The core claim here isn't about ice baths being good or bad. It's more nuanced than that, and that's what makes it worth sitting with. Dr. Tom Seager — a 57-year-old with testosterone around 1100 — is making a structural argument: the sequence matters as much as the practice itself. Cold exposure and exercise are both powerful stressors. Stack them in the wrong order, and they cancel each other out. Stack them correctly, and they amplify each other.
The specific insight is this: cold immediately after a workout blunts the anabolic signal. Your muscles just absorbed a stress, and they need that inflammatory cascade — the very thing cold suppresses — to adapt and grow stronger. Cold is anti-inflammatory by design. In the hours after training, that's exactly the wrong environment for muscle protein synthesis to do its work.
This timing principle has shown up across nearly every serious researcher working in this space. Andrew Huberman lands in the same place — wait four to five hours, or flip the sequence entirely and do your cold exposure before training. The 40 percent improvement in insulin sensitivity Seager references is consistent with what we see in the broader metabolic literature. Cold exposure activates GLUT4 receptors independently of insulin, which means your cells become more efficient at glucose uptake — a genuine metabolic signal, not a marginal one.
Where there's less consensus is on the testosterone claim. The cardiovascular data on cold exposure is robust. The hormone data is promising but thinner. That said, the mechanisms make sense: cold activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis, reduces testicular temperature (which sperm and testosterone production prefer), and lowers cortisol chronically — and cortisol is the primary suppressor of testosterone. So the pathway is plausible. Seager's personal results are compelling, but they're n=1.
Seager offers a reframe that I find genuinely useful: use exercise to recover from cold, not cold to recover from exercise. This inverts the conventional athlete's logic entirely. Most people think of the cold as the recovery tool deployed after training. But if you treat cold as the primary stressor — the main event — then exercise afterward becomes the warm-up, the reactivation, the way your body processes and integrates the cold adaptation. It's a different relationship with both practices.
If your goal is muscle and strength: cold in the morning, training later. Or train, wait four to five hours, then cold. Don't reach for the ice immediately post-workout as a reward — you'll be blunting the signal you just worked to create.
If your goal is metabolic health, hormone optimization, or stress resilience: timing is more flexible. Cold before breakfast, two to four minutes, three to four times per week, is a clean protocol that won't interfere with training if you give yourself that buffer.
Start with ten to fifteen seconds and add time each session. Not because the cold gets easier — it doesn't, not really — but because your nervous system learns to stay calm inside the discomfort. That calm is the adaptation. That's what transfers.