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Cold Showers - The 3 Benefits

A 10-Week Plan to Experience the Benefits Today (Based on Huberman Lab)

Cold showers, cold plunges, and ice baths are gaining more and more popularity in our world today. It’s no longer just something crazy, biohackers do. But yet, more and more everyday people are using cold exposure to improve their mental and physical health.

Throughout this episode I’m going to refer to cold showers, cold plunges, and ice baths as cold exposure. Though the greatest benefits are seen when exposing your entire body - hands and feet included - in something like say a cold plunge or ice bath - I know that is not feasible for a lot of us including myself. However, cold showers are believed to provide if not the same, then very close to the same benefits. And that is something that basically all of us have access to.

For your information, in preparation of this episode I’ve taken a lot of this information from Dr. Andrew Huberman, one of the world’s leading health scientists and top podcasters of the show Huberman Lab. I’ve taken his hours upon hours of research and education into a much shorter, digestible, and hopefully easier to apply episode for you.

That said, let’s dive in.

To frame up the conversation, we must first discuss why people do cold exposure in the first place. I will be diving into each one thoroughly. By the end of the episode I’ll discuss a very practical 10-week progressive cold exposure plan that you can do to reap all of these benefits.

The 3 primary reasons for cold exposure:

1. Mental Benefits - Improve Resilience and Mood
2. Metabolic Benefits
3. Performance Benefits
1. Mental Benefits - Improve Resilience and Mood
We would all benefit from being more resilient. And by resilience I mean this:

- Your ability to regulate your mind and internal state through stress
- Your ability to stay cool, calm, collected and rational with your decision making when you are experiencing stress
- Your ability to lean into challenge or tolerate challenge while keeping your head on straight

There are specific ways we can all improve our resilience; one of which is deliberate cold exposure.

I use the word deliberate because there are greater benefits to deliberately or voluntarily subjecting yourself to a difficult situation for the sake of extracting the benefits from said situation, then there are from being thrusted into a difficult situation involuntarily.

So, anytime I say cold exposure moving forward I mean deliberate cold exposure. 

When our body gets stressed, our body increases its production of the catecholamines norepinephrine and epinephrine. Catecholamines are simply a type of neurohormone that are made by nerve cells that are used to send signals to other cells.

Norepinephrine and epinephrine are types of these neurohormones that play an important role in our “fight-or-flight” response. 

So, when we experience stress in our everyday life whether that be from work, from family, emotional stress, financial stress, etc. our body produces norepinephrine and epinephrine. Simultaneously our body produces a hormone called cortisol - which is considered our stress hormone.

When these chemicals are in our body, they can cause us to act less resilient. We do things we regret like drinking or doing drugs; we say things we didn’t mean to say like yelling at someone; we might quit something early like a workout, etc. Therefore you would say during those times you were not mentally tough.

But, through cold exposure you get practice in stressful situations. You voluntarily jump into a cold shower thereby increasing your production of norepinephrine and epinephrine and we get to show ourselves that we can withstand that stress. We get to show ourselves that we can do something we didn’t want to do and we got through it.

Another thing that is fascinating is that when you experience let’s say unwanted stress in your life, your body releases cortisol into the bloodstream. And generally we don’t want high levels of cortisol in the bloodstream unless we are getting ready to engage in physical activity. But when you do cold exposure, there are no increases in cortisol like there are during unwanted stress.

This is evidence that cold exposure falls into the category of a good type of stress. A famous endocrinologist by the name of Hans Selye won the Nobel Prize for distinguishing between two types of stress - distress and eustress. I personally haven’t dived into his work, but how I understand it is that he explains distress as unwanted stress that leads to negative health outcomes. While eustress is a positive stress that leads to improved health outcomes. 

Distress increases our levels of norepinephrine, epinephrine and cortisol. While eustress just increases our levels of norepinephrine and epinephrine.

To summarize, cold exposure can gradually improve our resilience by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to the same neurohormone response that occurs during stressful life situations minus the cortisol and gives us an opportunity to show that we are up to the task.

We are able to experience an increase in norepinephrine and epinephrine and not let it metaphorically break us down.

The last thing I’ll mention just briefly is the increase in dopamine that we experience from cold showers. It is well documented that our levels of dopamine - the neurotransmitter responsible for motivation - increases from a cold shower and that the increase in dopamine can last for hours after the cold shower is finished.

This can lead to elevated mood and motivation as you go about your day!

