Health Benefits of a Cold Shower Post-workout

After a complete apocalyptic monster of a workout session, after collapsing on the floor in a heap of sweat, or staggering to reach your water bottle to chug the last of the liquid and quench your thirst, the next thing that most people think about is jumping into a shower after workout hot or cold to wash off all that sweat and bacteria and also to ease those muscles and joints.

Most of us, me included until very recently, go for the hot shower to massage those muscles and make the body feel loose and replenished.

But more and more research is showing the huge benefits of a cold shower after a training session, with a lot of evidence stacking up that’s making me dial down the heat once I hit the showers.

Just like a proper cool down after a heavy gym workout will set you on the track to a faster recovery, adding a cold shower into the mix will supercharge the recovery process even further and gear your body up to repair itself faster.

Adding just five minutes of cool down to your workout helps in:

Reducing the light-headed sensation that you can get after an intense workout

Forcing your muscles to recover faster

Stopping the blood pooling in your muscles, mobilizing it back through your heart and lungs to re-energize your body

After the cool down

This is where a shower after workout hot or cold takes all the hard work that you’ve done in the gym and gives it a little more edge, here’s how. The cold water hitting your body after a workout has important effects on your physiology.

Protect your internal organs: magic loophole

Your body interprets cold water hitting it as a threat. Our system is woven with over 200,000 years of hard-coded DNA. This DNA activates response pathways that protect us from the environmental forces that once threatened our existence on this planet. When cold water hits the body, it does its best to keep the blood from the outer edges of the body away from the skin and into the internal organs to protect them.

This is great after a workout, as lactic acid and lactate are carried along as blood moves away from the muscles and into the internal organs. Lactic acid is a compound that muscles produce during exercise. New research shows that lactic acid is not the enemy we once thought. That’s for another post, but after working out, you need to wash the lactic acid out of your muscles. For a visceral blood craving, a cold shower works well!

Reduce DOMS

Delayed onset muscle syndrome (DOMS) is a side effect of strenuous exercise. Metabolic activity is enhanced by the breakdown and rebuilding of muscle cells. These tiny tears in muscle fibers and the resulting cell damage are how muscles grow, but there’s also an inflammatory component that leads to a condition known as DOMS. I wake up a few days after my bench session to find my chest soft and painful to the slightest touch. It’s Dom. There is no way out, but you can reduce it. Two ways:

Anti-inflammatory drugs can reduce tension, but also show the catabolic effects of DOMS.

Pain relief coupled with reduced muscle buildup

Cold showers have been suggested to minimize post-exercise muscle inflammation, thereby also reducing DOMS, and without the catabolic effects of anti-inflammatory agents.

Also checkout, back and bi workout

brown fat = good; white fat = bad

Scientific understanding has advanced in recent years when our goal is to burn fat and build muscle, and when it comes to ridding our bodies of fat, new research suggests that brown fat – our shows the “good fat” – that surrounds the organs of the It plays a role in removing white fat, the “bad fat” found in your belly, hips, and thighs. can raise levels of brown fat, which is considered healthy.

how does this happen? Well, exposure to cold temperatures boosts the activity of genes that convert white fat to brown, which seems to stumble upon a magical loophole that prevents the body from shutting down.

Metabolic runway

Best of all, a cold shower boosts your metabolism as your body tries to warm up. A Scandinavian study found that exposing your body to cold temperatures can increase your metabolic rate by 15 times.

Now here’s the problem. You don’t have to take a cold shower to channel all that positive sizzle. Damn it, that’s a fact. You can take a normal hot shower, but turn the heat off completely for the last 30 seconds. That alone is enough to trigger the pathways that make all these good things possible.

The next time you shower after a great workout, lower the temperature and you’ll see the benefits.

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