Or do cold plunges? I know depending on where you live this can either be a lot more or a lot less intense. It’s getting down to the low 30s at night where I live so the water gets pretty cold.
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I don’t see why I would want to do that. The water takes about three minutes to heat up but then a nice, hot shower always feels good. Not a big fan of cold showers or cold plunges when there’s perfectly good hot water available.
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I have been having purely cold showers a lot since summer has begun here. I hate getting hot and sweaty all the time. I perspire all over my body. Especially my face. So gross!
There’s supposedly health benefits. Reduces stress, good for circulation, boost’s metabolism and immune system, good for your skin ect… also great for your mood, like getting a short workout in. It’s also one of those things that sucks at first but after awhile starts to feel good like jogging.
You don’t use the heat at all!? That’s wild lol. I get clean in the warm water then turn it to cold for a few minutes before I get out.
OK, there’s health benefits. But I don’t like cold showers.
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Fair enough 
1515
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Yep! I still sometimes have hot showers though. Especially when its a cold day. But cold showers feel like they help with my mindstate and mental health a bit. Reduces me anxiety somewhat.
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Not since I got married. Erections stopped being an issue.
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I don’t like heat, so I take cool to cold showers. The heat makes me feel dizzy and yucky.
I don’t like cold showers. I prefer hot water.
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Warm water for me, can’t do hot
Yeah…helps when your lifting but not sure about duration. We only have a shower and only do it in spring to autumn but cold showers in summer for sure for me.
There seems to be great benefits to exercise especially if you have the bath/plunge pool which interests me because the Romans would have saunas then cold rooms where you do the plunge pool. It’s old knowledge for sure so I do it still now.
before, yes, but now it’s more gentle
Ive taken them.
Mountain stream:
When I was a kid, the most relaxing experience I can remember was when I laid down in a cold mountain creek with just my nose above the water. Almost felt like taking a nap at the bottom of the flowing water.
I kept doing it at that time, until I became hypothermic from laying in a stream that was too cold (they get colder the farther you go up the mountainside), which was a bit scary because my body went numb and hard to move for a short time afterwards, on top of being frozen as a pop-sickle.
Being in a cold mountain stream (that is not so freezing you catch hypothermia, but uncomfortably cold and you need to adjust your body to the water slowly) with the water flowing around you feels 100x better than a cold shower, which already feels better than a warm one if you adjusted yourself.
Ocean:
I have never done a cold plunge in a gym or otherwise. Closest I would know is jumping into the pacific ocean as a Florida kid in Oregon, which I can describe like being a warm cup of coffee being dropped into instant freeze dry ice, so I must say: prolonged exposure probably would have actually killed me.
There is a reason people wear insulated suits in the pacific: They do not want to die.
Cold showers:
I used to do them for most of my showers, now I wait for the warm water to get running.
It is great after exercise or on a hot day.
But I would not recommend it if you feel stressed or over worked.
Because the only times I ever get sick (in my post teen years) are immediately following being exposed to cold, wet conditions for a prolonged period of time (not cold showers, but drenched in icy rain outdoors.)
If you are going to do cold showers/plunging then you need to:
- Hype yourself up for it, be invigorated and enjoy it instead of stressing yourself and letting the cold make you uncomfortable. Do it intermittently in time intervals, by alternating the water on/off (or with warm water) to let yourself get used to it if you need to adjust.
- Always prepare a warm, dry place to warm-up afterwards, if the air temperature is cold.
- Stop it if you feel stressed, overworked, or begining to feel sick. And know to alternate the cold showers with warm showers because the dopamine boosting benefit will only work if your body is not fully adjusted to the cold water, thus multiple, consecutive plunges into cold water will decrease or cease the benefits over time.
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Just read on Wikipedia that Ice Man’s (Wim Hof) previous wife was diagnosed schizophrenic, before she ‘left the building’ in 1995.
It is a small and tragic world.
When I was 17, I lived alone and couldn’t afford to pay the oil bill, so I took cold showers for months.
This happened in the winter and I’m in New England so it was so fkn cold I’d get migraines just from washing my hair!
I’d get out and sit under an electric blanket to play Mario Galaxy for hours while I got warm.
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Cold showers were used as a punishment by prefects at the public school I went to. It was not a good experience. At first it made you feel perked up, but by lunch time you were struggling to keep your eyes open. Nowadays the bit I hate is the initial cold water hitting my body before the shower warms up.
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Cold showers are good for weight loss, your body burns fat to heat itself. I drink cold ice water I read it burns calories too, it makes me shiver. There is brown fat in the body that burns white fat to produce heat