7 Benefits Of Cold Showers For Men That Will Surprise You 2024

Which of these two is your preferred choice: an ice-cold shower or a cozy hot shower?

Well, it’s indeed true that some people do enjoy the warm water hitting their backs, but do you know that taking a cold shower is beneficial to you? It’s true, and science backs up the benefits of cold showers.

Some of the benefits of cold showers for men are boosting your testosterone levels, improving your immunity, and enhancing your cardiovascular health

Common Benefits Of Cold Showers For Men

Ice Cold Showers Improve Circulation

The cold water shock sends your circulatory system into work mode to warm your core and safeguard key organs. Thus your body boosts blood flow.

At the very same time, it reduces blood flow in the blood vessels around your skin. This procedure increases blood flow, which is generally beneficial to your overall health.

May Help In Weight Loss

Ice baths can help you lose weight since they boost your metabolism, speeding up the fat-burning mechanism. The result is a reduction in overall body weight.

The only catch is that you need to do more besides cold water showers. You may add exercise and dieting to fasten this process. Otherwise, the effects become null and void.

May Help With Injuries

Ice baths or using ice cubes directly on injuries like broken bones is highly beneficial. The cold temperature helps numb the peripheral nerve endings and reduce inflammation.

They might also help slow down bleeding since the blood vessels causing the bleeding are constricted.

Hydrotherapy

Dips in icy rivers were an ancient practice by past civilizations as a rite of passage and healing.

The Germans were the first to coin “hydrotherapy^[1]” to describe this novel medical treatment in the early 1800s. They utilized it to treat everything from broken bones to erectile dysfunction in men.

Does Cold Shower Therapy Improve Men’s Health?

Yes, a cold shower does improve a man’s health. And it does this in various ways.

When cold water hits your body, a couple of things will happen long-term and in the short term. For example, showering in cold water has an immediate effect on boosting your metabolism.

When you take a cold shower, your circulatory system is activated as it works to sustain your body’s warmth despite the cold. Because your body temperature drops, you enter a state known as non-shivering thermogenesis^[2], which means you burn more calories.

In addition to you losing some weight, ice-cold water showers help boost your immunity, circulatory health, mental health, and more.

Here is how cold shower therapy can be used to improve men’s health:

Cold Showers Help Boost Sperm And Testosterone Production

The testicles and scrotum are the focus of most studies on temperature and its benefits to men’s health. Testicles should stay in a temp range^[3] of 95 to 98.6°F (35 to 37°C) to create sperm and other hormones. Hence the scrotum hangs outside the body.

Cold showers lower scrotal heat, facilitating the testicles to generate the most sperms. Consequently, it also means that cold showers increase testosterone levels as well.

However, a few contradictory pieces of evidence do not support that cold showers make any changes to your testosterone levels. One study^[4] states that it decreases testosterone levels.

Regardless, cooler testes have a greater impact on DNA activities, resulting in increased sperm count, quality, and movement.

Cold winter temperatures boost sperm shape and motility, according to a 2013 study^[5].

Cold Showers Boost Your Mood And Reduce Stress

Taking a cold bath has a positive effect on your mood. When the cold water hits your skin, it stimulates the cold receptors. These receptors send signals to the brain, which then triggers the release of neurotransmitters like endorphins. Endorphins are the chemical substance responsible for the runner’s high^[6], which boosts your mood.

As a result, they help you become a happier person with sound mental health as you can wade off depression and get rid of the extra stress. Taking a hot-to-cold shower has been linked to this fact of making you happier, according to a 2016 report^[7] on 30-60 second hot to cold showers.

A cold shower can also help you cope with stress more effectively by strengthening^[8] your nervous system. As you adjust to your new surroundings, the antioxidant glutathione levels rise, which helps to alleviate stress.

A Virginia commonwealth university school study supports^[9] that adopting a cold shower may help you combat depression.

Cold Showers Boost Your Metabolism

Brown fat, also known as brown adipose tissue, is a form of fat found in all humans, big or tiny. It can be found as subcutaneous fat under the skin, visceral fat around internal organs, in breast tissue, within the bone marrow, and in between muscles. Its main purpose is usually to keep a reserve of energy, plus it helps keep the body warm from time to time.

Two research trials, one from 2007^[10] and the other from 2009^[11], established a relationship between cold temperature and brown fat activation. They also discovered that brown and white fat have an inverse association.

In other words, the more brown fat you have, the more inclined you are to have a healthy quantity of white fat and a healthy BMI, which is one of the most important indications of your general health.

