Let me show you the proven benefits of taking a cold shower and also how to make doing it easy, because scientists, doctors, elite athletes and biohackers agree, a cold shower delivers significant benefits for everybody, not just those pushing the limits of human performance.
What are the benefits of a cold shower? The benefits of taking a cold shower are improved blood circulation, greater and more effective fat loss, a stronger immune system, increased testosterone levels, faster muscle recovery, improvements hair and skin condition, better quality sleep, and a reduction in stress.
How Your Body Reacts to a Cold Shower
First, you need to understand how our body reacts to the cold.
Ideally, our body wants to keep its temperature consistent with the temperature of the surrounding environment. But body heat mustn’t go above or beyond a certain point.
When the human body gets exposed to cold, it starts to lose temperature, and in order to save heat, the pores start to close into the skin. This way perspiration takes place and prevents too much heat loss. In addition, outer blood vessels get tightened under our skin.
Now the question is, how do all these benefit our body?
When your body makes such adjustments to itself, the impact is quite fascinating and really beneficial.
A Cold Shower gives you Better Blood Circulation
To generate more heat, the body needs to burn more oxygen, which in turn keeps our vital organs warm.
Automatically oxygen is carried to the organs via the arteries, pumped there by the heart. As a side effect, faster blood circulation is really great for cardiovascular health too.
Basically, by exposing yourself to the cold water in the shower you’re building a stronger heart.
The circulation improvement also helps drain what’s called your lymphatic system, which carries waste away from cells out of the body too.
It’s also been reported by some people that as you become used to cold showers you’ll see a drop in your heart rate throughout the day.
In fact, I know and train with somebody who commented how their resting heart rate fell by 5 to10 beats per minute after taking a cold shower every morning, which had major benefits when doing normal activities and when doing exercise.
A Cold Shower helps you Burn Fat
Pumping oxygen to organs is not the only way in which the body tries to keep itself warm during a cold shower.
Another way is to activate brown fat that can generate heat around the body.
Brown fat is known as the ‘good fat’ of the human body and burns a lot of calories in the process of keeping the body warm.
In cold temperature, brown fat gets a 15% boost compared to the normal amount, and burns more calories than usual.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t do exercise, you should, but people run miles and push themselves in the gym to burn extra calories, so if that’s you why not use the body’s natural ability too by having a cold shower?
A Cold Shower Improves Testosterone Levels
This is a benefit that’s more applicable to men and especially as testosterone levels drop over time, but well worth mentioning as it has relevance to women too, depending on what they’re looking to achieve.
Testosterone plays a key part in muscle mass, bone density, hair strength and growth, sex drive, mood, brain function, confidence, energy and cardiovascular health, so it has a significant impact on everybody, not just men.
In terms of male orientated benefits, increases in temperature affect the DNA, RNA and protein synthesis of the male testicles, which reduces testosterone levels. The opposite of this is that reducing temperature has the opposite effect.
More testosterone means a higher sperm count and increased fertility, that’s why hot showers are sometimes used as a natural male contraceptive.
If you are a man looking forward to improving your fertility, then a cold shower can be a great natural solution.