Be sure to keep listening till the end of the episode where I provide you with a specific plan you can follow to gradually get into cold exposure and increase your level of cold exposure to extract further benefits from it.
2. Metabolic Benefits
Metabolism is defined as the sum of all the chemical processes that occur inside of our body to maintain life.

When it comes to the topic of this conversation, we think of metabolic benefits as improving your body’s ability to burn calories, and for this conversation in particular, burn fat.

There are two types of fat called white fat and brown fat inside of our bodies. The names are given to them because those are the colors that the fat cells appear under a microscope. There are also fat cells called beige fat - which as you might assume - is simply a fat cell that most likely has properties of both white and brown fat and may be in the middle of converting into one type or the other.

White fat, simply put, is the kind of fat that most of us don’t want in excess amounts. This fat is meant to store extra energy. This kind of fat has lower levels of active mitochondria therefore not optimized for work but optimized for storage. Not optimized for the burning of energy but for the conservation of energy.

Brown fat on the other hand is a type of fat that creates heat and helps you maintain your internal body temperature. This kind of fat has higher levels of active mitochondria therefore being optimized for work and for burning calories.

It has been shown that cold exposure can allow us to convert white fat into brown fat, therefore increasing our core metabolism - increasing our body’s ability to burn calories. 

This conversion of white fat to brown fat provides benefits both acutely and overtime. When you’re actively converting white fat to brown fat while in a cold shower, your body is burning more calories. That said, it’s not an extensive amount of calories that are being burned at the moment.

However, an improved ratio of white fat to brown fat in our body is healthier and provides a more long lasting increase in metabolism.

How much? That is something that is super complex and not well documented in research. 

However, if you’re looking for ways to increase your metabolism, then this could certainly be an option. That said, don’t expect to hit all your weight loss goals simply by taking cold showers.
3. Performance Benefits
There are two different ways that cold exposure can provide benefits when it comes to performance. The first is improved recovery and the second is cooling body temperature during a workout.

Let’s start with improving recovery. Doing cold exposure after high intensity exercise, can help to improve your ability to exercise with high levels of power in your next workout, can help reduce muscle soreness, and increase perceived recovery levels.

However, one thing to mention is that if your goal is purely hypertrophy and/or strength, meaning your goal is purely to build as much muscle or gain as much strength as possible, then doing cold exposure post workout is not ideal. 

But again, if your goal is more athletically based, or endurance based then cold exposure post workout can help you recover faster so that you can perform at high intensities in subsequent workouts.

The second possible performance benefit from cold exposure is not something that I had heard of before. And it’s not something that I have personally tried yet. And it’s all about reducing your internal body temperature during your competition, game, or workout.

Think about when you’re really hot. Imagine you’ve either been running for a long time, working out for a long time, or in the middle of a competition outside and been in the heat of the summer for a long time. If someone gives you a cold rag to cool off, where do you usually put it?

I don’t know about you, but for me it’s usually my head or my neck. And I’m sure most of you would say the same. Turns out, that’s not the best place to put it.

In order to most efficiently and effectively reduce our core body temperature, we should place the cold rag on our upper cheeks, palms of our hands, or bottoms of our feet. These three areas of our body are what’s called glabrous skin surfaces.

And what that means is in these areas, underneath the surface of the skin the vasculature is such that the body is more able to dump heat more readily. Therefore having the ability to decrease your body temperature more quickly.

And this is important because the window of temperature at which our muscles are able to optimally perform is actually a pretty narrow window. So, if the temperature of our muscles are overheated, then they are more likely to quit sooner.

Therefore, if you can expose one of these glabrous skin surfaces - most regularly experimented on has been the palms of the hands for practical reasons - then you can bring your body temperature down to the desirable range for optimal muscular performance. 

And the main benefit you see from your performance is from the overall volume of work you can put in over time. It’s not going to allow you to lift heavier per say. It’s not going to allow you to run faster. It will allow you to lift as heavy as you normally could lift for longer. It’s going to allow you to run as fast as you could normally run for longer. I’ll provide a specific example of how you might see an improvement in a moment.

But an important nuance to be aware of is that you don’t want the cold exposure to these skin surfaces to be too cold causing what’s called vasoconstriction - when you constrict blood flow. 

So, if you were interested in trying this out, what would that actually look like? Well, I can tell you for one that I’ve never tried this before, but this is something I want to try, and something similar has been tried in studies. 

