A Ridiculously In-Depth Analysis of Cold Water Immersion (“Ice Bath”) Claims

Ice baths. Cold water immersion. Cryotherapy. I hear about this everywhere lately (though I only see the term “cryotherapy” in academic papers). You’ve probably heard about it as well if you’re anywhere near sports, fitness, or the internet.

But many of the articles with claims about the benefits have some kind of agenda, be it to sell their ice baths or related products, or even just to sell themselves. Well, this is an unbiased¹, exhaustive, and frankly too-long review of the literature on the benefits (or lack thereof) of ice baths / cold water therapy. My only goal is to engage with people who make spurious claims about a trending topic of ice baths — so I’m sharing what I’ve learned with you.

Ice baths or cold water immersion / therapy have become popular among fitness enthusiasts, wellness influencers, and entrepreneurs. There are many flavours of ice baths out there, but the idea is generally to reduce water temperature to 5-15 degrees C, often with ice, and to hop in there for at least a minute, optionally while doing some form of breathing (with the “Wim Hof” methodology being a popular variant).

Cold water therapy takes many forms. It can be immersion in an ice bath, plunging into a cold lake, going for a swim in cold water, or just taking a cold shower. The duration can vary from fractions of minutes to multiple hours (usually a swim if it’s hours). There’s not always actual ice involved, which is why it can’t always be called an “ice bath” — it may be just “cold water immersion” or even just “cold water”.

Proponents of ice baths/cold water therapy claim a multitude of benefits, from physical results like reduced muscle soreness to more difficult-to-define mental results like improved clarity. Some people just like doing it because it’s hard, David Goggins style (he talked about it in his book “Can’t Hurt Me”, which I summarise here).

But being sceptical of any trend, I decided to go into the research and analyse all the claims made about ice baths and cold water immersion therapy.

My questions are

1. What are all the claims that people make regarding the effects of ice baths / cold water immersion? (e.g. “Ice baths reduce inflammation”)
2. What is the research that supports those claims? (Academic research, preferring randomised controlled trials)
3. What are other therapies (e.g. stretching, diet, exercise, or a massage) that can achieve those same effects, and how do they compare in effectiveness and practicality?

I’ll look at all these in turn.

Overview — My Conclusions about Cold Water, Ice Baths, and the like

Here’s a brief summary of what I’ve found.

In short, some of the claims of the benefits of cold water therapy are true. For example, ice baths / cold showers will help you recover from intense exercise, improve your mood, and may alleviate the symptoms of mental health conditions.

But there are usually better, scientifically-backed ways to achieve all those ends, including stretching, exercise, sleep, diet management, and cognitive-based therapy.

Some of the claims of cold water therapy, like improving your immune system, helping you lose weight, or tightening your skin, are not well supported by any evidence. There are simply anecdotes, which are not evidence.

The good news is that there are limited risks of cold water therapy. Avoid drowning or prolonged exposure that could result in hypothermia, and you’ll be fine.

So the bottom line is that if it feels good, and if you manage the risks and have relatively easy access to cold water therapy in the way you like it (be it a cold shower, an ice bath, or frozen-over lake), by all means do it!

Claim: Cold Water Improves Mood

Summary: Yes, ice baths/cold showers feel good to some people and can boost their moods. But other things might boost your mood more.

The first thing to address — the elephant in the room — is that cold water therapy feels good to many people. Not the actual therapy (usually), but at least the after-effect.

To me, this is enough justification for anything that’s not harmful (assuming you’re managing the risks). If taking a cold shower or jumping in an ice bucket for a while feels good, either during the process or afterwards — then continue doing it! There’s no evidence that short-term cold water is harmful, after all. You won’t catch a cold (see below on the effects on the immune system). You may get a little less hypertrophy, but that’s only important if you’re trying to build muscle. Overall, if it feels good, do it.

More technically speaking, there are multiple studies that show an improvement in mood after cold water therapy. A recent study of thirty-three participants (Yankouskaya et al, 2023, published in Biology) with no recent cold water therapy experience found an improvement in self-reported “positive affect” following a 5-minute whole-body bath in 20-degree water which matched results from their vitals.

