In this video, we will discuss the surprising effects of cold water immersion on testosterone levels! Join us as Dr. Rena Malik ...

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You Won’t Believe What Happens to Your Testosterone After an Ice Bath!

can cold water plunges actually affect your testosterone levels I'm Dr Reena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and today we're going to talk about the impact of immersing yourself in cold water and how that affects your testosterone levels but before we get started I want to let you know about my brand new ebook called better sex better life with my top 10 tips that you can use to have better sex every single time you're with your partner you can get it in the link in the description down below completely free when you sign up for it you'll also get access to our brand new newsletter where I send out exclusive content to our subscribers and you can ask me questions and I answer a question from a subscriber each and every week it's completely free so check it out down below all right so what is the data in terms of cold water immersion and what happens to your body when you immerse yourself in cold water so normally when you submerge yourself into very cold temperatures your body has what's called a cold shock response during that cold shock response your body activates the sympathetic nervous system or the fight or flight system this causes a release of hormones called norepinephrine and epinephrine this initially then increases heart rate constricts blood vessels and causes more alertness then our skin temperature cools rapidly and our body then activates the parasympathetic nervous system which is the opposite of the sympathetic nervous system it's the rest and digest system and with this our heart rate starts to slow our blood flow then gets shunted to the core right where we need to keep ourselves warm and the Deep tissues rather than the peripheral tissues so those start to cool off and this is essentially to ensure survival right our body is trying to keep our heart and our essential organs profused when you are in some sort of shock-like situation now during prolonged cold exposure your body is essentially working to maintain your core body temperature and in order to do that it's activating a bunch of metabolic processes so that you can do that and some things will get less attention right so potentially the thought here is that if you're doing all these other things to maintain your core body temperature perhaps your testosterone will decline as well we know that you can't go on social media without seeing someone fully immerse in an ice water bath saying how great it is so is it really that great I'm not going to talk about the other benefits that people talk about in terms of cold plunges I'm just going to talk about about the hormonal changes is it actually causing a negative impact to your hormones when you immerse yourself into very cold Waters so I'll preface this by saying these are really small studies there has not been large scale studies to look at the true impact of cold water plunges on a variety of things particularly hormonal physiologic changes so in a 2019 study published in the European Journal of Applied physiology they studied 11 men and instructed them to do two separate workouts either followed by a cold water plunge or a normal recovery and so they instructed these guys to do back squats at about 80% of their maximum load and they did six sets of 10 repetitions and they did this two times a week apart and one time they did a 15minute cold water plunge which was at a water temperature of 15° C or they had a normal recovery and the researchers measured their blood samples to assess their hormone levels before for the recovery at 5 minutes after recovery 30 minutes and 60 minutes now in the control group meaning the group that had no recovery involving cold water plunges at the 60-minute Mark they found that their testosterone actually increased by almost 9% whereas the people who did the Cold Water plunge saw a decrease in their testosterone levels by on average about 10% however when you looked at this from a statistical View point they didn't see any statistically significant difference between the two groups meaning that if you any difference that you saw was likely due to chance and not because of actual clinical findings So based on this initial very small study we don't see a significant change in serum testosterone levels after immersing yourself in a cold water plch another study looked at 12 volleyball players from the Brazilian men's volleyball Super League so these 12 guys were then divided into two groups they did training for for 5 days and after these five trainings they would have to undergo some sort of recovery the treatment group underwent a cold water immersion and the control group was exposed to LED light therapy they were told it was LED light therapy but it was actually an inactive LED diode so it was basically not doing anything so on the first and sixth day of their training so before and after the study they underwent evaluation of both the saliva and their blood for testing so the other interesting thing about this study is they really tried to set it up in a good way they told the players to avoid any food supplements they told to maintain a certain dietary input meaning they had to follow certain macros so they had to keep their carbohydrates at 60% their proteins at least 15% and 25% of lipids so they wanted to make sure that there was really no other factors that could affect their testosterone or their other physiologic measures now in terms of the cold water group they were submerged into an inflatable pool with uh water that was about 14° C and they were very specific they immersed them up to their zpid process so right about here for about 15 minutes and they made sure to maintain the water temperature they kept checking it and making sure that if it got warmer they added some ice or things to cool it down to keep it at that 14° c bottom line when they looked at the first and sixth gr blood work they didn't see a difference in testosterone and either the cold water immersion group or the placebo group so again no major differences in testosterone with cold water immersion or without now again remember these are really small studies and we don't have a lot of studies but there are another type of cold water immersion that's been looked at and this is particularly looked at in Special Forces or the military the first study in this group was looking at five Norwegian Special Forces operators they looked at these men who were undergoing twice daily Arctic Dives where the temperature is usually around 33° C and they over the course of the days that they were doing these Dives they measured their testosterone levels to see was there an impact of these arctic cold water Dives and what they found was that they did have a decrease in their testosterone following the Dives but between Dives meaning if they had a day without Dives they did notice a recovery and so this sort of tells us that yeah maybe there's an impact on testosterone but typically it's short-lived now a 2022 study looked at 21 participants who were doing dive training for the military so for this particular training instead of doing diving into the Arctic or into cold water they actually had them fully submerged into a pool of water that was chilled to 4° C for 9 hours and during this time they measured a bunch of physiologic metrics as well as their sex hormones and stress hormones using both salivary and blood testing and so they did in this group of men see a significant decline in testosterone following the Dives now while this study does offer some interesting Insight it is not really replicating what people are doing in terms of cold plunges because they're not underwater for 9 hours and so you're not going to see necessarily the same physiologic parameters also testosterone is a dial hormone meaning that it is higher in the morning it decreases over the course of the day and then starts increasing overnight so if you have 9 hours and you start in the morning and you check the hormones 9 hours later you're going to see a difference in testosterone just based on that also they're not eating during those 9 hours right so they're fasting during those 9 hours and that can have a physiologic effect as well so what do I take away from all this data do cold plunges actually impact your testosterone level well based on the limited data that we have I suspect that it probably doesn't have a huge impact and if it does it's a short-lived impact meaning that you may see a short decline in testosterone which will then ultimately come back to its normal level now it has been studied that stress from thin things like interrogations skydiving intense physical activity all can reduce testosterone so if immersing in cold water is extremely stressful to your body because you've never done it or you're always someone who's a little bit sensitive to the cold then you may see a larger decline in testosterone levels because you're forcing your body to do something that it seems is stressful now it may improve if you continue to do cold water plunges over the course of many weeks or it becomes sort of habitual for you then you may not see such a strong physiologic response as your body adapts now the human body is really really amazing and so it can really adapt to whatever we put it through and there is some data also that shows that cold plunges after working out May reduce muscular hypertrophy and so that makes sense if you are reducing your testosterone then you're not going to get as much muscle hypertrophy as well bottom line I think that if you derive some benefit from cold water plunging by all means continue to do it if you don't or you're not interested in I'm not compelled based on this data to do it in terms of boosting your sex hormones if you guys like this video make sure you check out my podcast on optimizing hormones as you age in this podcast I talk about why hormones are so important why testosterone is so important and what happens to your body when your testosterone declines in significant detail and specifically benchmarks as to when your testosterone reaches a certain Benchmark level that you start seeing issu is with erections or you start seeing issues with other physiologic changes so check it out I think it's super informative and super helpful and as always remember to take care of yourself because you are worth it

Dr.

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