Download my book Master Your Testosterone to learn more tips on how to increase testosterone naturally at There is little evidence to directly correlate cold water immersion with increase testosterone naturally.
There is, however, a theoretically sound hypothesis in support of it - the body of research just doesn’t yet support the claims beyond anecdotal evidence.
There is a ghost study floating around on the internet that claims testosterone increase with cold water immersion, - referenced by people like Tim Ferriss in the 4 hour body - yet nobody actually links to it, and it doesn’t exist in any reputable academic journal databases.
Short-term cold water therapy is very healthy for humans for its anti- depressive effects, metabolic increase, and proposed leptin enhancing effects.
So what’s the deal with cold showers?
We;re going to find out in today’s video
Cold water immersion gets a lot of play, both in popular books as well as internet articles and forums, for increasing testosterone production in men.
But does all the hype actually stack up with the evidence? Unfortunately, no.
At least not in terms of direct scientific research that demonstrates convincing evidence of testosterone increase itself.
However, cold showers and/or short-term cold water exposure can be good for your health in general, for other reasons, but we’ll get back to that shortly.
Here’s the deal, everybody and their mother cites a 1993 study by the “Thrombosis Research Institute” as implicating cold showers with a direct increase in testosterone levels.
However, after hours of scouring the internet for this study, I could not even find the darned thing. I searched far and wide, first in reputable academic databases like Pubmed, Google Scholar, JSTOR, Science Direct, and Wiley, then in Google search, forums, and blog articles.
Nothing.
The study doesn’t appear to exist, at least not online. So what gives?
Well, at first glance this appears to be a case of he-said-she- said.
One blogger or author hears about something on a forum, “cites” a study, writes an article on it, then another blogger picks it up and cites it, then the spark ignites and the unfounded information runs rampant across the internet.
While it may actually be true - short term cold water immersion may actually improve transient testosterone production - I unfortunately will not explicitly recommend it, or recommend against it, due to the fact that I have never read any evidence to support this claim. I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon just because it is popular.
However, there is evidence that points to prolonged cold water exposure as having negative stress effects on non- cold-adapted rats, with decrease in testosterone levels being one of the outcomes. And negative effects of prolonged cold exposure in non-cold-adapted humans has been reported as well.
And if we pull our heads out of the books for a second and think about it, prolonged cold exposure in a human who is not adapted to it generally leads to one thing... hypothermia.
In terms of cold water immersion, here’s how things work:
Short-term immersion (5-10minutes): positive effects (discussed below), though little to no evidence of testosterone production beyond speculation
Proper cold-adaptation via steady habituation: adaptive responses such as increase in subcutaneous fat level (seen in many long distance pool swimmers, and especially in cold water distance swimmers - not necessarily preferable)
Long term cold exposure in non-adapted individuals (20+ minutes): negative stress effects, potentially decreasing testosterone levels due to increase in glucocorticoids
Noradrenaline has been shown many times to increase significantly with cold exposure. This is actually the main mechanism of action that scientists credit for the perceived anti-depressive effects of cold water therapy on subjects.
The short-term cold (or cool) water exposure increases blood levels of beta-endorphin and noradrenaline, also increasing synaptic release of noradrenaline in the brain. The immersion of the palms and feet in the water, areas with very high concentration of heat sensory receptors in the skin, would theoretically send a large amount of neural impulses to the brain to accentuate this process.
However, researchers acknowledge that the body of research is quite small in terms of cold water therapy acting in this manner and they call for wider and more rigorous study before conclusive arguments can be made.
Other cold water benefits include an increase in metabolic rate, as well as proposed contributions to restoring homeostatic leptin levels (in Dr. Jack Kruse’s “Leptin Reset”), with other promising results for chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic heart failure, and some types of cancers - even a hypothesis for anti-tumor immunity.
So it is definitely something you may be interested in trying out. Remember, short-term exposure to cold or cool water for 5-10 minutes is all you need.
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