And this result was consistent with other studies on the same topic, e.g. this one (Kelly & Bird, 2021, published in Lifestyle Medicine), which isolated the impact of cold water from that of swimming in cold water. That same study also concluded that a single immersion was enough to boost mood.

“OK,” you might ponder. “Maybe participants just feel good because they’ve done something difficult.” Yes, that’s a good hypothesis. But there’s a scientific basis for it too, it seems.

Firstly, there is a biochemical foundation for the improvement in mood from cold water immersion. Studies (summarised in Yankouskaya et al, 2023, see that paper for a multitude of references) show a release of neurotransmitters including serotonin, cortisol, dopamine, norepinephrine, and β-endorphin, which play a crucial role in emotion regulation, stress regulation, and reward processing.

That paper went further and assessed the neural impact of cold water immersion on positive affect — the extent to which a person feels enthusiastic, active, and alert, reflecting high energy, concentration, and pleasurable engagement, and came up with hypotheses linking the impact to changes in brain connections (a bit beyond my ken to assess this, but it’s in the paper). The hypotheses aligned with the test results, which provided “evidence that exposure to cold water was associated with a temporal correlation across multiple neural networks.”

Some of the mood boost comes from a feeling of accomplishment from having done something difficult. But the studies kept track of the participants and analysed their mood vs a control group for days after cold water immersion and found that mood remained higher. Maybe they kept thinking back to that glorious time they sat in an ice bath?

Accepting that a cold shower or ice bath provides you with a mood boost, the question becomes — what else can give you a mood boost? Off the top of my head, things that improve mood can include a hot shower, socialising (e.g. talking to a friend, meditation, sexual activity, exercise (e.g. going for a run, doing yoga), relaxing, and eating.

Most of those are obvious enough that they aren’t the subject of studies. Nobody is going to fund a study of the impact of a hot shower on mood, for example.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to predict a quantifiable degree of mood boost that something will give you. The application to your life is thus: Yes, cold showers / cold water immersion can boost your mood. Whether other things may do so as much is up to you.

Claim: Ice Baths / Cold Water Immersion helps Post-Exercise Recovery

Summary: The claim that cold water helps post-exercise recovery is true. But you can get the same inflammation-reducing effect from an ice pack, and the same recovery benefit from stretching.

This is probably the least controversial but most often-cited claim about ice baths. Ice baths are often touted for their ability to reduce muscle soreness after intense exercise — for example after endurance events or intense competition (I first came across them via Crossfit Games). But even this claim about ice baths, while not fundamentally false, is misrepresented in that it is often touted as the best method for recovery.

The claim is that the cold temperature of ice baths or cold water constricts blood vessels, reducing inflammation and numbing sore muscles. So far, so good.

Pro athletes use many different ways to recover from intense exercise. The most common methods include saunas, massage, and sleep, with cold water immersion being a much less frequently used (but still often used) option.

Yes, ice baths can provide temporary relief from delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), much like an ice pack might, and can enhance recovery. Cold water immersion is definitely better than doing nothing — there are many studies that show that localised cooling can reduce inflammation (e.g. this study by Khoshnevis et all). Anecdotally, it’s uncontroversial that cold treatment can relieve pain.

But it begs the question: Is cold water treatment or an ice bath the best way to recover or prevent DOMS beyond immediate relief? Here the answer is: no. There is no evidence that it’s better than other forms of treatment, and there’s evidence that other forms of treatment are better.

A study published in the Journal of Physiology found no difference in inflammation reduction between cold water immersion and active recovery (a low-intensity “warm-down”).

And meta-study published in the Alliance for Research in Exercise that compared post-exercise recovery methods alone and in combination found that cold water immersion had no significant effect in its favour at the 24h or 48h post-therapy points — though at 1h cold water had a small significant effect, as an ice pack might.

A study comparing stretching and cold water immersion — including their combination — found that stretching after plyometric exercise led to less soreness than just an ice bath, with no observable difference for people who combined the two. So you may as well just stretch.

