10 Shocking Cold Plunge Benefits You Never Knew About

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Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert. In each episode, I put the power of health in your hands and share ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut, detox, and lots more so you can look and feel better fast.

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Are you looking for an instant mood boost that can help you with everything from your workout recovery and stress relief to better immune and heart health? I'm going to show you how to chill out and level up your health with cold therapy. Now, regularly using cold therapy can help improve your mood, clear up your skin, support heart health, give your metabolism upgrade. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I know I couldn't help myself. So first of all, what are cold plunges? And I will tell you a little behind the scenes. I've been obsessed with these for a while now. In fact, so obsessed, I even got my own cold plunge. So cold therapy just means exposing your body to cold, right? To cold water, to cold air. And there's lots of therapeutic benefits. You're submerging your body now, except for your head and neck in water at temperatures cooler than 59 degrees Fahrenheit. And while this is definitely trendy, it's not really a new trend. In fact, it goes way back to Hippocrates, who believed that water therapy could alleviate fatigue. In fact, 18th century docs write recommended cold baths to treat conditions like fever and rickets. And today people are using cold therapy for physical and mental challenges, including dealing with anxiety and stress and depression. Because honestly, it gives you like this instant mood boost. So here's how it works. As you're exposed to the cold, your blood vessels constrict. Then all your blood gets pushed towards your organs. Now as a result, your blood acquires more oxygen and becomes super nutrient rich. As your body starts heating up again, your blood vessels expand. And as your blood vessels expand, oxygen and nutrient rich blood flows back to your tissues, helping flush out the inflammation. Now, if you've been cold plunging, I'd love to hear in the comments what benefits you're finding and also what you're actually doing. Like which temperature, I really want to know. So I'm going to talk to you about 10 of the fabulous benefits that cold plunges can provide. And the first one kind of just already elucidated this was better circulation. So again, blood rushes to surround your vital organs and your heart is forced to pump more efficiently. Which means blood is pushed all through your vessels and supplies your body with oxygen and nutrients, which then improves your focus and concentration. Because your brain is getting oxygenated. Oxygen is used by the brain, right, to produce energy. And if you don't have enough oxygen, you get that brain fog, brain fatigue, you can't concentrate. So increased oxygenation to the Brain increases the amount of energy available to the brain, which can help improve focus and concentration. All right, next up, and you wouldn't think this would be one, turns out cold plunging can stimulate leukocytes. These are the white blood cells that help fight off sicknesses. And when you do this, remember all that contracting. You're causing the lymphatic system to contract, which is forcing fluid through the lymph nodes, which then help you detoxify and help strengthen the immune system. And we're lowering chronic inflammation, which is always a big risk for any kind of disease. Next up, and this is where I first heard about this, is that it can help reduce muscle soreness. In fact, what we know is that it may alleviate what's called DOMS. It's delayed onset muscle soreness 12 to 72 hours after exercise. It constricts your blood vessels which then can help flush waste products such as lactic acid that's making you sore. And it also can help reduce swelling and help reduce tissue breakdown. But here's what's interesting and this has been like this big controversy. So when we work out, we're doing these micro tearing, micro damaging and our body then starts to repair this. So you don't want to just work out hard and then go cold plunge because you stop that process. You want to be going through that process. So when you're doing cold plunging, it should be like 24 hours after that hard workout to really start to help promote that, the lowering of the inflammation. If you do it before that, you might interrupt all that training adaptation that you want. So wait a bit other thing, and I kind of alluded to this earlier with the mood, is that it releases feel good chemicals, including endorphins. I can tell you that I get into the cold plunge and after the initial like it's. You laugh. I mean it's just like because you just, you start to feel so good. It helps your mental clarity, your focus, your concentration, but it also sends these electrical impulses to your brain and you're more alert. And plus it helps you release these endorphins and endorphins, you felt them. They're those natural mood boosting chemicals in your brain that makes you feel pleasure and euphoria and pain relief. Not what you'd really think, oh, I'm going to get in the cold plunge and I'm going to feel like pleasure. It's after you get out. So another thing that it can do is help with your heart health because it increases parasympathetic nervous system Activity, which promotes rest and relaxation in the body. So it helps lower blood pressure and lower your heart rate and it helps promote calm. You have these stress hormones called catecholamines. And catecholamines raise blood pressure and contribute to artery clogging plaque that can lead to coronary artery disease. And this can help counteract that and lower inflammation. Now there's more good news for your skin. Now I already said I'm not putting my face in there, but it can help tighten and firm all of your skin. And this is fantastic. It's increasing that blood circulation so your skin looks healthier. And it helps protect against skin damaging free radicals and helps just depuff you. Helps reduce that inflammation because it's improving circulation and getting more oxygen and nutrients to the skin along with that increased blood flow. You're getting increased blood flow to your digestive organs. So it's helping your digestion as well as it's promoting the release of digestive enzymes, lipase, amylase, protease, and it's also triggering hormone sensitive lipase hsl, which breaks down fat cells and releases fatty acids which then can be used for energy. It's also stimulating the release of the hormone norepinephrine, which helps to regulate the digestive system. I've been trying to do this at night, but I haven't yet. But this can help with sleep. So you know that like one of the things that can help a lot at night is like take a hot bath and then turn the temper down. Because one of the things that happens when you sleep is your internal temperature naturally drops as part of the sleep process. So a cold plunge can help facilitate this. And I keep reading this, I'm like, I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it. I haven't done it yet. I've been doing it in the morning because that's when we're coldest naturally. So I'm like taking advantage of that. But it can supposedly lead to better sleep onset and improve sleep quality. So check back with me. I'm sure I will be trying this because I just told you I would. And I'm just going to hit it one more time because it's such a big thing, is that this can really help with your mood. Cold therapy can lower cortisol. Like that is such a big one. Check out this study where 61 people took a 10 week course to learn how to swim in cold seawater. But what they found with them is that, that they had improved mood. But the people who were Sitting on the beach did not have the improvement in mood. And the big reason that I do it, number 10 is what it does for your metabolism. So we know it boosts your metabolism, but here's what it's doing. We have white fat and brown fat on our body. Brown fat's the one that you want. It's rich in mitochondria, which you know, those are your body's little energy plants and has the ability to generate heat by burning calories. When you expose your body to cold, the body actually moves its, turns its, it basically browns its fat, moves that, that white fat into brown fat and it activates this brown fat, burns it to help maintain your body temperature. So when you're doing that, you're increasing your energy expenditure. What does that mean? You're burning more calories. And as we know, you're also elevating norepinephrine, that boosts your metabolism. Right. So these things are all super important. So how much should we do really? They say 59 degrees or less. I've been really working in the range of about 48 to 50 degrees. I stay in five to eight minutes now. I've heard, heard some studies about 40 degrees at four minutes. One thing I will tell you about a cold plunge versus a cold shower or versus cryotherapy where it's air is that you are going to get a bigger impact when you are in water, surrounded by water. It's going to work faster and deeper. So if you can get your hands on a cold plunge, try it. It is amazing. And then one more thing you could do is alternate between hot and cold. So I have a sunlight and sauna at home. And as you know, saunas have all sorts of benefits, infrared saunas, including sweating out all of the chemical compounds that can be hormone disruptors. In fact, if you do both of these right, they both create a thermal stress. And that's what happens when your body has to deal with a change in temperature. And if you look at what's really happened out here in the world, we've gotten very comfortable at keeping our temperature right around the same all the time. But when your temperature is lower or higher, your body has to work to bring you back to homeostasis work to bring you back to where you need to be. And so when you have to deal with that, it can optimize your metabolism and it can also support metabolic repair and anti aging genes. So hot and cold therapy can work together to kind of just get your metabolism to work even better. The first thing that I Did was I took a cold shower for like, I like literally like 10 seconds. And then I just increased that until I went into the cold plunge.

