Therabody CryoTherm Palm — Can Cooling Your Hands Mid-Workout Actually Help?

What Is It?

The CryoTherm Palm, launched June 2026, is Therabody's move into thermoregulation. It's a handheld device you grip between sets during workouts. It rapidly cools your palms (and can switch to heat), based on the principle that the palms, soles of feet, and face contain specialized blood vessels (arteriovenous anastomoses) that are unusually effective at exchanging heat with the body's core.

The pitch: cool your core faster mid-workout, reduce fatigue, improve performance.

The Science It's Based On

Palmar cooling research is legitimate and well-documented. Stanford researchers have published multiple studies showing that cooling the glabrous (non-hairy) skin surfaces — particularly the palms — can rapidly reduce core body temperature during exercise. In controlled trials, subjects using palm cooling between sets were able to do more reps, resist fatigue longer, and maintain output in heat stress conditions.

The mechanism is straightforward: the palms have a high density of AVAs (arteriovenous anastomoses) — direct connections between arteries and veins that bypass capillary beds. When these vessels dilate, blood flows rapidly through the palms, and external cooling transfers directly to arterial blood returning to the core.

This is real physiology, not marketing.

What We Don't Know

The Stanford research used a specific cooling protocol — a custom vacuum chamber device called the CoreControl (now RTX) that applies mild negative pressure to the palm while cooling it. The negative pressure dilates the AVAs, dramatically increasing blood flow through the palm surface.

The CryoTherm Palm uses temperature alone. It doesn't apply negative pressure. Whether passive cooling without vacuum-assisted vasodilation achieves the same magnitude of core temperature reduction is unclear from Therabody's published materials.

This is the gap between "based on the science" and "validated by the science."

The Bottom Line

The underlying mechanism — palmar cooling for performance — is one of the more robust findings in exercise physiology. The question isn't whether palmar cooling works. It's whether this device delivers it effectively enough to produce measurable results.

Therabody scored in the yellow range on evidence transparency. They cite the right science. Whether the CryoTherm Palm specifically replicates the conditions of that science is what an independent evidence review reveals.

→ See the full NORM evidence report for Therabody