Contrast Hydrotherapy: An Effective Method to Cleanse the Body Or a Waste of Time?

One effective tool to help you detox your body is contrast hydrotherapy, also called contrast therapy. You can assist your body’s natural healing abilities when you help remove toxins, improve immunity, and boost your health. You can also help your body heal from minor injuries using this process. It helps strengthen the circulatory, nervous, musculoskeletal, endocrine, and immune systems.

What Is it?

Contrast hydrotherapy is the practice of exposing your body to alternating temperatures of hot and cold water. The easiest way to do this is at home in your shower; you can also do it using a sauna or hot tub and a pile of snow.

History

For hundreds of years, people have used contrast therapy for health. Hot sauna followed by a cold plunge or roll in the snow have been used by various societies.

Why Do It

When you alternate between hot and cold, you increase your waste removal, circulation, and metabolic systems. This helps remove toxins from your system: the hot water pushes water, oxygen, fresh blood, nutrients, and lymph throughout the body, while cold water pushes the wastes and stagnant blood.

What To Know

Decrease the intensity or discontinue the contrast shower if you experience dizziness, nausea, lightheadedness, or excessive chills. Several things can limit your tolerance and you should build up to doing two minutes at a time of cold water. Start out with 15 to 30 seconds and increase as tolerated.

Contra-Indications

There are some people who should not practice contrast hydrotherapy. People with the following conditions should not do contrast therapy:

• Asthma;
• Raynaud’s Syndrome;
• Heart disease: high blood cholesterol, hypertension, weak connective tissue, and intermittent clotting;
• Pregnancy;
• Vascular insufficiency;
• Cold-induced hemolysis or cold uticaria; and
• Diabetes.

Do It At Home

Shower as normal, then gradually turn down the temperature of the water until it is cool and stand there for between 15 seconds and one minute. Switch the water back to hot or very warm in order to warm your body for between three and five minutes. Repeat the cycle, ending on a cold cycle. Rub yourself briskly with a towel to help yourself warm up. Don’t be alarmed if your skin is very pink.

You can do cold therapy once a week, but the most benefits will come if you do them once a day in the morning.

Negatives

There are some critics of this practice, but since there are practically no adverse side effects, you really should give it a try to see for yourself how it works.

Conclusion

Contrast hydrotherapy involves the use of alternating hot and cold water to flush toxins out of your body via the process of vasodilation and vasoconstriction. This pushes healthy blood and lymph throughout your body while it pushes out toxins and toxic substances.

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