Right?

So this is the easiest thing. Start with just that cold shower. And then, you know, if you have a pool or access to a pool, like, get in there when the pool's down at like 60, right? When it's colder, if you have a big bathtub. We once had a big group at an Airbnb and we found that they a huge bathtub. We just kept dumping ice in it. We started doing it that way. You can, even outside, if it's cold where you are, you can go roll in the snow, you can go out in the cold, get your lungs exposed to the cold air, right? You can take some ice water. So take a little towel with some ice cubes and water and put it on the back of your neck. So there's a whole lot of different ways that you can do this. Of course, the very, very best ways is to get that cold plunge. And, you know, I've looked at a lot of what's going on in say, Iceland and Finland and Norway, all these places that are supposedly the happiest countries and healthiest countries. And spying, cold plunging and steams seem to be some of the common threads they're doing. And I know, like, this hasn't been something common in our country. So you might be going, ah, I don't know. But like, try the cold shower and then keep going and just start to watch because you will see amazing things that it can do to benefit your health. You'll see improvements in your mood, your sleep, your metabolism. And I think it's going to be totally worth the couple minutes of uncomfortable. And I'm not saying that the couple minutes of comfortable get more that get more comfortable. You just get more used to them. And you know the other side, how great it feels. Jump in that cold shower to start. And if you're looking for more ways to boost your metabolism when you get out of the cold shower, watch this next video where I cover my favorite metabolism boosting foods and spices and more. For more info on this and other health topics I cover or to rate and review, find me on Instagram, Facebook.

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