Benefits of Cold Exposure

Ice baths and cold plunges create a challenging few minutes, so why put yourself through it? Well, how much time do you have? The benefits of cold water immersion are vast and so, we’ll summarize some of the benefits of cold exposure here, discuss how to potentially implement a cold exposure routine, and at the end of this article, we’ll link to some of our favorite scientists who provide amazing insights in case you really want to take a deep dive.

Cold Exposure Benefits:

Cold exposure causes dopamine and norepinephrine to increase by 200-500%.
Dopamine is the molecule of reward and pursuit and increases of dopamine can lead to a vast improvement of mood and cognitive attention.
Norepinephrine improves mood, focus, attention, makes you feel good, and helps with anxiety. It also improves resilience, grit, and your ability to move through challenges…read as: makes you more capable when dealing with the challenges of life.
Norepinephrine also triggers an increase in the amount of mitochondria, which serve as additional energy producing units inside of the cell, in adipose tissue (fat cells).
This increase in mitochondria causes white fat cells to be classified as beige or brown fat cells. White fat cells are basically used for fat storage (the ones we think of as blubbery fat), but when the white fat cell turns into a beige or brown fat cell, because the cell has the ability to produce more energy, it becomes more thermogenic and therefore increases core body temperature.
Not only does the cold exposure increase the amount of energy used, or calories burned, while your body is trying to stay warm in the cold and as you re-warm after the cold exposure, but the thermogenic effect of brown fat cells increase metabolism more than white fat cells, so cold exposure can have a long-lasting impact on total daily calories burned.
Cold exposure also produces additional mitochondria in muscle tissue which improve the amount of oxygen, fat, and lactate our muscles are able to use as energy, which, in turn, has been shown to improve aerobic capacity.
Cold exposure can reduce inflammation in the body which can slow the aging process as well as improve recoverability from workouts.
Surprisingly, cold exposure increases heat shock proteins (not as well as heat exposure does) which repair damaged cell DNA and how it is read by the cells epigenome. These heat shock proteins are also associated with increased growth hormone which is great for recovery and maintaining and building muscle mass.

Here’s the MovementLink Cold Exposure Protocol

How cold should it be? Very, 30s - 40s (in degrees Fahrenheit), but start conservative when you’re new.

There are actually a ton of options here and it doesn’t necessarily need to be that cold! The amount of time required to benefit is dependent on how cold (stressful) the water is to you. Some studies were on people in a chili pool for an hour and some studies are on ice baths. Because we don’t want this habit to take up too much time, we are in the camp of very cold for short duration. But, we did want to mention mildly cold for longer duration as that can be accomplished by not wearing jackets in cooler temperatures, swimming in cold pools like Barton Springs Pool in Austin, TX (68 degrees), and not huddling under a bunch of heavy blankets at night.

There is cardiac stress that comes along with getting into very cold water, especially when you are new, so talk with your physician before following any cold exposure protocols. This is another reason why starting with uncomfortable, but cool water can be a great jumping off point as you expose yourself to lower and lower temperatures over time.

How Long? If it’s very cold, 3-6 minutes.

Again, depends on how cold, but for us, cold exposure using an ice bath or cold plunge tub in very cold water (~30s-40s) for 3-6 minutes seems to fit the science and benefits and makes for a practice that doesn’t eat up too much time.

How Often? 2-4 times a week

What time of day? Morning to afternoon is ideal.

Ironically, an ice bath has a net warming effect on your core body temperature. Obviously not during the bath, but as your body fights the cold and warms up afterwards, there is an overall increase in core body temperature. We are big on supporting a natural circadian rhythm, and higher core body temperatures promote wakefulness and alertness which we don’t want to stimulate too close to bedtime.

Additionally, dopamine on its own doesn’t do anything, it has to bind to receptors. Ingesting caffeine 60-120 minutes before cold exposure increases the density and efficacy of dopamine receptors which can increase the effects of the dopamine increase generated by cold exposure.

There are additional reasons to delay your caffeine increase after you wake up having to do with caffeine binding to adenosine. Adenosine is related to tiredness and naturally decreases in the morning after you wake up. If you ingest caffeine too early, instead of decreasing adenosine, caffeine binds to it and when the caffeine wears off later, it can make you feel tired.

We also highly recommend adopting a shortened, daily eating window, which puts your body into a fasted-mimicking state more often which has it’s own giant list of benefits for health and longevity. The fasted state increase norepinephrine on its own which potentially provides an even bigger boost to cold exposure when combined together.

So, in an ideal world, if we are going to stack all of our healthy habits in the most synergistic way, we recommend you would wake-up, wait 90 minutes before ingest any caffeine (if you’re going to at all), then wait an additional 60-90 minutes for your ice bath or cold plunge, so that the caffeine has improved your body’s ability to take advantage of dopamine. If your eating window hasn’t started yet and you’re fasted, then even better. Of course, this is a lot of work and stacking a lot of habits you need to be committed to for just a small part of the benefits of cold exposure, so it is more important to get the habit going in a way that fits your life. Perfect things if you want to later.