Pick an exercise or two that you’re wanting to focus most on. In between sets when you’re resting for 1-2 minutes, hold a cold water bottle in the palms of your hands. This should thereby allow you to do greater volumes of work for a longer period of time throughout your workout. 

Again this is overtime. This isn’t going to allow you to go from doing 20 push-ups to now all of a sudden you can knock out 40. The change would look something like this. 

The first test you would do would be without cooling your palms in between sets. So it could look like doing 6 sets of push-ups with a 1 minute rest between sets. And maybe your reps for each set are 20, 16, 12, 8, 6, 4, so a total of 66 push-ups over the course of 6 sets.

The idea or the thought or the hypothesis is that if you wait a few days and do this again but now in between sets you cool your palms then it might look like the following. You do another 6 sets of push-ups with a 1 minute rest, the thought is your push up total of 66 will go up. You might do something like 20, 18, 15, 12, 10, 8. So the reps across all your sets would be much higher.

If you give this a try, definitely let me know about the results that you experience.
The 10-Week Game Plan
The following Game Plan is progressive. Meaning we are increasing the difficulty of it progressively over time so as to get physically adapted, mentally adapted, and reap the greatest benefits.

The following Game Plan is designed so that you finish routinely doing 11+ minutes of cold exposure every single week which is a dosage that is shown to be plenty sufficient in studies to reap the benefits of cold exposure.

Across these 10 weeks there are 4 different variables that are tweaked in order to increase the level of difficulty, which are: 

1. Water Temperature
2. Frequency of Cold Exposures
3. Duration per Cold Exposure (overall time or number of breaths taken)
4. Movement or Body Turns 

The tendency will be to want to stay still in the cold. That’s because our skin will form a thermal layer in an attempt to warm us up. When we move, we break up that thermal layer and therefore experience greater levels of cold. That’s why throughout the plan, there are times that I will have you change the way your body is facing in the shower.

Other recommendations:
- Do the cold exposure in the morning. Sometime before noon.
- When facing the shower head, be sure to let the water hit the upper cheeks for at least part of the time. (see glabrous skin surface explanation for why)
- Don’t turn the water back to hot when you’re done. Finish with the cold! This helps maximize metabolic benefits.
- After the shower is turned off, wait at least 1 minute to start drying off with a towel. This helps maximize metabolic benefits.
Conclusion
Cold exposure, when done right, can be a great tool to improve our resilience, our mental toughness, improve our metabolism, and our performance. 

The neurohormones released during cold exposure mimic what is released during stressful, real-life scenarios and we can train our body to handle them with grace.

After taking a cold shower, we are more likely to have our mood elevated and motivation higher due to the surge in dopamine that we experience right after our shower and for hours after the shower.

When we get into cold water, it turns white fat - fat for storage - into brown fat - thermogenic fat, that aids to increase our metabolism both during the cold exposure and afterwards.

And using cold exposure can lower levels of inflammation after high-intensity exercise therefore providing us the ability to recover faster therefore allowing us to perform another high-intensity workout with great effort sooner. 

You can also cool parts of your body, like your palms, to lower your body temperature, in particular the temperature of your muscles, so that you are at a more optimal state to do higher volumes of work.

Cold exposure is not just a great tool for high performers, elite athletes, and biohackers; it’s a great tool for anyone on their health and fitness journey. I believe everyone should experiment with cold exposure to see what it might be able to do for you. 

I’ve been routinely doing cold showers since September of 2023 and have fallen in love with it. Well, falling in love might be a bit of an exaggeration. Every morning when I do it, I still really don’t want to, but I do it anyway. And in the winter months, I’m not going to lie, it’s been a little brutal. But if I can do it in the winter months, I can do it whenever. 

The way I’ve personally been implementing this is by finishing with cold for 80-90% of my showers. I’ll have my stopwatch on my phone nearby. I’ll press start, turn my shower as cold as possible, and stand in it for 1-2 minutes. I personally like to work on controlling my breathing and be sure I’m performing diaphragmatic breathing - breathing into the stomach rather than chest breathing. 

Right before I turn the shower to cold, I dread it. But I can truly say that when I come out of the cold shower my body is buzzing and feeling great.

If you start to experiment with cold exposure, then please send me a DM on Instagram @carrier_bestyou and let me know what you think!

Our next 10-Week Transformation starts April 22nd and registration will be opening up soon. 

But for now, try out the 1-Week FREE Trial of the 10-WT by going to nickcarrier.com/freetrial 

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Again go to nickcarrier.com/freetrial to get access today! 

To getting closer to your Best You,

Nick

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