Since the CryoTherm Palm was designed to reduce perceived strain and fatigue during sprint intervals, I decided to test it in the hardest workout I am still able to do: 400-meter sprint repeats at a controlled pace of 75 seconds.
This is a workout I try to do as seldom as possible because it is awful, and I can do about five reps before I feel like I am going to physically implode. During my testing, I ran my control splits on a treadmill in a temperature-regulated area and, predictably, hit my wall of five reps.
With the help of the CryoTherm Palm, I wondered, could I possibly manage a sixth, or maybe even a cheeky seventh?
I used the CryoTherm Palm before long runs on the hottest, most humid days of August. Alexander Aciman/NYT Wirecutter
Over the next several weeks, I attempted to push past this limit on four different occasions, blitzing my palms with a blast of cold, sweating over the device between splits for one to three minutes, as Therabody’s manual directs.
And each time, I would hit the same five-rep wall.
There it was, as always, the familiar dizziness bobbing around my skull, the fainting-goat-like breathlessness that threatened to level me in public. Nothing in my performance had changed.
Over those weeks, I would also grip the CryoTherm Palm before and after long runs, in search of a second wind; between reps of higher-intensity physical therapy circuits; and before bed as the device whirred in the dark, hoping to lower my core temperature.
Yet nothing about this device seemed to aid me. My limits, my physical discomfort during and after workouts, my soreness the next day, my fatigue between splits, and, most notably, my feeling of being perennially overheated, were all the same with and without use of the CryoTherm Palm.
My colleague, editor Ingrid Skjong, tested the device in resistance training and also saw no real improvement. “My performance remained the same; late-session reps felt as they would without taking a cooling break,” Ingrid said. “It also didn’t make me feel like I was capable of doing more.”
We also discovered a fatal flaw: The CryoTherm Palm is built around a small motor, which, candidly, sounds absolutely horrendous. It presses the same buttons of irritation and rage as an oven hood running on the highest setting. Ingrid felt similarly, saying, “When I tried it on my chronically tight upper-left trap one night while watching TV with my husband, it was so noisy, he asked me to stop.”