Bill Gifford

speaker

328 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 22 Mar

Bill Gifford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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The mindbodygreen Podcast · 642: The science of sweat, saunas & stress | best-selling author Bill Gifford · 22 Mar 2026 podcast

Your skin is cold.

Your skin is going hot to cold, but your core is not.

You're still building up heat inside your body.

And as the cold constricts your circulation, all the blood goes to your core, you're conserving heat inside you.

So you have to let that relax and let yourself radiate off that heat that you absorbed in the sauna.

So recover for enough time, I think, is key.

That's sound advice.

I wrote The Case Against Cold Plunging.

So the science of cold exposure and cold water immersion is really not as robust as the science around heat by a long shot.

A lot of the studies are, they tend to be small, they tend to be biased, and there aren't the big long-term observational studies of people intentionally dunking themselves in cold water.

In fact, most of the cold water literature is about

dying from hypothermia, right?

Or having a heart attack or whatever.

There's a risk and there's a risk to heat as well.

But I think perhaps probably the biggest misconception, it's eroding, it's fading away now, but is this idea that it's a good thing to do after a workout or after a strength workout in particular.

And it's understandable because

you know, activating your muscles and running or lifting weights, you generate a tremendous amount of heat in your body and you want to cool off, right?

That's natural.

But numerous studies have found that immersing yourself in cold water

Immediately after a workout kind of blunts the muscle benefits of that workout.

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