Andrew Huberman· PhD
Avoid deliberate cold exposure after hypertrophy or strength training. Before is fine.
The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Avoid deliberate cold exposure after hypertrophy or strength training. Before is fine.
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by doing your deliberate cold exposure on Tuesday, you're not going to get those effects, that is the blocking of hypertrophy or the blocking of strength improvement or the blocking or prevention of improvements in endurance that would occur if you immediately got into the ice bath after a hypertrophy strength or endurance workout.
the whole point is to cause overload that's what's going to be the stimuli to cause adaptation if all I'm doing is blocking that stuff attenuating it smashing it back down I'm undercutting myself I'm choosing to feel a little bit better to have a little bit better performance right now knowing that's going to compromise the results I'm going to get 6 8 10 12 weeks from now
if you're going to do deliberate cold exposure best to not do it in the eight hours or even on the same day after resistance training geared towards developing strength and hypertrophy increases no problem to do it first in fact maybe even some performance-enhancing effects of doing it first there's some athletes that stand for doing that
You want to separate it ideally six to eight hours.
waiting just on a recovery day is is what you think is best
And so if you're really trying to maximize your muscle gains, it's a good idea to not engage in deliberate cold exposure, cold water immersion cryotherapy whatever fill-in- thelank your favorite cold exposure method is anytime around resistance training.