Aside from reducing DOMS, can an ice bath / cold water immersion protocol reduce inflammation, or promote function recovery? No, according to this article published in Nature, which concludes that “…the use of multiple CWIs could be recommended as a strategy that may reduce muscle damage following exercises, but without the expectative to enhance recovery between training sessions or competitive events.”

The conclusion you can draw from these studies is that yes, an ice bath will help with reducing pain — and that alone. But it won’t help any more than a warm down stretch will, even if you combine it with an ice bath.

And at worst, an ice bath won’t hurt you… most of the time. Cold water immersion after intense resistance training may actually attenuate muscle growth and hypertrophy, though it doesn’t hurt strength gain.

There is still a lot of research being done on the impact of cold water immersion after exercise, so watch this space.

Claim: Cold Water Improves Your Immune System

Summary: There’s no robust evidence that you can improve your immune system through cold water therapy alone, and it’s definitely not more effective than exercise, diet, and sleep… but if you’ve addressed those things, there’s some evidence it may help — but that also could be a placebo.

Proponents of ice baths claim that cold water therapy improves your immune system and susceptibility to viruses.

Firstly, what is the “immune system”? In layman’s terms, your immune system is your susceptibility to getting sick or your quickness in recovering from sickness. In medical terms, it’s most often assessed by white blood cell (leukocyte) count, including a measure of different types of blood cells (e.g. neutrophils, monocytes, and granulocytes), and antibodies (a.k.a. immunoglobulins). You measure these through blood tests.

Of course, the immune system is more complicated than blood markers. So it’s also important to analyse the in vivo impact — actual incidents of illness.

Site note: Many past studies of the effect of cold exposure address the opposite hypothesis — that you’ll “catch your death of cold”. There’s no support for this hypothesis (Castellani et al, 2002) — cold exposure doesn’t depress your immune function.

There is definitely some evidence for the impact of cold water treatment on your immune system response at the blood level. Exposure to cold water for extended periods can improve your leukocyte, granulocyte, and monocyte response. This is further enhanced by exercise before the cold treatment.

A single sitting in an ice bath (even for an hour!) doesn’t have a significant effect. But if you do cold water therapy multiple times a week, there’s a measurable — though slight — impact on your immune system health.

And you don’t even need to be in an ice bath to stimulate certain aspects of the immune system. A study published in PLOS (Bujize et al, 2016) showed via a randomised controlled trial (of over 2,000 people in the Netherlands) that introducing 30-second cold showers reduced sickness absence from work — though not illness days, and that this improved with exercise.

But a problem with the study (some noted in the study itself) was that the participants were extremely healthy compared to the general Dutch population. They nearly all rated their health as “good” to “excellent”. Most of them participated in sports. It’s interesting to analyse this group, but the study wouldn’t thus assess things like whether improving diet or exercise would have a larger effect than cold water

And they already had average sickness absences of less than a third of the average population. “The relatively short follow-up period and the very healthy character of the study group resulted in the fact that most participants did not have any sickness absence days at all.”

Finally, while there was a control group in the Bujize cold shower study, you can’t effectively compare a cold shower to a placebo. Thus, it becomes hard to parse out the impact of feeling good from a cold shower.

So it’s hard to draw much from that. If you’re already very healthy, then adding cold showers may reduce your sick days. But you already have so few that you might not even notice the difference.

Similarly, the article “Cold water immersion: kill or cure?” by Tipton et al (2017) found that most cold water therapy practitioners are cold water swimmers, who are a self-selecting bunch of people. And it’s hard to get others who don’t want to do it to start cold water swimming habitually — for obvious reasons. So it’s hard to make a causative relationship.

A study of 21 males found that regular cold exposure found no significant changes in heart health (Ketelhut et al, 2023) after a period of practising cold water exposure (as part of the Wim Hof method). Other studies cited in the article have shown conflicting results, and sometimes include physical activity (e.g. swimming), which means it’s hard to parse out the effect of cold water alone.

But what are the best ways of improving your immune system? There’s a litany of research (so much so that it seems redundant to cite any) that suggests that the best ways to stay healthy are to maintain a healthy diet, exercise regularly, get enough sleep, and manage your stress levels.

