How This Daily 5 Minute Exercise Can Boost Your Health Energy Levels

By Yannick—

Do you sometimes get this groggy morning feeling? Do your energy levels take a plunge at noon and make you feel as if you could crawl back into bed already? Do you feel cold all the time? Or are you sweating too much?

If so, this one simple exercise could turn things around. It is designed to instantaneously raise your energy levels in as little as 5 minutes. And if you keep doing it, it will also improve your blood circulation, help with any thermoregulative issues you might have (feeling too hot or too cold), and strengthen your immune system in general.

So here it is…

The Exercise: Taking Cold Showers

In appearance, this exercise is very simple: Take a cold shower every day and gradually lower the temperature while increasing the time you spend in cold water.  

The Idea Behind It

The cold shower exercise is based on the notion that our primal ancestors didn’t have the luxury of living in comfortably heated houses all the time. They were out in nature and there they simply had to endure cold temperatures. Consequently, our body is well built to stand those conditions – but today we rarely make use of that potential. And this is not only a missed opportunity, but actually bad for our health. For all the processes that go along with the body’s adaptation to cold temperatures – improved blood circulation, a strengthened immune system – are lost too. The consequences are allergies, blood pressure issues and all kinds of other diseases. 

The cold exercise aims to challenge our body and thus reignite our potential for adaptation and healthy biochemical growth. 

How To Do This Exercise The Right Way

There are 4 main principles to keep in mind when doing the cold shower exercise:

1. Do it consistently:

   One cold shower doesn’t help much. The physiological aim of this exercise is to train your cells to contract more quickly and strongly, thus enabling them to pump blood more efficiently. And since muscles are doing the contracting, the cold shower exercise is essentially a form of strength training. So, like with any other form of muscle building, repeated stimulation is needed. A muscle simply won’t grow much if it’s only challenged once a week.

   So I recommend you shower every day and start at your usual (warm) temperature. The only thing you add is a cold shower phase at the end. I’ll explain how to do this in a second, but for now it’s only important that you take cold showers on a regular basis. This is the only way you’ll achieve growth in the muscular structure of your cells.

2. Lower the temperature and increase the time gradually:

   This is key! When I started taking cold showers I thought I had to be the toughest and turned the handle all the way to cold – just to find myself shivering after 10 seconds and having to get out. On top of that, I developed a fair amount of anxiety to go into the cold water again.

   So start off gently. It’s enough if the water feels cold to you personally. Nobody else and no fixed temperature can judge this. Then go a tiny bit colder day after day after day. The same goes for the duration: gradually but steadily increase it.

   You’ll experience that the body is very quick to adapt. Whereas you’ll shiver after getting out of the shower the first few days or even weeks, you’ll later be able to get out of the shower with no signs of shivering at all.

   Eventually, you should aim for at least 5 minutes of staying in water under 62° Fahrenheit and having it cover your whole body including your head. (I circle around in the shower, because the water never covers my whole body at a time.)

3. Be gentle and don’t force your body to overextend its limits:

   This is a warning for those of you who’d jump into the exercise with too much ambition: Never underestimate the power of the cold! Staying in cold water for too long can lead to hypothermia and all kinds of bodily harm. This shouldn’t make you fearful, but remind you to treat the cold with respect and not to force your body to stay in the shower when you clearly feel you should get out. Great results are not achieved through force, but through consistent practice and gradually increasing the challenge.

4. Don’t listen to your head; listen to your body:

   This final point is important to find a good balance between not overextending your limits but keeping the cold shower exercise a challenge (so your cell muscles are stimulated to become stronger). And in order to do that, you should listen to your body rather than your head. For your head will make up all kinds of excuses to stop even before you’ve felt a drop of cold water on your body. This is not a sign of overextension, but the workings of the monkey mind that’s opposed to any form of discomfort – and thus any chance of growth. This you may – and indeed have to – ignore. Just turn the handle no matter what.

   If you do, there will be a few moments of real discomfort as the cold water hits your body. The challenge is not to gasp and to continue breathing as normally as possible. Breathe and listen to what you’re body is telling you. You may be surprised to find that, after a few seconds, you don’t really feel cold after all. You feel the cold water coming down on you, but inside you’re actually quite comfortable. That’s what cold feels like when you’ve blocked out the mental chatter of how awful it is.

   It might take you a few showers to get there, but once you feel this for the first time, you’ll be amazed. You’ll wonder how it is possible to feel comfortable under such circumstances. And yet there you are, feeling “comfortably cold”.

   Of course, this comfort won’t last eternally. Once you start to feel cold inside, once you start shivering, or once you feel a tingling sensation in any part of your body, it’s time to leave the shower. Not panicking and in fear, but gently and deliberately. You made it. That’s a huge success!

That’s all there is to the cold shower exercise. Your instantaneous reward for doing it will be a clear mind and a body radiating with energy. And if you step into a cold shower again and again, you’ll improve your blood circulation and thus your immune system one step at a time. 

Yannick has been experimenting with practices to better harness bodily energy for years. He also writes about the best products for a good night’s sleep at Best Patrols and shows you how to release your energy through drumming at kickstartyourdrumming.com.