Ben Greenfield

But then after the four week mark and up to the 12 week mark, cortisol stabilized and began to chronically lower, meaning there was like a stress resilience inducing effect of regularly timed cold exposure in women.

Studies have also shown that, just like I was saying earlier, if you have a high amount of estrogen and progesterone, you get more vasoconstriction and a little bit higher cortisol response to the cold.

But that doesn't mean it's causing anything bad.

I would say...

if anything, there should be some kind of like a long-term study in women that also differentiates between different phases of the cycle to actually see if there's anything like fat gain, lower HRV, higher amounts of stress, anything.

But today, nothing like that exists.

And I think the only thing you can kind of reasonably say is that compared to men, women, and especially women in the luteal phase,

should consider doing cold that's slightly less cold for perhaps a shorter period of time than a man might.

Well, it's all kind of theoretical.

Right.

But if you look at the effect of cold and its ability to be able to suppress the response to exercise, that's another reason that people say don't do the cold is because

If the body's super cold, you shut down your own anti-inflammatory response and the body doesn't do things like mitochondrial proliferation, the development of new mitochondria, or I should rather say mitochondrial biogenesis is what it'd be called.

or building of new satellite cells for building new muscles so a lot of people have heard that and then they will exercise but not do cold after exercise because we've heard now that cold is bad for getting the response that you want from exercise

But the studies that have shown that to be true, which has been shown to be true, took cold exposure lengths from 10 to 20 minutes in length and a drop of almost a full Celsius in muscle tissue.

And it takes a long time to do that.

There's not a lot of people, I don't know about you, but I don't even have the time to do 10 to 20 minutes of cold after a workout.

If you're doing just a quick cold plunge, which I actually think is really refreshing after a workout, especially if it's

like summer and you don't want to be sweaty the rest of the day, it's not going to impair exercise response at all.

And then if you look at, well, how long should women go?

How cold compared to men?