These things have such abundantly well-demonstrated impacts on health that it’d be silly to cite any one particular source. Though here’s a start on physical activity and nutritional influence on immune function (Shao et al, 2021, in Frontiers), sleep, and stress.

So where does this leave you? If you’ve got all those other ducks in a row, then you may as well add in 30-second cold showers. At very worst, you’ll feel good, and may feel sick less often — even though it might be the placebo effect. But feeling good is good, and placebos work, after all.

As another side note, there’s an oft-cited paper on the impact of cold exposure on self-reported life satisfaction and physical composition of soldiers that was cited by Andrew Huberman on his podcast. It has been retracted as the authors acknowledged that they improperly mixed data from different sources.

Claim: Cold Water Improves Your Skin

Summary: There’s no robust evidence other than anecdotes that cold water has any long-term effect on your skin. But it may feel good in the short term.

There are a number of inter-related claims about the impact of cold water on skin, but they’re all bogus. They use terms like “vitality”, “wellness”, “anti-ageing, “youthful appearance”, “rosy complexion” etc. (e.g. here, here, and here, all companies with vested interests in selling ice baths / skin care products) and other nebulous health terminology.

Many of the claims run counter to common sense. For example, some of the cited blogs mention the benefits of vasodilation carrying nutrients to the skin or causing a rosy complexion — but vasodilation comes from warm temperature exposure.

Cold water does of course have an impact on the skin. As cold temperatures do generally, cold water causes your skin vessels to contract. The body uses constriction of peripheral blood vessels (vasoconstriction and dilation) to preserve heat or to increase conductivity and reduce heat, depending on your core body temperature (see this article, Espeland et al, 2022).

Vasoconstriction and vasodilation are temperature regulation mechanisms. By reducing blood conductivity to the surface, your body minimizes heat loss, keeping warm blood circulating around the core. Conversely, vasodilation increases conductivity, letting you release extra heat, and giving you a rosy glow in the process.

When skin blood vessels contract, your skin feels different, and when they expand, your skin feels different again. All of this is normal, and can even feel good but there are no proven long-term effects — just a lot of vague claims like “It helped my skin,” or “People in cold countries look youthful.”

The business of skin care is worth around US$150B globally. Thus, like weight loss, is rife with unsupported claims, home remedies, and sketchy marketing. You can easily get lost in a sea of claims and counter-claims of positive and negative effects that cold water, hot water, or any water at all (just washing) may have on your skin.

Unfortunately, claims of the benefits of cold water on skin aren’t supported by randomised controlled long-term trials (I’ve really looked), despite the lucrative backing they’d receive for it if proven true.

Claim: Cold Water has Mental Health Benefits

Summary: There’s no evidence that supports the claim that cold water therapy or ice baths solve underlying mental health conditions long-term, but their effects do alleviate some short-term symptoms, including through stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system. The most effective form of treatment for depression, anxiety, bipolar and other mental health conditions remains cognitive-based therapy.

Aside from the effect on “mood” noted above, there’s a body of claims that cold water / ice bath therapy has a long-term positive effect on mental health, reducing anxiety and depression.

Proponents of cold water treatment say it has helped them cope with grief, anxiety, depression and other mental health challenges, and better able to handle stress. But the question of whether cold water affects mental health is still unanswered.

“What about Wim Hof?” you cry. Wim Hof, the “Ice Man”, claims (that’s a post on his Instagram) posits that an ice bath increases “noradrenaline 540% more, dopamine 250-300% more,” and touts it as an effective remedy for depression and bipolar. “It’s all science,” he yells from his ice bath.

Are his claims true? In part, they are founded on science. Srámek et al (2000)² did find an impact of cold water immersion at 14 degrees C on noradrenaline and dopamine (530% and 250% respectively — this is probably the study that Hof was referencing). This does tie to a mood improvement.

But mood is temporary. Even if cold therapy may alleviate some depression symptoms short-term (per an oft-cited study by Nikolai A Shevchuk³, a study of a statistically insignificant number of people who did not have sufficient symptoms to be diagnosed with depression, and which concludes that more studies are needed), there are no studies that show it to be an effective long-term mental health therapy, as concludes this piece in the NY Times.

