Jeff Cavaliere makes a provocative argument here, and the title is designed to stop you mid-scroll. "Cold showers are killing your gains." It's punchy. It's memorable. It's also... half true. Which makes it more interesting to unpack than if it were simply wrong.
The core claim is this: cold water exposure immediately after resistance training can blunt the inflammatory response your muscles need to grow. That post-workout inflammation — the soreness, the swelling, the cellular chaos — isn't just discomfort. It's a signal. It activates the growth factors that trigger hypertrophy. When you immediately douse that signal with cold water, you interrupt the conversation your body is trying to have with itself.
We have another article in the knowledge base — "Why Cold Showers Are Killing Your Muscle Gains: Seven Scientific Studies" — that goes deeper on the mechanistic side. The picture that emerges is consistent: cold water immersion, particularly full submersion, is more problematic than a cold shower. The dose matters. The duration matters. And most importantly, the timing matters enormously.
Here's where Cavaliere is careful in a way the headline is not. He distinguishes between hypertrophy-focused training and strength-focused training. If you're chasing a bigger deadlift, cold exposure appears far less damaging to your goals. The inflammation pathway that drives muscle size is not the same pathway that drives neural adaptations for raw strength. This nuance is often lost in the "cold is bad for gains" discourse.
The cortisol piece is where I find the most interesting tension. Cavaliere rightly points out that cold showers lower cortisol, and that chronically elevated cortisol is genuinely anabolic — in the wrong direction. High cortisol degrades muscle tissue. So if you're training under chronic stress, skipping cold exposure entirely may cost you more than it saves. The tool that blunts your acute inflammatory response could be the same tool that restores your systemic hormonal environment.
Huberman's work, which we cover extensively elsewhere in this knowledge base, reinforces this: cold exposure is not inherently anti-muscle. It's about timing. Cold immediately post-workout suppresses hypertrophy signals. Cold in the morning, hours before training, or before bed — that's a different biological conversation entirely.
If muscle growth is your primary goal: keep your post-workout window warm for at least four to six hours. Let the inflammation do its job. Then take your cold shower — morning, evening, whenever suits your routine. You get the cortisol benefits, the mood lift, the metabolic advantages, without interfering with what you earned in the gym.
Here's what I keep coming back to. The contrast therapy literature — hot followed by cold, cycling between extremes — shows something that neither purely cold nor purely hot protocols achieve alone. The oscillation itself appears to have unique benefits. What if the answer isn't "cold showers yes or no" but rather learning to use both temperatures as instruments, the way a skilled musician uses dynamics? Not louder or softer — but knowing exactly when each serves the piece.