What about before or after exercise? Ideally you’d ice bath or cold plunge on your Recovery Days or after Endurance Workouts

Cold exposure can have positive impacts on endurance, but a blunting effect if done immediately after workouts where the desired result is strength or hypertrophy. So, either skip cold exposure on days where your desired stimulus for a workout is strength (using weights at 65% of a max or heavier) or hypertrophy (doing an amount of sets and reps designed to stimulate muscle growth) or wait at least 4 hours afterwards, so the growth signaling is not disrupted. However, if you are a competitor that is doing multiple events in the same day, cold exposure after a strength or hypertrophy workout is likely a great idea as you do want to blunt the stress from your events. Remember, competitions are not done to grow, they are done to test.

Cold exposure directly before exercise is likely not a great idea as you’ll need to spend a ton of additional time warming up, but we haven’t heard how long before would be OK. For us, the answer lies long enough before so that you don’t have to add additional time to your warm-ups. With that said, a shorter duration cold exposure, something like 1 minute, could increase adrenaline without cooling your core body temperature too much. So, a 1 minute pre-workout cold plunge may increase performance in that workout, but would likely be short of the full benefits we are trying to get out of our cold exposure.

Studies have shown there are endurance benefits to cold exposure directly after an endurance workout, so keep in mind that cold exposure after a workout is dependent on the workout stimulus.

What about Hot and Cold combined?

We don’t really know, but the internet seems to love cold-to-hot-to-cold, etc. From our personal anecdotal experience it seems to take a long time when transitioning between modalities. Getting into a sauna after a cold plunge feels great, but you’re not having to warm-up on your own and because your core body temperature is low, it takes a really long time for the sauna to even start feeling hot. There may be some benefits, but we have found keeping it one or the other seems to work best for us. Heat exposure is great on its own as you can read about in our Benefits of Heat Exposure article, but part of the benefit of heat and cold exposure is your body cooling itself down after a sauna or your body heating itself up after an ice bath. So, there may be benefits in cycling back and forth, but there may also be benefits lost in using the sauna to heat up after an ice bath and vice versa. The ideal circadian timing of heat and cold stresses are different and the positive and negative impacts after different types of workouts are different, so for now, we don’t know. On a pure recovery day, there is likely way less to consider and would be a great opportunity to experiment.

Our Experience with Different Cold Exposure Options

Cold Plunge: These are amazing, expensive, but amazing. Constant temperature whenever you need it. Uses electricity, but saves a lot of water and plastic bags and can make a cold exposure habit a daily thing.
Ice Bath: For a 100 gallon tub filled up 3/4 of the way, about 100lbs of ice will get the water around 40 degrees. We like about 100lbs of ice and then 7-15 additional pounds of ice per additional person that is going to use it. Downsides are that it uses a lot of water each time you fill it up and you have to buy ice (wastes a lot of plastic bags) each time. Upsides, most affordable option if you’re going to do it every now and then.
- Getting in is scary.
- The first 10 seconds to a minute is spent hyperventalating and trying to get our breath under control. Experience with the cold and how recovered, rested, fed we are all play a role in how difficult it is to catch our breath.
- One we settle in with our breath, our extremities burn, a lot. We do best when we embrace that the burn is simply what it is going to feel like.
- We find it interesting that it is not a feeling of cold that is difficult, but it is first getting our breath under control and then it is living with the burn.
Cold Showers: With 3 minute cold plunges around 40 degrees, it is surprising that our 3 minute cold showers at around 70 degrees seems to be equally difficult mentally...in the beginning. But, having done cold showers every morning for a few months, you tend to get cold adapted and the initial shock isn’t as extreme. We do a 3 minute cold shower and then drip dry for an additional 3 minutes. We are cold, but our extremities do not burn like in cold plunges or cold walks. There doesn’t seem to be much research on cold showers, but our sense is some of the benefits will be there, but cold plunges will more effective.
- Update: There seems to be positive research of 6 cold showers a week plus 1 cold plunge, so if daily access to a cold plunge isn’t something you have, maybe this could be a good compromise.
Cold Walks: If the temperature is 45 degrees or below, 10-15 minute cold walks wearing as little clothing as possible seems to create a similar burn feeling in the extremities' as the cold plunges do. Although, for us, pre-going outside is just as scary as getting into an ice bath or cold shower, we do not experienced any fight or flight hyperventilating that happens with those other methods. Also, we don’t tend to shiver much in ice bath and cold shower (maybe due to the quick duration), but we do fight shivering during the second half of our cold walks. When it’s raining, the added water make it feel a lot colder. When it’s windy, the wind chill makes it feel a lot colder.

To sum it up, each of these methods are challenging in their own right. Cold plunges and ice baths are the most researched and seem to be the method that incorporates all aspects of cold exposure causing hyperventilated breathing and burning of the extremities, and post-exposure shivering. In our opinion, something is better than nothing, so if you are challenging yourself with cold, you’re on the right track. As you acclimate to your cold exposure, you may need to progress your exposure by adding more time, more cold, or making an aspect of it more challenging.