What about the effect of cold water on stress and anxiety? There are various claims about the impact of cold water therapy on your nervous system, and they centre on the vagal nerves (sometimes called the “vagus nerve”).

The vagal nerves are a key part of your parasympathetic nervous system. The nervous system is divided into sympathetic, the “fight or flight” part, and the parasympathetic, which is the “rest and digest” part. Mmm, sounds like a fun way to live!

The vagal nerves are the 10th of 12 cranial nerves and contain 75% of the parasympathetic nervous system’s fibres. So stimulating the vagal nerves can relax you by helping slow your heart rate and breathing, thus reducing stress, anxiety, and even inflammation. There’s tons of research on the impact of the vagus nerve (see Breit et al, 2018⁴, for an overview), so this is not voodoo — though many “wellness” practitioners tend to talk about it so much that it becomes enshrouded in mystery.

Stimulating the vagus nerve does in fact have a relaxing effect. Ever had a neck massage? Congratulations, you’ve stimulated the vagus nerve. Do you feel better after singing or laughing? Congrats again! Ditto if you’ve splashed cold water on your face, done some deep breathing exercises, or applied electrical impulses via a surgically implanted vagus nerve stimulator⁵ (sounds great, how do I get one?).

The effect of cold (not just cold water) on the vagus nerve is also well-documented. It’s described as the “diving reflex“, and explains why when you dive into water, you can hold your breath and stay conscious for longer than out in the air, something I’ve personally noted every time I try not to breathe while in a smelly outdoor toilet.

You can trigger the diving reflex or stimulate the vagal nerves by holding an ice pack to your neck or cheeks, or dunking your face (or head) in cold water. You do not need to take a cold shower. And if you do take an ice bath or cold shower, be sure to get your head wet.

There are studies of using vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) to treat depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions⁶, including depression and Alzheimer’s⁷. Alleviating symptoms, after all, is much like the effect of taking antidepressants. But VNS involves an implant which requires major surgery under general anaesthetic. Studies of its effectiveness on treatment-resistant depression are still ongoing, but they’re promising⁸.

The question remains: How do the methods of stimulating the vagus nerve compare? I.e. what’s the effectiveness of breathing and an ice pack vs a surgical implant?

The answer is … not sure. But there are studies of the effectiveness of various methods, like dunking your head in ice water⁹, a thermode on the neck¹⁰, or a vagus nerve massage… I mean, a shoulder rub¹¹. I’d like to sign up to one of those studies.

As for studies on the impact of cold water on the ability to cope with stress long-term — a 2010 study¹² of 32 male volunteers showed that people who became habituated to cold water had a reduced stress response when working out in a low-oxygen environment. But that kind of stress isn’t the same as psychological stress.

One general problem with assessing the impact of cold water therapy on mental health is that despite multiple studies and literature reviews having been done, no robust study shows that cold water therapy in isolation has had a long-term impact on mental health. As with the discussion above of the impact on mood, the studies are usually of cold water swimming, and there are no robust studies involving randomised controlled trials across different population types. (I discussed this above in the section on “mood” — cold water swimmers are a self-selecting bunch.)

Involving swimming means that you confuse the impact of cold water with those of exercise, spending time outdoors, socialising with others, and a general placebo effect from doing something challenging.

Again, it’s important to assess what other means we already have at our disposal to improve mental health. The most established way of improving mental health long-term is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Cold may alleviate symptoms, but isn’t proven as an effective root cause treatment.

Claim: Ice Baths / Cold Water Stimulates Fat Loss

Summary: The claim that cold water therapy/ice baths stimulate fat loss to any significant degree is exaggerated or misleading.

Yes, BAT is activated when you’re cold, but you need hours of exposure (e.g. a long cold water swim), and it doesn’t need to be in water (e.g. it can be an air-conditioned room). Yes, you burn some calories while cold, but that’s just for a few minutes, and it’s insignificant compared to a workout. And yes, cold water swimmers are leaner, but there are many factors that cloud those studies (exercise, selection bias, difficulty of doing a control).

