Fill a bowl with water, freeze it solid, add cold tap water, then submerge your face until the freezer headache hits. Three days of this triggers the mammalian dive reflex and delivers roughly 80% of an ice bath's benefits for a few dollars instead of hundreds.
The cheapest thing. And the way I started doing ice therapy maybe 10 plus years ago and I started teaching people about this. Get a solid bowl and put it in your freezer with about like an inch of water in the bottom and just let it freeze. And then as soon as it's frozen, get some cold tap water, ideally filtered water, if you want to be fancy about it, and stir it around until the ice in the bottom makes the water really cold. Put it on the counter, take a deep breath, bend forward, and stick your whole face, like all of your face into the water and hold your breath as long as you can. You'll take your face out before you run out of air because you're going to get, like, that freezer headache. We'll keep doing it. And after you do this for three days, you'll get probably 80% of the benefits of an ice bath. And the reason this works is because of the mammalian dive reflex and the fact you have most cold receptors on your face. So this is something that doesn't take a lot of ice. I used to, when I started this, I had a trough from my farm and I would fill it with ice that I had to buy at the convenience store. And you're going to spend 20 bucks every time you do it on ice? Maybe more, plus a half hour your trunk gets wet and it's stupid. You're not going to do that.
