Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Motivation Monday: I Took A Cold Shower (Almost) Every Day for a Year. Here’s What Happened.

Episode Date: March 12, 2018

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.” (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s one thing to know what you want to do, but it’s something else altogether to actually make yourself do it, and I hope that this series gives you a jolt of inspiration, energy, and encouragement to get at it. So, if you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

This episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my workout app stacked. It has tens of thousands of users and close to 400 reviews on the Apple Store with a four-star average. And it helps you get more out of your training in several ways. It helps you quickly and easily

plan out your workout routines. It gives you quick access to useful tools like plate math and one rep max calculation. It allows you to visually track your progression in your workouts, as well as your body measurements and much, much more. It's free to download too. So if you want to check it out, then head over to www.getstackedapp.com or just hit the iOS app store and search for stacked workout and you will find it. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now, at least. Let's get to the show.

Guten Tag, meine Freunde. It is Mike back with another Motivation Monday. And that's me practicing my German because I am learning German, grinding it out. And random tangent. Language learning is interesting. It's actually, there are quite a few parallels to the fitness space because the long story short is learning a new language is a fucking pain in the ass. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of work. You can't really shortcut it. You can go about it intelligently and there

are some basic principles that you should know to get the most out of your work but in the end you just have to grind it out you just have to suffer through it i'm guessing it'll probably take a thousand hours of work to get to a point where i can have conversations that i'd actually want to have. I wouldn't even say fluency by what I would consider fluency, but maybe a high school level of proficiency, probably a thousand hours probably to get there. Now that is not how most language learning systems are promoted. Much like the fitness space, they are promoted as the one weird tricks for becoming fluent in three months, shortcuts, hacks, and so forth, trying to sell you on how easy it's going to be. No. Suffer. You're going to have to suffer just

like what it really takes to go from a normal skinny fat type of body composition to let's say a super fit, almost fitness model type of body composition. Yeah. What does that take? It takes years of hard work. And similarly, what does it take to go from not speaking a word of a language to speaking it fluently? I think that process is analogous. It takes a shitload of hard work. So anyways, I am grinding it out. I hope that by the end of this year, I'll be at that high school level of proficiency. And I think that's realistic given the time that I'm putting in. I've put in some time previously, so I do have a kind of a jumpstart. And I've also been with a German woman for how many years now? 16 years. So I've heard a lot of German

being spoken and I guess that has helped a little bit. Anyways, random rant. Let's now get to the Motivation Monday podcast. Let's start with a quote, of course. And this one comes from John Chatterton, whose story is chronicled in the fantastic book, Shadow Divers, which I highly recommend. And he said that excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity. Compromise on any of these and you become average. So today's episode is going to be a little bit different than usual. Instead of a random reflection of mine on things, I want to talk about cold showers and a little lesson that I learned through taking cold showers pretty much every day for, I guess, over a year now. And like most people, I first heard about cold showering because of Wim Hof, the

Iceman, as they call him, who is able to do some pretty impressive things with his body, no doubt. And I heard that taking cold showers every day was a way to follow in his footsteps, I guess. You obviously weren't going to transform yourself into Wim Hof, but if you took cold showers, you would experience a wide variety of benefits like more testosterone. Do you want more testosterone? Of course you do. What about a stronger immune system? Sure, who doesn't want a stronger immune system? What about less stress and better moods? Yeah, I do. And how about a dollop of rapid fat loss on top of all that? Well, yeah, please. Does the Tin Man have a sheet metal disco stick? Well, those are the things that many

proponents of cold showers say that we can have. We can have all that and more without having to buy or steal anything or sacrifice any small animals to the dread Lord Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, if you prefer. I'm politically fluid, so don't you judge me, bigot. Okay? Now, what if all you had to do, these people say, is freeze your fun stuff off for a few minutes every day and your body would just automagically upgrade its firmware, so to speak, as if you had swallowed the star in Super Mario. And of course, I heard these things. I heard this story and figured that cold showering probably was just the biohack du jour. Because let's face it, when people are saying that we can do something as simple as just freezing our ass off for a few minutes a day

