When this is activated, such as during a cold shower, you get an increase in the hormone noradrenaline. Health Check: do ice baths after sport help recovery or improve results? There is some evidence that cold water activates the sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that governs the “ fight-or-flight” response (an automatic physiological reaction to an event that is perceived as dangerous, stressful or frightening). When you have a cold shower, your heart rate and blood pressure increase. He says: “We go to the gym to work our muscles, but inside our bodies we have millions of tiny muscles in the cardiovascular system – and we can train them by simply taking a cold shower.” In the BBC programme, Hof suggests that cold water activates the cardiovascular system and therefore improves its function. Interestingly, the duration of the cold water did not affect the sickness absence.īBC presenter Michael Mosley is also a fan of very cold showers. The largest study with 3,000 participants was carried out in the Netherlands and found that people who took a daily cold shower (following a warm shower) of either 30 seconds, 60 seconds or 90 seconds for one month were off work with self-reported sickness 29% less than those who had a warm shower only. There is not much research looking at the health benefits of cold showers, so the literature is limited. Watching the reaction of the participants under the cold shower shows you that it is not a pleasant experience, at least at first. He asks celebrity participants on the show, including sports presenter Gabby Logan and singer Alfie Boe, to have a cold water shower of 12☌ every day, increasing the duration of the shower over time from 15 seconds to two minutes. You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here. Hof, who set a Guinness World Record for swimming under ice, says that a “cold shower a day keeps the doctor away” by decreasing stress and increasing energy levels.
Anyone watching the BBC programme Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof may be starting to wonder whether there’s really “power in the cold shower” as extreme athlete Hof claims.
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