Most people frame this as a recovery question. Should I jump in the cold bath after training to reduce soreness and feel better faster? But Dr. Thomas Seager is asking something more precise: what are you actually optimizing for? Because depending on your answer, the protocol reverses entirely.
The core insight here is elegant once you see it. Cold exposure blunts inflammation. That's why people use it for recovery — it dials down the post-exercise inflammatory cascade, reduces muscle damage markers, speeds the feeling of freshness. But that inflammatory cascade isn't just soreness. It's also an anabolic signal. It's part of how your body registers that training happened and initiates the repair and growth response. Cold after training intercepts that signal before it can do its work.
Flip the order, and you get something different entirely. Cold before training stimulates luteinizing hormone, which drives testosterone synthesis. You arrive at your workout already primed. The exercise then amplifies what the cold started, rather than canceling it out.
This isn't Seager operating in isolation. The transcript from our piece on cold exposure and anabolic signalling makes the same point directly: if you're trying to drive adaptations or build muscle, ice baths after training sessions might be counterproductive. The evidence is converging. Cold is powerful precisely because it's a strong signal — and strong signals have to be timed carefully.
What strikes me about Seager's contribution is his framework for thinking about this, not just the protocol itself. He's a scientist who has learned to hold population-level research loosely. Randomized controlled trials give you averages. They can't tell you whether you're in the 99% who responded like the study predicted or the 1% who didn't. That humility — coming from someone with a PhD and over a thousand ice baths — is worth sitting with.
There's genuine disagreement in this space about how significant the post-training cold blunting effect actually is. Some researchers argue the window is narrow — that cold needs to happen within 30 minutes of training to meaningfully interfere. Others suggest the effect persists longer. Seager's practical workaround is clean: if you want both benefits, separate them by at least four hours. Let the anabolic signal run its course, then use cold later in the day for its neurological and metabolic benefits.
If you're training for performance or muscle development, make the cold your morning ritual before you touch a weight. Two to four minutes, whatever temperature makes you gasp and stay honest. Then train. The norepinephrine from the cold sharpens focus and the luteinizing hormone primes the hormonal environment for what's about to happen.
If you're training primarily for cardiovascular fitness or general wellness, the timing becomes less critical. Cold after is fine. The anabolic signal matters less when hypertrophy isn't the goal.
Seager mentions Kelly McGonigal's work on stress beliefs — that your perception of a stressor changes how the stressor affects you. This surfaces something we don't talk about enough in cold exposure: the protocol matters, but so does your relationship to the discomfort. Two people at 34 degrees for three minutes can have completely different hormonal outcomes depending on whether they're dreading it or embracing it. The nervous system reads context. Build your ritual with intention, not just parameters.