What every woman should know about cold plunging Hear more from @Dr Stacy Sims Robbins Podcast. Episode out now! 🎧 “The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy.”

Can you talk about cold plunging? Sure. Should women be doing it? What are the mistakes that we're making? What's the difference between men and women and cold plunging? So inherently, women don't need as cold. Thank you. We don't? No. Why? When we're looking at stress response, because that's how I view all the environmental and exercise things, is what kind of stress it puts on the body. When a woman gets into ice cold or cold water and gets in there, it invokes such a severe, strong stress response, much stronger than a male's response, that her body goes into more of a shutdown phase where it invokes a sympathetic drive and it doesn't create the metabolic changes that we see with men. If you were to take a woman and put her in 15 or 16 degrees Celsius, which is around that 55 degree mark, she'll end up with the same responses that a man has because it's not as severe shock to a woman's body as it is for a man's. Why is that? Because we have more body fat. So we tend to vasodilate and vasoconstrict first for controlling our temperature. Women do better in the heat. Okay, talk to me about this. Okay. So when we look at sauna exposure, women can tolerate heat a lot more than men. A woman can sit in there, sit up high, 20 minutes or so, not sweating yet, absorbing heat, vasodilate. It's great. So we're heating ourselves. Our body's responding to it by what we call heat shock protein responses. So these little proteins that will uncouple and then recouple and be better for it. So it's creating a whole cellular change that then is like, okay, now we have better responses within the muscle. The muscle can use glucose a lot better, can use fat a lot better. We're also increasing blood flow to the brain. We're also improving our blood vessels. So they respond to constriction dilation a lot faster, which is important as we get older and start to hit perimenopause, we start having blood pressure problems. And it also allows us to hit higher temperatures on the outside. So like summer times and things without having an undue stress. When you're in the sauna sitting there, it takes time for the body to heat up because of our thermoregulatory differences between what men do when they get in and they start sweating profusely. And then they get dehydrated and they don't have time to adapt as well to the heat as women do because we vasodilate first and then we start sweating. So if you have access to a sauna, do you recommend that women sit in a sauna for the health benefit? Yeah, I do. If we are doing 10 to 15 minutes twice a week, bare minimum, you get health benefits. Better cardiovascular health, so better blood flow, better blood pressure. We have metabolic responses, so we have better blood glucose control, better fatty acid metabolism. So your body's like, I'm going to use more fat as a fuel. Like meaning you're going to burn more fat if you sit in a sauna? You will use the circulating fat as a fuel instead of storing it.