and not only help keep the doctor away, but fundamentally transform and elevate our physical and astral bodies. You got to say, right? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. A part of us always wonders though. A part of us always wants to know, always wants an answer. Is it? Because in some cases, things that sound too good to be true actually pan out. Take vitamin D for example, which was once thought to be simply a bone vitamin. And thanks mainly to the work of Dr. Michael Holick, we now know that vitamin D is essentially a hormone that every cell in our body has a receptor for vitamin D, and it is a vitally important hormone at that. And one of the

simplest things we can do to improve just about every aspect of our health and wellbeing is ensure that we are getting enough vitamin D. Anyways, back to cold showering. Like most people, I first heard about intentionally exposing yourself to extreme cold, not that cold showers are extreme cold, but I mean extreme cold. I first heard about it when I heard about Wim Hof's story, which I mentioned earlier. Of course, his stuff has made the rounds on the interwebs that started a few years ago. And in case you don't know about this guy, he has climbed some of the tallest mountains on the planet in just his shorts. He has run a marathon in freezing temperatures again in his shorts. He ran another marathon in the Namib

desert without any water. And he has also swam underwater in an ice capped lake for 120 meters. Risky. Moreover, Wim says that anyone can tap into their own latent superpowers, if you will, through a protocol that he designed that involves regular cold exposure, breathing techniques, and meditation. Actually, much like the samurai misogi ritual of breath training, sleep deprivation, and chanting beneath icy waterfalls. Now, all that is intriguing, of course. And so a year or so ago, I figured, what the hell, I'll give it a go. And while I quickly lost interest in the hyperventilation and the meditation, because I don't really care about being able to try to control my nervous system or raise my internal body temperature, which Wim can do, I did stick with the cold exposure starting every day with a three-minute cold shower.

And by cold shower, I mean as cold as the water goes all the way to the left, which gets pretty cold in the winter. I live in Virginia. And so we regularly see temperatures in the teens, twenties, well, I'd say more in the twenties and thirties. We'll have a few nights got down in the teens. And that water comes out cold. It is ice water. It stings. Now, what have I gotten out of this? And what does science have to say about everything? Well, here is the long story short. The benefits of cold showers have been widely oversold. They will improve your ability to handle cold, and they're also great for waking up in the mornings, and they may toughen you up a little bit. And I think they also can help teach you a very simple and powerful lesson, which is the reason why I wanted to do this episode as a motivation Monday.

But there's very little evidence that they're going to do much else. They're not going to do much for your physiology. Why then am I still doing it? Why am I still dousing myself with buckets of ice water every morning? And I'm going to get into that in this podcast. But first, I want to start with some myth busting. So the top five myths about cold showers. Now, according to internet gurus and biohackers, cold showers are one of the easiest ways to level up your biology.

The purported benefits include increased calorie and fat burning, increased testosterone production and fertility, better muscle recovery, better immunity, better skin and hair, and more. And the bottom line here is as with most, everything that promises big returns for little or no effort, all of this is more fiction than fact. Now let's take a closer look at each of these five claims and find out why they are basically bogus. So cold shower myth number one, cold showers help you lose fat. And the theory here is that cold showers can help increase fat burning because of what is known as brown adipose tissue, BAT, also known as brown fat in humans. Now, unlike normal white fat cells, whose primary job is to store calories for future use,

brown fat cells help maintain a stable body temperature by doing the opposite, burning calories to generate heat. These things are true and have been proven in a number of studies. Specifically, what these studies show is that once activated by cold temperatures, just two ounces of brown fat in your body can burn through as much as 500 calories of energy per day in an effort to elevate your body temperature and keep it at that homeostasis level. This is why babies and other small mammals have large amounts of brown fat, they need this to help them stay warm. Research also shows that women seem to have more brown fat, by the way. They need this to help them stay warm. They have small bodies. Research also shows that women seem to have more brown fat than men, probably for the same reason.

