Cold Water Therapy is on this episode of Spa Skin and Beauty today!
How can you freeze your buns off literally? Well, in this cold water therapy at home post I’m going to tell you how!
If you are new to our spa skin & beauty podcast, I am Lindsey – a licensed esthetician and spa owner and I am Ashley a skincare and wellness enthusiast who has worked with Lindsey for EVER and the best part is we are sisters!
Today we are talking about the surprising health benefits of cold water therapy at home and we will tell you how you can do it at home.
Before you say no way to cold showers, let me capture your curiosity with a few benefits!
Benefits of Cold Water Therapy at Home
*Increases Brown Fat for weight loss – What? I’ll explain later tater…
*Increases immune system
*Helps with sore muscles and sore joints
*Makes you happy with a Brighter complexion, longer and thicker hair
Also, I have a method of how you can do this where it will be as painless as possible and it’s something that both Lindsey and I do!
Before I get into the benefits, let me share this method with you
How long to do Cold Water Therapy at Home in the Shower
Start off slow! Begin with 20 seconds of hot water in the shower, then switch to 20 seconds of cold water in the shower. You can repeat if you’d like. Then the next day add 5 to 10 seconds. Keep adding on seconds each day until you have reached 2 minutes. It’s that simple!
Now that you know it’s not as scary or as difficult as what you thought, let’s get into it.
Improves your Immune System
Exposing your body to cold water improves your immune system by boosting your t-helper cells and white blood cells to fight off pathogens and chronic illnesses. It also stimulates autophagy like fasting does – if you remember from my fasting episode and post, autophagy is your body’s way of recycling itself to clear out damaged cells and replace them with newer cells. It will also lower your cortisol levels to lower your stress levels.
Helps with Depression and Anxiety
It can also help with depression and anxiety as well as your mental focus by boosting your noradrenaline (pronounced as nora – drenaline) Seriously, I laugh out loud and squeal when I turn the water to cold. Try not to laugh – it takes your breath away which is another great way to release toxins and stress!
Healthy Stress
You might be thinking, why am I putting my body through this? Let me help explain this part. So, what we are doing is putting our bodies through healthy stressors, so it makes our bodies stronger. Think of it when you are working out – you tear down the muscles in order to build them back up and make them stronger. Same with this method. Also fasting works too – if interested, I have an intermittent fasting episode full of facts and how I do it.
You now have access it in our free anti-aging community. For a limited time, you can ask me, a licensed esthetician and spa owner, questions and share your story. We would love to hear!
Weight Loss
Cold therapy/showers also help with weight loss through 2 ways. It creates an increase in insulin sensitivity which will give you better blood sugars and it increases your brown fat. Now, I know what you are going to say. Umm I don’t want to increase my fat. But this is not your traditional fat. This is brown fat, and it works differently. So, we all have brown fat in our bodies – this type of fat is a fat that burns fat for you! So how it works is it uses calories from what we are eating and turns it into heat to burn the calories and use them for energy. So brown fat is used to keep our bodies warm so you can see how it is activated when we are cold! Neat huh?!
Cold Water therapy at home helps inflammation
Cold water therapy also helps with inflammation – think of arthritis, or after you have done a new workout – sore muscles,etc. I just hurt my hamstring from walking up a steep hill the other day. I took a cold shower and incorporated intermittent fasting for an extra boost, and it healed within 2 days! That’s so impressive to me with my body! And I managed to do it without taking any over the counter pain medication. Again, I was impressed! Another area that I struggle with soreness is in my hands. I write a lot of blog posts and magazine articles and I use cold showers to help reduce my inflammation. Reducing your inflammation not only helps reduce your pain but also will decrease your chances of getting a chronic disease as I mentioned in the beginning of the article with the immune system benefits.
Tighten your skin, shrink pore size and gain thicker & longer hair with cold water therapy.
Cold water is fabulous for tightening up that skin as well as getting longer, thicker hair and reducing the look of your pore size! But How? Because warm water encourages your body to release oils. Cold water does not. So this will help with breakouts. Also the cold water activates hair follicles! So if you have thin or thinning hair – jump into the cold water to increase the length and thickness of your hair!
Now that we have covered all the reasons why you want to do cold showers, let’s talk about how long and how often and all the ways you can achieve these benefits!
How Long and How Often to do Cold Water Therapy
You can do 2 cold showers a week for 2 to 5 minutes or even 15 minutes if you are gungho using our build up strategy
You can take a cold shower everyday for up to 2 to 5 minutes .
Options for Cold Water Therapy
Cold showers, cold baths with some ice in it if you want it even colder, cryotherapy if you want to pay for it, ice vests that are packed with ice – can wear this while working at your desk.
Voila! There you have it and if you have any questions or want to share your experience – we would LOVE to hear from you. You may join our lapree beauty community for free – you will have access to all of our videos, discounts and skin knowledge database where we are reviewing products!
Big Smiles from,
The spa sisters,
Lindsey & Ashley