In summary (of the summary) — if you want to burn fat, go out in the cold sometimes, and do exercise, but sitting in an ice bucket isn’t likely to have an impact in isolation.

One of the more out-there claims about ice baths is that they promote fat loss. I say “out there” because it’s counterintuitive and seems like a hack: Could sitting in an ice bucket be the secret to getting shredded? It’s easy to sell, but like many too-good-to-be-true claims, not a claim founded in hard research, and nearly impossible to prove.

A huge caveat on claims about fat/weight loss: I want to note at the outset that weight loss/fat loss is itself a very difficult-to-research area. It’s hard and expensive to study it — especially long term. There are so many things in people’s lives that affect their weight, including constantly fluctuating activity levels, diet, other health conditions, stress, changing lifestyle, and more.

No reasonable person — including companies selling ice baths — would prescribe one method as being the only method you need to lose weight. Diets go with exercise and vice versa. Better sleep and low stress are always important. Each factor influences the other, too, often with a cumulative effect.

For these reasons, many claims about the efficacy of fat loss techniques are as difficult to prove as they are to disprove. So, the absence of robust studies on the impact of ice baths on weight loss is to be expected. And you’re likely to see many anecdotal claims that are equally difficult to disprove.

Now, let’s look at the claims regarding ice baths / cold water immersion and fat loss in turn and assess the corpus of knowledge about them.

The core claim of ice baths aiding fat loss is that ice baths activate “brown fat” (brown adipose tissue or BAT). There are further claims that they boost your metabolism and force your body to work harder to maintain core temperature (because it’s cold).

Let’s look at the BAT claim first. The human body has three kinds of adipose tissue (sometimes called “fat” itself) — white, brown, and beige (see this article for an overview).

White adipose tissue is the bulk of it and is your “energy storage” one. White adipose tissue cells take sugar and fat from the blood and make fat (lipid) droplets out of them, which they store in them. This is what we commonly think of as “fat”.

Brown fat, on the other hand, is your “energy usage” fat. Brown fat breaks down blood sugar and fat to create heat and maintain body temperature. When you get cold, brown fat keeps you warm before your shivering point. It converts sugar and fat in your bloodstream to energy. This process is called “thermogenesis”, which you don’t need to know, but which blog posts use to make themselves sound smart. We only have very limited BAT in our body — it makes up less than 0.5% of our weight.

Beige fat is white fat that acts like brown fat through a transmutation process called “browning”. This process happens when we’re exposed to low temperatures.

“Aha,” you cry. “By being in an ice bath, I can brown my white fat cells, accelerating energy usage.” Yes, I’m getting there.

A 2009 study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism¹³ found that acute cold exposure increased BAT activity and energy expenditure in healthy adults. Similarly, a review article in the journal Obesity Reviews¹⁴ (which shares some of the authors of the aforementioned study) concluded that cold exposure can stimulate BAT activity and may have potential as an obesity treatment.

However, you don’t need cold water to stimulate BAT. Both those studies were on cold exposure from the air. In fact, a study showed significant recruitment of BAT just by keeping subjects in an air-conditioned room at 17 degrees C (62.6 F) for two hours a day¹⁵. That’s chilly, but a far cry from sitting in an ice bucket… it’s what I think of as “put on a light sweater” temperature.

So beware of this above claim when looking at biased blog posts on the effect of cold exposure on BAT. For example, this blog post by “Urban Ice Tribe” cites the above study on the effect of mild cold air exposure but describes it as “two hours of daily exposure to cold water at 17°C”. They’re not alone, either.

Another claim is that cold water therapy can increase metabolism, leading to greater calorie burning and fat loss. A study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology demonstrated that cold water immersion (14°C for 1 hour) increased metabolic rate by 350% above resting levels². The authors attributed this increase in metabolism to the body’s attempts to maintain core temperature in the face of cold stress. However, it is important to note that the metabolic effects of cold water exposure are limited to the time of the exposure — there are no studies showing a lasting increased metabolic rate from cold exposure alone.