Now, it used to be thought that brown fat simply disappeared in humans as we got older and that adults had none. Newer research has proven though that we do, we adults do have brown fat, which has led some people to speculate that we could use cold exposure to turn on the brown fat that we have and rapidly increase our metabolic rate and of course our fat burning. That's a hypothesis though. And how has it panned out in research? Well, this has been studied and what we know is that cold exposure does tend to slightly increase metabolic rate by stimulating brown fat. However, the effects are much smaller and much more unreliable and impractical than many people would have you believe. Furthermore, research shows that cold exposure can also markedly increase your appetite, which of course just makes it easier to eat back any of

the extra calories that you might burn. So for example, researchers from Maastricht University had 11 people stay in a cold room for an entire day. And on average, they burned about an additional 76 calories. And just so you understand that in perspective of the calories contained in fat, a pound of fat contains about 3,500 calories and studies show that you have to burn quite a bit more than that to actually lose a pound of fat. So an additional 76 calories burned per day for many hours of uncomfortable and hard to replicate conditions isn't exactly a win. You might as well just buy a treadmill desk instead and spend five hours walking per day. That's going to burn quite a bit of calories. Another study showed that spending a few hours in a suit filled with very cold water caused an 80% rise in metabolic rate,

which averaged out to about an additional 250 calories burned. And yes, that's impressive, but it's also extremely impractical. And it's still about half of the calories you'd burn if you had spent that time walking instead. You spend those hours walking, you're going to burn more than freezing in some weird cold water suit. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram

at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. And in yet another study, researchers found that spending two hours per day in a 60 degree room resulted in about 1.5 pounds of fat loss over six weeks, which is all well and good, I guess, but you could also just achieve the same with one week of proper dieting and exercise. So the key takeaway here is very simple. Yes, you can use cold exposure to boost your metabolism and you can boost your fat burning, but a cold shower is not going to cut it. You're going to have to spend at least a few hours per day in rather cold air or water, like almost shivering cold air or water. And the results are going to depend on your genetics. Some people have far more brown fat than others and therefore

will burn a lot more calories when exposed to cold. All right, the next cold shower myth is that cold showers increase testosterone production. Now, these days, you can almost make an accurate snap judgment about the credibility of pretty much any health and fitness educator or expert or influencer, guru, whatever, by what he or she says about naturally boosting testosterone levels. If someone says anything other than eat a nutritious diet, lift heavy weights a few times per week, minimize stress, and make sure you don't have any major nutritional deficiencies like vitamin D, zinc, and a few others. They don't know what the hell they're talking about, and they probably don't know what the hell they're talking about across the board. And that, of course, brings me

to the point at hand, which is cold showers and testosterone. Most people claiming that cold showering is an effective form of hormone therapy, cite a specific study that showed that testicle cells function better in colder temperatures, which is probably why our nuts dangle between our legs, right? As opposed to being like stuffed inside our pelvises, like they are in sloths, whales, and elephants. Other research often cited shows that sperm cells function better in the winter and spring, the cooler months, than in summer and fall, the warmer months. And that sounds kind of cool, I guess, but this could be due to any number of reasons. The researchers themselves that conducted that study did not think that it was caused by cold exposure per se. They

thought that it was probably caused by a kind of annual circadian rhythm that affects fertility. Regardless, the assumption that some people draw from these studies is cold must be good for your balls. And since your balls produce testosterone, it must be good for your testosterone production as well. And okay, that sounds neat, but unfortunately there is no evidence whatsoever that taking a cold shower for several minutes actually even reduces the temperature of the testicles enough to have any impact, let alone impact testosterone production. This is obvious too, because most of the water is going to hit your head, your shoulders, and your chest. So

who knows if enough even gets down there, gets down to the plumbing to make a difference. Furthermore, there's no evidence that exposing any bits of your body to even extreme cold actually raises testosterone. All we can say right now is that the twins like to be slightly cooler than the rest of the body and that the boys might be better swimmers when it's cold. So no matter how you look at this, the theory that cold showers can increase testosterone production is very unlikely and ill-informed. All right, next myth. Myth number three, cold showers boost muscle recovery. Now, nobody likes intense muscle soreness that dogs you for days, and that's why muscle recovery strategies like post-workout nutrition, supplementation, something like creatine in

