Benefits of Cold Showers

There are benefits of cold showers but singing is not one of them!

Taking a cold shower routinely can really change your life in powerful and subtle ways. There are some guys who have actually experimented with taking cold showers, wanting to find out about this powerful tool as a way of enhancing fitness, health, mental toughness and yes, quality of life!

Remember Wim Hof, known as the Iceman; who trained himself to endure the extreme cold. There are many lessons to be learned from his experience. Additionally it wakes you up, energizes you and increases alertness and the ability to concentrate. It strengthens the cardiovascular and immune systems, enhances recovery from disease. Also reduces inflammation, increases testosterone, and improves hair and skin health.

Here are some life lessons learned from John Sifferman, after taking a year of cold showers:

You’ve got to be 100% in; willing to take the uncomfortable

If you are not 100% in it, you won’t make it, period. In an uncomfortable situation, you will be miserable, but if you are not willing and ready, you’re not a candidate for cold showers. In other words, you need to want this. If you’re not 100% on board, you’re not going to make it. The point here is, it takes willpower, it’s the simple idea of being comfortable with being uncomfortable, testing your resolve to see what you are made of.

Learning to be flexible

It’s good to have a basic plan, sticking with it as best you can, but not too rigid. It requires flexibility to ease into the situations, the shower in this instance, more gradually – almost every time John would end up going colder, for longer. The key again is making progress, by pushing your limits.

It requires endurance

Even after 18 months of disciplining himself to take cold showers, John still found it hard to do so, every time. He always heard a voice telling him to give up, just set the shower to warm. He said he had to beat the fear of facing that icy water, all the time, over and over again, but he knew that to endure would make him the champion.

Refusing to weasel out of it

You will want to quit, but you must be prepared for that eventuality. John often wanted to give in, thinking, ‘today, I’ll just skip this one’, giving himself excellent excuses for skipping the shower; early warning signs for quitting. But he never did budge from giving in. Not an inch.

When facing resistance, search for the right motivation, but keep going! In this instance, John waited till after his gym when he was hot and sweaty, knowing it would turn out better! It might even be nice. It aided also, in recovery and inflammation reduction. He turned negativity into positivity.

There’s more to cold showers than just a long list of health benefits – a lot more.

Cold showering, simply, is one of the things you have to experience to understand. It teaches you a lot about yourself – it gives you superpowers. There certainly are heaps of health benefits, even relieving depression and stimulating weight loss. But as you can see from the above, it does far more. It builds character too! Additionally helps you focus and overcome resistance. Also builds confidence where you believe you can reach any goal you set for yourself, even when resistance tries its best to get in the way.

If you can overcome the resistance to expose yourself to cold showers on a daily basis, believe it, you will have built a solid foundation of overcoming more challenging obstacles as well as uncomfortable situations. That’s aside from the health benefits! Go take a cold shower!