@Christine Rhoads we appreciate all sports and backgrounds but I can't deny the bias I have for fellow hockey players (also been a while since I've been on the ice). Welcome to the group and hopefully there is value for you and your clients!

@Lauren Martin great to have you find us and share your unique insights and experiences. Although not addressed much in the content, hydration is obviously an important variable in relation to heat stress and thermoregulation, so you've got a great background for the topic!

Don’t have experience with this and not familiar with this occurrence, but will do my best to look up and see if I can find anything on it. Hopefully some others have experiences that can be helpful too.

@Shawn Strickland great question and probably a common scenario given constraints during competition. A few thoughts: Cooling during training can help to increase the volume and quality of the training, leading to adaptations of improved strength/endurance/execution which could be transferred to the competition as a positive benefit. To play devil’s advocate, if you’re relying on cooling to achieve peak performance, and those same cooling methods are not available during competition, you will be limited by your physiological adaptation to the heat. Therefore, doing a complete heat acclimation protocol would be best so that the body is as adaptable to the heat as possible. There is a limit to physiological adaptation, so at some point, the constraints of personal physiological and the competition logistics (accessibility of cooling, breaks, conditions) will set the ceiling on optimization. I don’t think there is a big risk and the pros outweigh the cons, but you’re still going to want to prioritize acclimation if competition exposes players to heat.

@Dane Hall well said!

Hey @Bob Metcalfe - great question and something I've thought about extensively. Unfortunately, there are not yet any studies with palm cooling in a hockey environment, so my answer is mostly theoretical as an extension of other studies. Short answer, yes, it will work on a bench, even in the cold, but the extent of efficacy will land on a continuum due to a variety of factors. First, hockey players are highly susceptible to heat stress because of the high intensity activity that drives metabolic heat production and the insulation from the cold environment. There are multiple layers of insulating equipment, including the primary heat transfer portals (feet in skates, hands in gloves, and head in helmet). This greatly reduces opportunity for conductive, convective, or radiative heat transfer. Additionally, most sweat is trapped, so the evaporative cooling is also diminished. This creates the scenario where the body heats up quickly and ramps us cardiac output to the cutaneous skin, especially the hands. But to your point, as the metal reaches equilibrium with the cold environment, that is below the optimal temperature to avoid vasoconstriction of the hands. Keeping the device in its case to limit the cold exposure in between use may help, but after a few sessions of holding the device, your body heat will also transfer rapidly and warm up the device to a more appropriate temperature. Even just keeping the device wrapped in a towel to keep it from getting too cold could potentially help find the sweet spot. So there will likely be a tradeoff between competing forces: physiological drive to redirect blood to the extremities to dissipate heat and vasoconstrictive response to the cold. But, even if vasoconstriction leads to suboptimal heat transfer, there will still be some blood flow, hands will still be hot, and therefore some (likely high) degree of heat transfer. Conductive heat transfer to metal with a large temperature gradient will be orders of magnitude greater than pure convective heat transfer to the air, so even suboptimal would still be an improvement over no intervention.

@Travis Burkybile appreciate you joining!

@Brian Billett great share!