particular, for example, and also active recovery days or routines do deserve some attention. Cold showers, though, do not. Research shows that ice baths can indeed reduce muscle soreness and speed up recovery after hard workouts, but a 10 minute immersion in 50 degree water, a cold shower is not. Point being 30 seconds or even a few minutes, if you're not a pussy of sprinkling your upper body, mostly with some kind of maybe cold water, really depends how low you go, is a very far cry from the ice bath protocols that are used in scientific studies, which means it's also far less likely to produce even similar results. Moreover, using cold to improve recovery has a significant downside to everyone striving to improve their body composition because studies show that it can significantly reduce muscle growth.

In one study, for example, researchers at the University of Queensland found that two 10-minute ice baths per week for three months reduced muscle gain by about half a pound and reduced leg press strength by about 150 pounds. Now, why? Well, this is probably because research has shown that immersing yourself in cold water suppresses certain signaling molecules that are responsible for muscle growth, blood flow, and satellite cell activity, all of which of course hurts your body's ability to create new muscle proteins. of which, of course, hurts your body's ability to create new muscle proteins. Okay, the next myth,

myth number four, is that cold showers boost your immune system. Now, similar to muscle recovery, the idea that a cold shower can boost your immune system is more wishful thinking than outright fake news. Studies do show that winter swimmers tend to have higher levels of antioxidants in their blood, which is associated with more resistance to germs and lower incidence of sickness. In one particular study, researchers found that sitting in cold water for an hour, three times per week for six weeks, did slightly boost white blood cell count, although it is worth noting that it had no impact on other markers of immune function. In yet another study, scientists found that cold exposure did indeed improve several markers of immune function, but the participants were not taking cold showers. They had a daily routine that included breathing and meditation techniques. This is the Wim Hof

stuff, by the way. Standing in the snow barefoot for up to 30 minutes, lying bare chested in the snow for 20 minutes, swimming in ice cold water for up to several minutes, including full submersions and hiking up snowy mountains in their shorts and shoes in temperatures ranging from 23 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. We should also know that this study did not prove that brutalizing yourself with cold actually reduces your chances of getting sick. It just showed that it can indeed cause a few chemical upticks that might help you fight off infections. So the point here is this, while regular intense bouts of extreme cold exposure may improve immune function over the long term. Citing that as evidence that hitting yourself with a bit of cold water every day can make you invulnerable to bugs is obviously absurd.

Okay, the fifth and final myth that I want to debunk is that cold showers give you better skin and hair. So the story here goes like this. goes like this. Cold showers can improve your skin health and appearance by tightening your pores, which then prevents dirt from clogging your skin and producing blackheads and breakouts. Additionally, cold showers are often said to seal in the natural oils in your skin and hair, keeping them shiny, strong, and smooth. And while there may be some validity to these claims, And while there may be some validity to these claims, there's no real science to back any of it slightly larger with age until around 40, where they seem to find a settling point, so to speak. And studies show that we may be able to prevent this to some degree by using topical tretinoin creams, vitamin C, alpha hydroxy acids, AHAs, and beta hydroxy acids, BHAs, which can help us maintain a more youthful look as we get older.

Cold water, though, simply doesn't make the cut. Unfortunately, there's just no evidence that splashing some cold water on your skin every day can constrict pore size for any length of time or prevent pores from getting larger or otherwise improve your skin health or appearance whatsoever. Just because it causes blood vessels to constrict doesn't mean it can do the same thing for your pores. Now, another popular theory is that because cold water doesn't dissolve fats and oils as effectively as warm water, cold showering then better preserves the natural oils coating your skin and hair, resulting in improved skin and hair health and appearance. And this isn't impossible. It is a

plausible theory, I guess, but there's just not much in the way of good rationale or good evidence to really back it up. The reality is we know very little about how these natural oils ultimately affect our hair and skin health. And we really don't know to what extent hot and cold bathing can ultimately impact the oiliness of our skin and hair. What we do know though, is that a more reliable way to control this is simply regulating your use of soaps and shampoos, which are designed to strip oils from your skin and hair. Okay. So we have stripped cold showering of all of its mythological trappings. Now let's get to my personal experience. Here's why I've been taking cold showers for a year or so. And here's what I've learned.

