Hot vs Cold Shower: Which One Should You ACTUALLY Take?

Which is better for recovery, a cold shower or a hot one? In this video, we’ll compare cold vs. hot shower recovery after a workout to see how they stack up. I’ll also share the best recovery method after a workout that many people don’t know about!

What if there was a recovery method that has been used for over 2,000 years? It’s not a pill, it’s not a gadget. It’s currently used by the elite Olympic athletes. We actually get to tap into the core of your capacity to recover. Before we get into that, let me first answer the question between cold and hot showers.

What is better for recovery? Most people think it’s the cold shower because when you apply cold, you’re going to reduce inflammation. How many times have we been told to put ice on an injury? But exercise is not the same as being injured. You’re stressing the body out and you’re breaking certain things down for the purpose of your body adapting and recovering and building things back up.

When you add cold therapy and you decrease inflammation, you are actually slowing down the benefits of exercise, believe it or not. We actually want that inflammation to be there. Now, there’s some exceptions to this. If you overtrain or if you have swelling, well, then you need cold. Or if you actually have pain, well, cold’s going to be better.

But cold therapy has other benefits. It can greatly stimulate your cognitive function and benefits for your immune system. Now, when we add a hot shower, we’re getting a different effect. We’re getting more muscle relaxation, more blood flow, more oxygen. We’re relaxing the parasympathetic nervous system.

It’s been known to increase sleep quality by 20% and even extend another 20 to 30 minutes of sleep. If we compare both of them, heat to cold, it’s going to be the heat that’s going to give you a little more benefits to recover from exercise. Now, if you add them both as a contrast therapy, cold and then hot, that would be even better because we’re creating a vasoconstriction and a vasodilation, so we get more blood flow. And before I get into the mind-blowing recovery technique, I first need to tell you a few other recovery things that you can add to the list. The sauna and then cold immersion.

It’s just more intense. Another one is using the foam roller 10 minutes after exercise can greatly improve your recovery. They also compared getting 8 hours of sleep versus getting 6 hours of sleep after exercise. And there was 20% more recovery when you get 8 hours. If you ever get your DNA tested, the company that I have been using recently is called 3x4 Community.

They look at what type of exercise you should be doing for your DNA and cross-reference that with how you recover. Now, let’s get into something very cool. Something that can actually give you so much exercise repair and it’s actually very, very simple. It doesn’t require even any exercise at all. You ready for this?

Intermittent hypoxic training. So, it’s kind of similar to intermittent fasting where you’re doing a short-term starvation and then you eat, right? But guess what? Intermittent hypoxic training, you’re restricting your oxygen going into your lungs. You can buy an air restriction mask.

You can even hold your breath. It actually has effects that mimic endurance exercise without exercise. You actually mimic a high-altitude environment. It’ll strengthen your metabolism as well as enhancing the growth of your muscles and at the same time decreasing inflammation. It’s one of the most powerful things to speed up recovery and top elite athletes do this all over the world to get the unfair advantage of being able to have more recovery.

Unlike cold therapy that gets rid of inflammation, this therapy balances inflammation. This is why the Kenyan long-distance runners always win because they live and train in high altitudes. And in top of all these great benefits, you’re also increasing growth hormone. That’s a fat-burning hormone, that’s an anti-aging hormone, and that’s a hormone that can actually help your muscles grow. What are you doing to create this hypoxic state?

One way is to buy one of those air-restrictive masks. And typically when you breathe air, you’re getting like 21% oxygen. But when we add the mask, it’ll bring it down to, let’s say, 18% oxygen. Also, if you don’t have the mask, there’s other things that you can do as well that don’t require any equipment at all. You can basically take a deep breath in, exhale all of it out, and hold your breath for 30 to 60 seconds.

By going through that cycle and breathing for a minute and going back and forth six to eight cycles after your exercise, that would be a valid form of hypoxic training. So, a lot of people ask me, “What supplements do I recommend? ” Now, of course, I’m not biased of my own high-quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg’s supplements, you’ll find more information. But then here’s the big question.

Should you do this type of training while you’re working out or when you’re done working out, post-exercise? You want to do this hypoxic training right when you’re working out. This will amplify the signals to the muscles to grow. Let’s say, for example, your goal is not necessarily muscle growth, it’s going to be recovery. Or maybe you want more endurance.

Then you would want to do this hypoxic training after the exercise. That would mean just putting on this mask for 5 minutes. Okay, breathing through it. It’s restricting your air. And then taking it off for 5 minutes and breathing normally.

And then putting it back on with a cycle of six, so you’re doing it six different times. And this is after the workout. And of course, because we’re dealing with something that can affect your health, you want to check with your doctor before doing this because I don’t want someone with a bad heart to do this and then pass out. Now, let’s say, for example, your goal is to improve an injury. Then you would do hypoxic training while you exercise but keep the intensity low.

Another thing to enhance this is to make sure you’re having enough magnesium because magnesium also increases ATP. Another thing that can enhance this is getting infrared. 50% of the sun is infrared, so just being out in the sun can greatly help you as well. When someone has cancer, they don’t want to be doing this therapy because they already have hypoxia. Inside that tumor, there’s a hypoxic state.

There’s a lack of oxygen. It just turns up the dial on cancer. When you have inflammation, you also have hypoxia because in inflammation, there’s not a lot of oxygen. In fact, cancer grows into areas of inflammation. So, the antidote to that is a lot of exercise and counter some of the things that happen in a hypoxic state in cancer.

So, it’d be beneficial to take something like quercetin, curcumin, green tea, berberine, sulforaphane, and intermittent fasting. All right. Thank you so much for watching. I will see you in the next video.