“What is your practice on cold shower or cold plunge?”
My practice is to take a hot shower or plunge into a warm spa.
My practice is not to do things I don’t like or cause pain.
I’m ~84 and in excellent shape.
But then again, some people are closet masochists and like to feel pain every day.
I did it for around 6 mos. It was thrilling and extremely uncomfortable. It didn’t ease my ailments. I haven’t done it in about a year and may not again, but will think about it and watch for any new evidence of its benefits.
I stumbled across one of Wim Hof’s books and read enough to get to his recommendation of ending each shower by turning the water to the coldest setting for thirty seconds. He says that ten days of this will have big effects, making the blood vessels more flexible. I just finished the ten days and may or may not be better for it.
He has two or three books and a conditioning program. I saw that he has completed a number of extreme hot, cold and breathing related feats, including a half-marathon above the Arctic Circle, barefoot, wearing only running shorts.
My cold shower thing was done out of curiosity and I have no opinion about that or him. His name wasn’t mentioned anywhere that I saw in this thread, but it seems some of the extremists here would be familiar with him and his programs.
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I think he was the first, or one of the first ones, who popularized cold exposure (CE). He held the records on CE. Now there are people compared to which Wim Hof, aka the Iceman, is a total wimp.
I think that there are many factors influencing our CE capability or tolerance. One of them is perhaps culture and habit. I started reading about the benefit of cold exposure when I was 15 and since I was that kind of challenging mentality with a strong willpower I liked it. I started with cold air then switched to cold showers. Only recently I switched to cold plunges. It is a normal thing to me and to say the truth, it has become a habit, almost an addiction, in wintertime.
Some cultures include cold plunges within their religious or recreational practices. Russia, Eastern Europe, the Orthodox Christian culture, practice purifying plunging into frozen waters at the end of January. They do it even in Siberia. They maintain holes in frozen rivers and lakes.
Some people develop a practically unreachable imperviousness to cold. The present holder of the Guiness record for immersion in ice stayed within ice cubes, up to his neck, for 4+ hours. This sounds barely possible and testifies the adaptation capabilities of the human body and mind and the strength of applied willpower. Of course such extreme feats of CE are not advised for healthspan and longevity.
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Ok, many confounding effects, but if it was that beneficial to longevity, why do they never feature on the lists of long lived people.