An Icy Waterfall Can Help You Stay Alert And Boost Energy

Have you ever wondered why people in army training camps take showers with cold, freezing water?

It is because it helps you stay alert in an instant.

Freezing water stimulates the amount of dopamine and norepinephrine, two neurotransmitters that cause your nervous system to enter a sympathetic state. This sympathetic nervous system state makes it a terrific method to get pumped up, increasing your energy levels before a training session of any kind, and they keep you alert.

Coldwater Showers Boost Your Immunity

Hot showers are comfortable, but that is just about it as they do not offer the same benefits as cold showers. One big one is boosting the immunity system.

Although it may not seem like it, prolonged exposure to cold water increases the development of immune white blood cells that protect your system against common infections.

Coldwater immersion leads the brain to release adrenaline, according to a 2014 study^[12]. This has two consequences: It stimulates the production of anti-inflammatory chemicals by the immune system. It also reduces your immune system’s inflammatory response to infections. Both of these impacts can aid your body’s ability to defend against disease.

Cold showers reduced research participants’ time off work by 29%, according to a 2016^[13] study. Even while there was no effect on how long patients were sick, this shows that ice-cold baths may enhance the immune system.

Cold Showers Help With Reducing Inflammation

Repeated oxidative stress responses can cause muscle damage to healthy cells, organs, and tissues over time, increasing your risk of major diseases such as cancer, arthritis, and clogged arteries.

Taking a quick cold shower may be out of your comfort zone. However, it engages your sympathetic nervous system, which lowers levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines^[14] that cause chronic inflammation.

So much so, regardless of any infection, cold exposure due to a cold shower every day could offer your body the potential benefits of better overall health due to reducing inflammatory responses.

Cold Showers May Help With Workout Recovery

Nothing sucks like having sore muscles that make even walking hard. But thankfully, science backs that when you start taking cold showers, you may experience faster muscle recovery. Coldwater has a delayed onset muscle soreness effect.

According to a study on two athletes, a case study from 2010^[15] supports that cold water immersion could help minimize discomfort and soreness after intensive activity. The first subject was a martial expert and the other a long-distance runner.

But there are other contradicting findings that say that cold water therapies may have little or no effect on reducing muscle soreness.

Two studies, one from 2007^[16] and the other from 2016^[17], found that cold water immersion had just a minor favorable effect on muscular pain recovery. This was especially true when done in conjunction with hot water exposure or for at least 10 to 15 minutes in water between 52 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit (11 to 15 degrees Celsius).

This style is commonly referred to as the James bond shower or the Scottish shower, which is when you first shower with hot water, then reduce the water temperature slowly to become colder as you proceed. It would be best to shower at a certain temperature for a few minutes before moving to the cold temperature water to finish off.

Another study from 2007^[18] indicated that cold water exposure did not affect muscle pain.

Are Cold Water Showers For Everyone?

We have highlighted the health benefits of showering or bathing with water in cold temperatures, but is everyone safe to take a cold bath?

Unfortunately, not everyone is safe to use cold water therapies. And these people are

• Someone with heart disease like heart blood pressure.
• Someone with a compromised immune system.
• Someone living in a freezing location. This might cause hypothermia^[19].
• Someone who is recovering from a cold or flu as the cold water bath may induce another cold.
• Someone with a mental issue. Taking a cold shower only has short-term antidepressant effects, and it will not heal your condition. So please take your medication since cold therapy is not a long-term sound alternative.

It may sound like an adventure of a lifetime to go ice-hole swimming or swim in icy rivers or cold waterfalls, but if you have any of the above health conditions, please do not—it may cause more harm than good.

Bottom Line

A daily cold shower is good for men’s health and offers you amazing benefits. It may help in boosting testosterone levels, sperm count, and mobility. A cold shower may also help increase blood flow, improve mood, and more energy which helps you energize your day.

Regardless, an icy bath is not for everyone, so please, if you have a compromised immune system or are predisposed to heart disease or high blood pressure, please stick to a nice hot shower or hot baths.

All in all, if you are a healthy individual, we know it can be stressful to start taking a cold shower daily. So why not give the Scottish shower a try? Take a deep breath and embrace the water change from hot to warm then cold. You will boost your body to produce more white blood cells.

Or start by cold water dousing after a hot shower to help your body release heat. When you start using hot and cold water together, you will notice some health benefits right away, while others after a few months.

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