Aaaah, my buddy Joe Rogan.

I will get hate for this but overall I love Joe and his show most of the time…

…however, the practice of going ballZ deep at 33F in the ice bath as a recommendation to start is bonkers.

This has also spun off a whole slew of “Cold Water BroZ” via the cult of Joe with their own epic posting about their love of cold water immersion after lifting ‘cuz "recovery, bro."

Can doing cold water immersion (CWI) immediately after lifting stall your gainZ?

Here's what's actually happening inside that freezer situation.

When your skin temperature drops below around 95°F, your body triggers vasoconstriction — blood gets shunted away from your periphery and toward your core, norepinephrine spikes, and your sympathetic nervous system lights up like it just spotted an alligator trying to join you in the cold plunge.

This is not recovery.
It is a stress response.

Again, a stress response is not inherently “bad,” but if you stack it immediately on top of a strength training session, and you go full Rogan ballZ-deep super cold for a longer-ish duration, you are adding more stress to a stressful lifting session.

…And since you are reading this newsletter, I know you are probably training hard and not licking windows at Planet Fitness.

But there is another issue with CWI done immediately after lifting, and this is where the frozen recovery cult starts to fall apart under fluorescent laboratory lighting.

Let’s drag out the actual research from the oily depths of PubMed and look at what happens when cold gets dropped directly on top of a hypertrophy signal.

Study 1

Roberts et al., 2015 studied 24 males over 12 weeks of resistance training. They did CWI at 10°C (50°F) for 10 minutes, within 5 minutes of finishing lifting.

Nice and cold. Clean protocol. Brutal timing.
And what happened?

Muscle protein synthesis (MPS) was blunted. Hypertrophy was attenuated.

In plain English: the body got a weaker signal to build mo’ muscle after training.

No bueno, Bro.

Study 2

Then came Fuchs and van Loon, 2020, who used a slick single-leg design. One leg got dunked into 8°C (46°F) water for 20 minutes post-training, while the other leg sat in thermoneutral water like a civilized adult.

Same human just one frozen leg and one normal leg.

Once again the cold leg lost the argument as muscle protein synthesis was impaired in the cold leg.

Strike 2 for the meat sticks.

Study 3

Next up is Fyfe and Petersen, 2019.
16 men. 7 weeks.
After each training session they performed 15 minutes at 10°C (50°F).

And the result came back like a ransom note for your quadriceps:

Fiber hypertrophy blunted.
Heat shock protein 27 content attenuated by 0.8-fold.
HSP72 reduced by 0.7-fold.

Strike 3 for Harry Hypertrophy.

Now step back and admire the frozen crime scene:

Three different labs.
Different designs.
Same basic conclusion.

When you do cold water immersion immediately after lifting, especially at the colder temps and longer durations above, you may be actively working against the very adaptation you were trying to earn.

That is the key distinction.

Lifting is the demolition crew.
Adaptation is the rebuild.

And if you cannonball into a post-workout ice coffin right after training, there is a decent chance you are telling your body in BoBo the Bear voice:

“Great session sir, very nice, very nice sir, now please shut down some of that messy rebuilding nonsense before it gets out of hand.”

That is not recovery.
That is interference wearing an old-timey strongman mustache.

Now, to be fair, there is one newer paper that muddies the frozen waters a bit.

Horgan et al., 2023, which included Dr. Gregory Haff, studied 18 male academy Super Rugby players in Australia during the season using a randomized cross-over design. Their CWI protocol was also 10°C (50°F) for 10 minutes after lifting.

Unlike the earlier hypertrophy-focused work, this study found no significant difference in lean mass (p = 0.960) and no significant difference in fat mass (p = 0.801) between conditions.

In other words, in those in-season athletes, repeated post-lifting CWI did not appear to worsen body composition or reduce lean mass.

So the honest interpretation is not that the earlier data magically evaporates into the ice fog.

It is that context matters.

If your primary goal is hypertrophy, the weight of the evidence says that jumping into very cold water immediately after lifting for a min of 10 minutes is probably a dumb way to celebrate leg day if your goal is get every last gram of muscle.

..But if you are an in-season athlete, buried under practice, collisions, fatigue, and the general chaos of organized sport, the equation changes.

