Is Cold Water Good After Exercise?

While performing high-intensity exercises, you must keep yourself well hydrated. With increased physical activity, your core body temperature increases. As a protective mechanism, you start sweating.

Sweating may seem unpleasant or undesired, but it helps cool you down when it evaporates off your skin. However, excess sweating causes dehydration, which leads to various unwanted complications. Therefore, you must rehydrate yourself by consuming water. If not, your body will dehydrate, resulting in a variety of physical consequences.

• Cold water not only reduces your core body temperature but also helps lower your heart rate which improves your exercise performance and recovery.
• As body temperature increases, you feel fatigued, and your performance reduces. 
• Studies report that if you drink cold water while exercising, you are less likely to get dehydrated and will be able to exercise for a longer period without feeling exhausted.

However, it is not required that your water should be cold; you can even drink water that is of room temperature while performing exercises. It is not the temperature of the fluid but the consistency of intake of fluids that plays a big role in the rehydration of the body.

Dehydration can cause painful muscle cramps, which is another consequence of high-intensity exercises. If you drink adequate water, especially with added electrolytes, it will protect you from muscle cramps.

Water is crucial for regulating various bodily activities. You need proper fluid intake to accomplish these activities while exercising:

• Regulating your body temperature
• Supporting muscular movements
• Maintaining blood volume

Dehydration leads to the following:

• Fatigue
• Muscle cramps
• Heatstroke
• Headaches
• Dizziness
• Breathing difficulty
• Impaired muscle activity

Confusion, muscle weakness, and loss of consciousness are symptoms of severe dehydration that require immediate medical attention.

With exercise, your muscles get inflamed and swell, and you may feel pain, especially if you are a beginner. A cold shower helps relieve muscle pain, swelling, and discomfort and helps reduce the inflammation caused by heat. Scientists believe that a cold shower is more helpful in treating muscle micro-tears caused by exercise than a hot shower.

Cold water baths after exercises help in recovery.

There is a new concept called “recovery shower,” which means taking a shower with alternative temperatures of cold and hot water following exercise. Some studies report that this type of shower has shown better results in cooling down the body rather than just cold water baths.