Video tutorial by Ben Greenfield explaining how to take a cold shower (or contrast hot/cold showers) for cardiovascular and fat-loss benefits, stress resilience, and activation of the mammalian dive reflex. Provides a brief, practical how-to with timing recommendations (2–5 minutes continuous cold or 5-minute contrast protocol of 20s cold / 10s hot repeated).
Hi, I'm Ben Greenfield and I'm naked right now. Now I'm about to take my morning shower and I've received tons of requests from my listeners and readers about how I actually do this cold shower. I'm going to make this super duper quick for you as far as the explanation goes, because I have hour long podcasts on my website about the science behind this. But the idea is that you either a, do a two to five minute cold shower or B, do a five minute shower in which you're alternating between 20 seconds of cold and 10 seconds of hot. So you do 10 rounds of that hot to cold. Now, when you do the hot to cold, it is a little bit more logistically annoying than just standing in the cold the whole time. But. But you get the blood flow benefits of your body shifting from opening the blood vessels to closing them to opening to closing. So there's some really cool cardiovascular and fat loss effects that come from that. So first thing that I get asked is, do you just go straight to cold? Well, the answer is yes. And the reason for that, and this is at about. I'm not quite sure how cold it's really cold, though. I have really, really deep well water. The reason for that is that it builds stress resilience when a stream of cold water hits your face. And it also activates your mammalian dive reflex, causing you to take a sharp influx of air. And that actually increases your ability to be able to handle stress. So here we go.
So the way this works is I don't use a timer or a stopwatch. I just approximate. So once it feels like it's been about 20 seconds of pull, 4, 3, 2, 1. See if it helps time go by a little bit quicker, I'll shift to warm. Once I start to feel a little bit warm, I'll go ahead and take that 10 seconds and then I'll shift it back to cold. Now, a couple important things here. Make sure you don't just let the cold water hit the top of your head. I'm going to shift it back to cold here because it's nice if it hits areas of high blood flow or areas of lymph flow. Particularly your armpits are important. So I'll hit one armpit.
And I'll follow 180 and hit the other armpit. I will also bend over and let it hit my crotchal areas so that I get that increase in blood flow there as well. Go ahead and go back to hot here.
So that's called a hot cold contrast shower. I also try and let myself air dry more than towel dry after the shower so I get the fat loss benefits of my body having to warm itself. Now if you have questions of that had to do a cold shower, leave them underneath this video and I'd be happy to reply. In the meantime, please leave me to my showering and have a great day.
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