At that point the goal is not always “maximize every last molecular whisper of hypertrophy.” Sometimes the goal is simply: recover enough to survive the week without turning into human soup.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

The same cold exposure that can blunt hypertrophy when done right after strength training may have a very different effect after endurance work, where the goal is not necessarily to amplify muscle growth, but to improve recovery and maintain performance.

There is one cross-adaptation finding that should make every coach sit up straighter and stop blindly worshipping at the altar of IcePlungeBro_Official.

Lunt et al., 2010 showed that six short CWI sessions not only habituated the sympathetic response to cold, but also improved the body’s response to acute hypoxia (low oxygen condition).

Two completely different stressors.
One shared adaptation.

That is where this gets legitimately fascinating.

Cold water immersion, done correctly, at the right time, in the right context, is genuinely powerful in my biased but accurate opinion.

The problem is that nobody told the internet that timing and context are everything since that does not fit neatly into a 17 sec TikTok, plus it has to be extracted from reading many full studies of actual research done on hooooomans.

Cold is a dose.
Wrong timing, wrong result.

The specific protocols — when to use cold, what temperature, how long, how to progress it, and how to periodize it against heat in a block model — are inside the Phys Flex Cert in addition to the background and deep dive into the research.

You will learn all about it plus the exact protocols and when to apply them for maximal effects.

​https://miket.me/physflex <--full details

Much love and cold,
Dr. Mike

PS — Fast action bonus: enroll by Wednesday, April 23 at midnight PST and get a free 1-hour private consulting call with me. Legit $250 value, yours at no cost.

PPS — "One of the most fascinating aspects of the course is learning how there is 'crosstalk' between the homeostatic regulators.

For example, improving CO2 tolerance can improve your tolerance to exercise. This was something I suspected, but now I know the science behind it.

It was so informative, I am going back through it a second time." — Christopher S. Ellis, DPT, Dynamic Physio Therapy

​https://miket.me/physflex <--full details

References

Roberts, L. A., Raastad, T., Markworth, J. F., Figueiredo, V. C., Egner, I. M., Shield, A., Cameron-Smith, D., Coombes, J. S., & Peake, J. M. (2015). Post-exercise cold water immersion attenuates acute anabolic signalling and long-term adaptations in muscle to strength training. The Journal of Physiology, 593(18), 4285–4301. https://doi.org/10.1113/JP270570

Fuchs, C. J., Kouw, I. W. K., Churchward-Venne, T. A., Smeets, J. S. J., Senden, J. M. G., Lichtenbelt, W. D. V. M., Verdijk, L. B., & van Loon, L. J. C. (2020). Postexercise cooling impairs muscle protein synthesis rates in recreational athletes. The Journal of Physiology, 598(4), 755–772. https://doi.org/10.1113/JP278996

Fyfe, J. J., Broatch, J. R., Trewin, A. J., Petersen, A. C., Bishop, D. J., Stepto, N. K., McConell, G. K., & Garnham, A. P. (2019). Cold water immersion attenuates anabolic signaling and skeletal muscle fiber hypertrophy, but not performance gains, following resistance training. The Journal of Applied Physiology, 127(5), 1403–1418.

Horgan, B. G., Halson, S. L., Drinkwater, E. J., Eston, R. G., Kerswell, B. N., Stephens Hemingway, B. H., Coldwells, A., & Haff, G. G. (2023). No effect of repeated post-resistance exercise cold or hot water immersion on in-season body composition and performance responses in academy rugby players: A randomised controlled cross-over design. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 123(2), 609–622

Lunt, H. C., Barwood, M. J., Corbett, J., & Tipton, M. J. (2010). “Cross-adaptation”: Habituation to short repeated cold-water immersions affects the response to acute hypoxia in humans. The Journal of Physiology, 588(18), 3605–3613.

_____________________

Mike T Nelson CISSN, CSCS, MSME, PhD
Associate Professor, Carrick Institute
Owner, Extreme Human Performance, LLC
Editorial Board Member, STRONG Fitness Mag

Mike T Nelson is a PhD and not a physician or registered dietitian. The contents of this email should not be taken as medical advice. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any health problem - nor is it intended to replace the advice of a physician. Always consult your physician or qualified health professional on any matters regarding your health.

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