Should women take ice baths? How cold exposure affects the sexes differently
Emily Emmins, Women's Health's social media manager, started taking dunks in ice baths as a personal experiment. She wanted to see if cold exposure could give her the rush she heard others in wellness circles bragging about.
Like most of us when doing something arduous or interesting, she took videos, posting clips of herself catching her breath as her skin hit the ice and her gleeful face as she came out feeling alert and energised.
Emily was expecting crazed comments, of course. Something along the lines of, I could never, or, so impressive. She wasn't expecting to be told that she was putting her health at risk. Yet these were the messages she received, her DMs full of people warning her that ice baths aren't for women.
While sex differences in wellness habits do exist, Emily couldn't help but feel icky about it. What was the justification for women not doing something extreme?
Ice baths: why are they good for you?
When anyone steps in an ice bath – or is exposed to any type of cold, for that matter – their blood vessels constrict. That reduces blood flow through the vessels and inflammation. When you step out and warm up, the vessels dilate, meaning a high volume of blood can rush through, taking oxygen and nutrients to tissue in a high volume.
The shock of cold water is also a stress, triggering the release of hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine. Short bouts of these hormones can boost mood, increase alertness and reduce stress.
'The general benefits of cold exposure include better recovery by promoting blood flow and reducing lactic acid buildup, reducing muscle soreness and inflammation and supporting mental benefits such as stress relief, improved focus and a feeling of accomplishment,' says Emma Estrela, a Level 3 practitioner of the Wim Hof Method, a type of cold exposure therapy.
'Research on ice baths and cold-water immersion has been growing in recent years but many studies either use mixed-gender groups without analysing gender-specific responses or focus predominantly on men due to assumptions about hormonal variability in women making them harder to study.
'There is more interest in understanding how cold exposure affects women, especially in areas like metabolism, fat adaptation, and hormonal responses, but more targeted research is still needed.'
Are ice baths good for women?
With limited studies on ice baths per se, we can't draw any specific conclusions. However, with things we already know about women's bodies, we can work out how temperature exposure may influence us.
'Physiological differences between genders may influence individual responses to cold exposure,' says Emma.
'Women are more sensitive to cold extremities due to differences in peripheral blood flow, meaning hands and feet may feel colder faster. This might limit their tolerance for longer ice bath durations or extremely cold temperatures.'
Studies show that we do feel the effects of cold more than men, reporting feeling colder and shivering at higher temperatures. This is one of the reasons many people told Emily to stay away from ice baths, claiming that excess cold is an extreme stress that can lead to long-lasting issues with hormones.
However, more sensitivity to cold isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it means we can be more efficient with our cold exposure as we don't need the temperature to be as low or sit in it for as long to get the benefits.
Cold exposure can also increase our tolerance to the cold and boost circulation, helping to improve daily temperature regulation. For those with hot flushes in menopause, cold exposure also has benefits: a University College London study from 2024 found cold water swimming led to improvements in hot flushes, as well as anxiety and low mood.
Women can also harness greater recovery from ice baths when used after training. Renowned exercise physiologist Dr Stacy Sims wrote on her blog that men don't benefit from dilating the blood vessels after exercise as much as women, 'because their blood vessels naturally constrict post-exercise to push blood away from the skin and back into the central circulation.
'Women on the other hand tend to vasodilate after exercise, meaning our blood tends to pool in our skin, dropping blood pressure and reducing blood flow to the damaged muscle. Cold water immersion for women can help speed up vasoconstriction after hard exertion, to get blood back centrally helping to increase blood pressure and circulation into the muscles,' writes Dr Stacy.
Emily wasn't surprised to find she experienced these benefits, despite being warned off her ice baths.
'After trying regular ice baths, before and after exercise, I was able to experience some of the benefits like reduced stress, increased energy, lower inflammation and better recovery. This is a recovery practice I’ll continue to incorporate regularly (but not daily),' she says.
'My approach to all health and wellness trends (and in response to the people who were sent concerned messages), is that I think there is value in learning from our own experiences and listening to our body’s responses to different stimuli as they’ll all be unique. If it inspires someone else to give it a try and see if it can work for them, I’m happy to be a human guinea pig.'
How to have ice baths as women
More important than your gender is your personal physiology.
'While women may experience cold differently than men due to physiology, gender alone shouldn’t dictate how long someone stays in an ice bath or how cold the water is,' says Emma. 'Always listen to the body, prioritise safety, and adapt based on individual tolerance, goal and intentions.'
Dr Stacy recommends the benefits come from immersing yourself in water at 0-15℃ up to the shoulders or neck for two bouts of 30 seconds with a two-minute break in between (for the lowest temperature) or up to six bouts of three minutes at the highest temperature.
More like this:
'I took an ice bath every day for 20 days — here's what I learned'
'Women's tiredness is underestimated while men's is overestimated, finds new study'
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