like a broken bone or an ankle sprain. If you feel a searing pain when you attempt to lift your arm over your head, you should definitely let a doctor examine your muscle tissue and provide you with a sling to stabilize the area while the body attempts to heal itself. This might be painful, and will take a lot of patience.


If you are experiencing an unusual pain in your shoulder blade, your doctor will probably prescribe heat and ice treatments so that you can sleep and go about your day. If you are experiencing a throbbing pain, you can use ice or cold packs to numb the pain. If the pain is dull and aching, the heat will help it to melt away and loosen up the injured muscle. No matter what the causes or the symptoms are be sure that you request a doctor to look at the injury. In some cases surgery or more intensive rotator cuff treatments are required, and you don’t want to avoid them.

Having just had back surgery, it made me think of what goes on inside the body that causes the swelling and most importantly how to get rid of the pain. Since I work in the hot and cold therapy product field, I knew exactly the best way to treat it. I am often asked when should you use ice or heat and how do you know if the swelling is normal or bad. If you’ve ever had an injury or a surgery, chances are you have experienced the swelling that is caused by lymphatic fluid rushing to the injury site. Lymphatic fluid is the clear fluid that accumulates inside a blister. It is used to provide nutrition to the cells of the body and to remove waste. When cells become damaged, fluid rushes to the injury site and sweeps away any bacteria that may have accumulated. It is then whisked off to the lymph nodes where it can be filtered off and excreted from the body. If only it would take the pain with it.

Swelling is a normal part of the healing process whether it is from surgery or a hard bump. The immediate swelling is typically blood that is accumulating from broken blood vessels caused by the trauma. Over time, if the injury is minor, the blood will be swept away by the lymphatic system, and the swelling will subside. It is often confusing trying to decide whether you should apply a hot compress or an ice pack or whether you should alternate the two. If you do alternate, there is always the question of how long each should be applied before switching. After my surgery, I treated it with ice to help reduce the swelling and to numb some of the pain. As time went on, I began alternating it with heat to relax the muscles that were damaged during surgery and reduce the muscle spasms. For both heat and ice you should remove the pack after about 10 to 15 minutes, and allow the skin to return to a normal temperature before icing or heating it again. Any longer and you can cause skin burns and nerve damage.

Swelling can also sometimes signify infection or the presence of an irritating substance beneath the skin. This type of swelling is caused by a concentration of lymphatic fluid at the infection site. A fever along with pus and redness around the injured area with this type of swelling is a good indication you have an infection and should contact your doctor. Applying heat to the infected area can help relieve the pain and reduce the swelling. Just as the cold of ice causes blood vessels to constrict and reduce blood flow, heat causes them to expand, so that more blood cells can pass through and speed the healing.

Another great thing about ice and heat therapy is that it has helped me reduce the amount of pain meds my doctor prescribed, therefore reducing the chances of me becoming addicted to them. Just another great benefit of hot and cold therapy.

Chemotherapy drugs are specially designed medications that are programmed to attack cancer cells. Cancer cells grow rapidly which means that the drugs will also, unfortunately, attack other rapidly growing cells throughout the body– including your hair follicles. Because of this chemo can cause loss of hair and not just the hair on your head, but anywhere on your body. Cancer patients have reported the loss of eyelashes, eyebrows, pubic hair, armpit hair and other body hair. Different chemotherapy drugs and differing levels of dose can affect hair loss as well. For many cancer patients the loss of hair simply adds insult to injury. One new method for preventing hair loss is called cold therapy.

Hair loss prevention for chemotherapy patients did not used to be an option. It was an accepted fact that the powerful chemo drugs simply took your hair. Recently it was hypothesized that if you could restrict or slow the blood flow to the scalp while the chemotherapy drugs were in the system it would provide a tool for hair loss prevention. Restricting the blood flow through compression or other methods was deemed not practical, but the specific application of cold to slow the blood flow was tried to some initial success.

A cold therapy cap is placed on the head up to 15 minutes before the start of chemotherapy to begin the process of slowing down and restricting circulation. The cold cap is kept on throughout the therapy and for up to 1-2 hours after your chemo session has ended. Some people find the cold caps too uncomfortable and cannot tolerate wearing them for the time needed to achieve full efficacy. For the majority of people however, they can tolerate the cold in a bid to save their hair. This method is producing fairly good results with hair loss prevention and at least supplies an option to the old sense of inevitable hair loss.

Cold therapy might be just the right thing for preventing hair loss due to chemotherapy. No longer does it have to be an automatic that you lose your hair when you undergo chemo treatments. Of course, like any medical treatment, this process is not 100% effective, and results will vary depending on what chemo drugs cocktail will be used. In addition, depending on what type of cancer you have restricting the drugs from your scalp may not be a good idea. The best bet is to talk everything out with your doctor to decide what is best in your case.

Every sports team has that one player. Everyone knows him. That one player who is great and so the coach keeps putting him in, but his body seems to be made of glass. He is so accident prone that he spends half the game on the sidelines sitting in a tub of ice water.

Now we have something that trainers can be very happy with, the Trainer’s Kit of Ice Wraps by ColdOne. This kit has 8 reusable pieces including wraps for hand, elbow, shoulder, knee back and anything else a person could think of. Hopefully, no athlete would need to use every one of these wraps. However now there is something for everyone on the team and for those players who end up with multiple injuries.

This kit is very useful and will be, again and again. Now there is now need to worry about running out of items for the trainers to use on their athletes. This kit carries some of our best product and easily pays for itself. No need to share ice packs any more coach!

So, there is this girl. Tomorrow, this girl has a date. Now what happens? She falls down the stairs. Uh oh. Her ankle is swollen and she can’t wear her favorite shoes. That won’t do, she needs to look perfect! Though a swollen ankle with pain should always be looked at by a doctor, there is not always much else a person can do but ice it and elevate.

This imaginary, particular girl decides to put on the Double Ice Ankle Ice Wrap by ProSeries for Ankle Swelling. She rests with her wrap on and her leg elevated on top of pillows and by the next day her swelling is down and the pain is dulled. Now her favorite shoes fit perfectly and her date need never know.

This product is a great buy for anyone. Everyone has accidents and many times they involve our quite fragile ankles. There is no need to reschedule your life around a swollen painful ankle. No customer will regret the purchase of a Double Ice Ankle Ice Wrap.

It is not just athletes and active individuals that have to deal with pain. Headaches, backaches, neck aches and muscle pain are common to everyone. Icewraps.net knows this and we carry a large supply of unique cold and hot packs and wraps. A very useful product is our Pressure Point Cold Therapy Packs. These packs aid in the relief of headaches, back aches and muscle soreness.

Combining pressure point therapy and cold therapy these packs are a must have. Many times, everyone gets that achy soreness that just won’t quit. A person can not get comfortable no matter what they do. These packs do the work for them.

Horrible pain can stop a person in their tracks and ruin their entire day. There is no need to deal with all that. Just take a little time out to rest with one of these packs and get up feeling great and being able to finish out your day on top.