Some proponents also argue that cold water therapy can directly stimulate fat burning, particularly in subcutaneous fat stores. Yes, you get cold, and your body needs to burn energy to warm up again. But the energy expenditure in regaining core body temperature after a short cold shower or ice plunge is minimal, even compared to exercise of similar duration.

In contrast with the lack of evidence supporting the claim that ice baths can help you lose weight, there is a wealth of scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of diet and exercise.

A systematic review¹⁷ and meta-analysis published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that dietary interventions, particularly those focusing on calorie restriction and increased fruit and vegetable intake, were effective for weight loss.

Similarly, a review article¹⁸ in the journal Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases highlighted the importance of physical activity for weight management, with higher levels of exercise associated with greater weight loss and maintenance.

Compared to cold water therapy, diet and exercise interventions have been extensively studied and have demonstrated long-term efficacy for weight loss. These lifestyle changes can be implemented sustainably and have additional health benefits beyond just weight management, such as improved cardiovascular health, reduced risk of chronic diseases, and enhanced mental well-being.

In conclusion, the evidence supporting cold water immersion or ice baths for fat loss is limited at best. In contrast, diet and exercise remain the most scientifically backed and effective strategies for achieving and maintaining a healthy weight.

Wrap-up

My general conclusion about whether or not to take an ice bath is “If it feels good, do it.” But don’t over-hype their claims, or worse, try to profit from them based on misleading science or claims without any scientific basis at all.

While ice baths might offer some short-term relief and a mood boost to some, their purported benefits are largely exaggerated by anecdotal reports. For most people, the benefits of regular exercise, sufficient sleep, and a balanced diet far outweigh the need for ice baths.

For athletes, ice baths can be a useful tool for managing pain and preparing for back-to-back competitions. However, for the average person, stretching has the same results. And the discomfort and potential risks, such as hypothermia or frostbite from prolonged exposure, often outweigh the minimal advantages.

Additionally, ice baths can interfere with muscle growth and recovery, making them counterproductive for those looking to build strength and mass.

Finally, while you may get a mood boost from cold water immersion, don’t think that means your depression or bipolar is cured by any means. Seek professional help.

If you enjoy the experience of an ice bath or cold shower and it fits into your routine, there is little harm in continuing. However, it is important to recognize that you can achieve better health outcomes through more conventional and — if cold isn’t your thing — more comfortable means.

Footnotes and References

1. All articles have bias, of course. My bias here is that I don’t enjoy being cold and wet (many people do!), so won’t do it if there’s no point. But I do things that are unpleasant if they’re good for me… and sometimes they become pleasant. That’s the point of this article. ↩︎
2. Srámek P, Simecková M, Janský L, Savlíková J, Vybíral S. Human physiological responses to immersion into water of different temperatures. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2000 Mar;81(5):436-42. doi: doi.org/10.1007/s004210050065. PMID: 10751106. ↩︎
3. Shevchuk NA. Adapted cold shower as a potential treatment for depression. Med Hypotheses. 2008;70(5):995-1001. doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2007.04.052= ↩︎
4. Breit S, Kupferberg A, Rogler G, Hasler G. Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain-Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders. Front Psychiatry. 2018 Mar 13;9:44. . PMID: 29593576; PMCID: PMC5859128. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00044 ↩︎
5. Howland, R.H. Vagus Nerve Stimulation. Curr Behav Neurosci Rep 1, 64–73 (2014). doi.org/10.1007/s40473-014-0010-5. ↩︎
6. Mark S. George, A. John Rush, Harold A. Sackeim, Lauren B. Marangell, Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS): utility in neuropsychiatric disorders, International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, Volume 6, Issue 1, March 2003, Pages 73–83, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1461145703003250 ↩︎
7. Beekwilder JP, Beems T. Overview of the clinical applications of vagus nerve stimulation. J Clin Neurophysiol. 2010 Apr;27(2):130-8. doi: doi.org/10.1097/WNP.0b013e3181d64d8a. PMID: 20505378. ↩︎
8. Johnson, R. L., & Wilson, C. G. (2018). A review of vagus nerve stimulation as a therapeutic intervention. Journal of Inflammation Research, 11, 203–213. https://doi.org/10.2147/JIR.S163248 ↩︎
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