Question:
I like to take a cool shower after my workout. Am I lowering the
> effectiveness of the workout by cooling off my body, instead of
> letting it work to cool itself off?
Answer:
But this does *not* apply to the body, as we might intuitively think.
The body is a *regulated* system, like a room with a thermostat. And
the answer is, *while the body is still able to cool/regulate itself*,
all three are about the same, with maybe some minor secondary effects
that would be hard to predict. If you take a cold shower, you are mostly
trading the conductivity of water for vasodilation or evaporative sweat
as a cooling mechanism. In a sauna, the body increases sweating for
cooling [maybe a small edge here, as sweating does have some small
caloric value]. People who don't sweat easily can quite benefit from cold-weather
running to avoid heat stress and actually increase their metabolic
capacity to do work, ie, burn calories.