Despite all of what cold showers cannot do for me, as I mentioned several times now, I still do them every day. Can you guess why? No, it's not that I think taking a quote unquote Spartan bath as the cool kids call it makes me a badass. You know, the Spartans supposedly preferred to bathe in cold water. Therefore, taking cold showers makes me a Spartan. I feel so alpha right now, bro. It's also not because it jolts me awake in the morning, which it does do.

And I, okay, that's a little bit why I am awake after three to four minutes of ice cold water, but you know, a good pre-workout can do the same without giving you the brain freeze or shriveling your, uh, your Franken beans. And it's totally not because it allows me to give one of my friends shit about how pathetic his cold tolerance is. And okay, fine. I have enjoyed that a little bit. Now, the real reason why I have converted to the cold shower is simply because it is uncomfortable. And I know that the better I can force myself to do things that are uncomfortable or even painful, things that I don't really want to do, the better my life is going to be. This is one of the most fundamental things that separates the successful from the unsuccessful. It's very simple. It's very

unsexy. Successful people do the things that unsuccessful people don't want to do. They do the things that make people go, ugh, that turn people off, that scatter their thoughts and weaken their wills. These are the hard things, the uncomfortable things, the complicated things, the unexciting things, the exhausting things. Successful people find a way to do them all every day, every week, every month, every year without fail. Sometimes they stumble, sometimes they fall, but they always get back up and keep going. That is not failing. Making a mistake and learning from it and continuing is not failing. Failing is giving up. And successful people don't even necessarily learn to like these things either. They just have a strong enough

reason to do them anyway. They just care more about reaching whatever that brass ring is for them than doing things that make them feel good. Unsuccessful people, on the other hand, have that backward. They care more about how they feel while doing the things they want to do than what comes from those things. And that's why these people actively avoid doing things they just don't want to do and why they strive to eliminate any and all forms of discomfort and burden and responsibility and stress from their lives. I myself do not want to become one of those people.

I do not want to become a milk and water milk sop. So if nothing else, my silly daily cold shower routine is just a reminder, a rather shocking reminder to continue embracing things that make me uncomfortable, to continue doing things that I don't really want to do. And also to learn to like things that I may not enjoy, but that serve a greater purpose, that serve a goal that I do care about. So to wrap up here, cold showers are not going to help you lose fat faster. They are not going to increase your testosterone levels or boost your post-workout recovery or strengthen your immune system or give you prettier skin or hair, or do much of anything else physiologically speaking. By my lights, the only sensible reason to get under a stream of glacial water every day is because it sucks. And the more you're willing

to do things that suck, the more satisfying your life is ultimately going to be. And I just realized, actually, I haven't told you what exactly I'm doing in case you want to give it a try. So every morning I take a three to four minute cold shower. I go straight for the cold. I don't start with hot and then switch to cold. I just go straight for the cold. I let the shower run for a minute or two first to make sure it is maximally cold. And then I just get right in there and turn around and make sure I get all my body several times, again, about three minutes, longest would be four minutes. And I usually then end with maybe a minute or two minutes of hot water as my little reward. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful.

And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscle for life.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read

everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. So please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode. And I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my workout app, Stacked. It has tens of thousands of users

and close to 400 reviews on the Apple Store with a four-star average. And it helps you get more out of your training in several ways. It helps you quickly and easily plan out your workout routines. It gives you quick access to useful tools like plate math and one rep max calculation. It allows you to visually track your progression in your workouts, as well as your body measurements and much, much more. your body measurements and much, much more. It's free to download too. So if you want to check it out, then head over to www.getstackedapp.com or just hit the iOS app store and search for stacked workout and you will find it.