The Israeli public has found a thousand ways to support soldiers serving in Gaza and Lebanon – barbecues, laundry services, kids’ paintings, snacks, phone chargers, anything from tactical gear to toiletries . . . and ice baths.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds, says Nikia Blumenthal. It’s all about breaking through the pain barrier.

“At the end of the ice bath you get out with these crazy powerful feelings of overcoming something hard,” she tells ISRAEL21c. 

That’s a powerful message, especially for soldiers who are physically and emotionally exhausted.

She packs her car with a portable bath and 100kg (220 pounds) of ice and drives to IDF bases or army refreshment stations. 

And she has soldiers come to her, in centrally located Ra’anana, to do breathing exercises followed by a cold plunge, sometimes in soldier-only workshops, sometimes with other people. So far she reckons she’s dunked around 150 soldiers.

“You know it’s going to be hard, but you don’t back down and you don’t turn around. In fact you climb into it and you sit there until your mind goes still,” she says.

“And you realize it’s only cold water. I’m safe. My body knows what to do. I can trust myself to get through this. I’m strong. I’m powerful. I am who I am.”

Body first

Blumenthal trained in South Africa as a biokineticist, a healthcare professional who uses exercise and physical activity as a form of rehabilitation and performance enhancement.

She moved to Israel eight years ago and had just embarked on her own “ice bath journey” when Hamas launched its murderous attack on October 7, 2023.

She responded by offering Friday morning ice baths, initially to soldiers living locally. Then she started working with Chayal’s Angels, a voluntary group of massage, acupuncture and other therapists – including practitioners of cold therapy — who go out to heal soldiers’ minds, bodies and souls (chayal is Hebrew for “soldier”).

For Blumenthal, the body comes first. 

“The soldiers have a lot of aches and pains to deal with, quite aside from any injuries,” she says. “The average weight that a regular soldier carries is incredible. I held my daughter and two nieces and even that’s not [equal to] the weight they have to carry.” 

Plunging into an ice bath has clear physiological benefits, she says. There are claims (and counter-claims) about the efficacy of cold exposure to treat muscle soreness and inflammation, to improve circulation, metabolic rates and recovery times, to reduce muscle stiffness and to manage stress. 

But it goes beyond all that, says Blumenthal. Getting into a bath of ice-cold water – and staying in it, which is the bigger challenge – can be exhilarating and cathartic. (Women are, generally, able to stay in longer than men.)

“Different things happen to different people. Some people cry,” she says. 

“And I had one guy the other day who giggled and giggled and giggled. He told me when he came out that he hadn’t laughed like that since he was a kid. It’s a huge release and a lot of people cry as they get out.

“They get in and it’s so difficult and they’re like ‘Oh my God,’ and they actually panic a little bit and then you have to help them remember that this is cold water, it’s got nothing on you.

“You get into the water and your core temperature has to make sure it stays constant. So it narrows the blood vessels, makes them very small [vasoconstriction] around the whole body, especially the fingers and the toes, so they can go numb.

“It’s very painful and your whole body is screaming ‘Get me out of here!’ but your mind stays so strong and you breathe through it. And it’s basically mimicking a very hard situation, whether that’s something emotional, mental or physical.”

Someone brave enough

Blumenthal takes her portable ice bath to IDF bases, where she’s “competing” with the less challenging therapies that are also on offer.

“I often find when I start off there are no takers,” she says, “but then I’ll find somebody who’s brave enough and then he goes to his friend and then it sort of snowballs. 

“I worked with a lone soldier who really had a hard time. He hurt his knee and he wasn’t able to serve, which was mentally very difficult for him. He lost a lot of friends at the Nova festival. 

“He lost a lot of other people in Gaza. He came to ice bath and he told me as he finished, ‘The cold water is a metaphor for life. You have to plunge into the cold to overcome what you need to overcome.’

“I had another guy — I wish I took a picture before he came in. He looked dreadful. He’d had a very, very hard week in Gaza and he’d lost some people.

“His color was gray and his energy was gray. We did the breathing and he got in the bath and he literally left as a different human. His face was alive and his color was right and it was very meaningful,” she tells ISRAEL21c.

“It’s so funny — on the one hand, the ice bath finds your resilience. On the other hand, you get a huge dopamine hit and you just feel great. The water sort of holds whatever it is that you need it to hold. So you can just let it go in that moment.”

Breathwork

A critical element of the ice bath experience is the breathwork — conscious regulation of breath patterns — before the plunge, says Blumenthal, who takes an ice bath every day, sometimes twice a day.

The idea of cold exposure as a therapy has been championed by the Dutch “extreme athlete” Wim Hof. The Iceman, as he is known, climbed most of the way up Everest in shorts and sandals, and set a world record for the fastest barefoot half-marathon on ice or snow.

His Wim Hof Method (WHM), a combination of breathing techniques and cold-water immersion, is designed to develop mental resilience and focus, and to offer the benefits mentioned above.

The scientific evidence for and against the Wim Hof Method (WHM) is mixed.

But that’s not likely to trouble Blumenthal or the soldiers, the “miluim moms” (reservist mothers) or the many other “ordinary” patients she treats daily.

“I challenge anybody to try an ice plunge without feeling absolutely transformed,” she says.