Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, has built what is probably the most followed cold exposure protocol in the world. Millions of people have heard the numbers: 11 minutes of cold per week, 57 minutes of heat, three rounds of each, end on cold. Specific, confident, and built on real research. But a structural gap separates what Huberman does personally from what the researcher he cites most actually recommends — and that gap changes how you should think about building your own routine.
Huberman has done more than almost anyone to bring deliberate cold and heat exposure into serious public conversation, and the underlying dose he recommends is well supported. His personal Tuesday session, though — a single two-hour block packing an entire week’s worth of exposure into one sitting — diverges from the distributed approach that Dr Susanna Søberg, a metabolism researcher and founder of the Søberg Institute, whose research underpins the protocol, explicitly recommends.
Here is the protocol, evaluated honestly, element by element.
What Huberman actually does
Huberman has described his personal routine across multiple podcast episodes and in his cold exposure newsletter. He has a disclosed sponsorship with cold plunge manufacturer Plunge, though his protocol recommendations predate the partnership and do not reference specific products. The session takes place on Tuesdays and follows a consistent structure:
Three rounds of cold water immersion alternated with three rounds of sauna, ending on cold.
Each cold round lasts roughly three to five minutes. Each sauna round lasts approximately twenty minutes. Water temperature sits between 1–5°C (34–41°F) — cold enough that he wants to get out but can safely stay in. Sauna temperature runs around 80–100°C (176–212°F) for a traditional Finnish-style sauna. All told, a session runs ninety minutes to two hours.
Weekly targets: at least 11 minutes of total cold exposure and at least 57 minutes of total heat exposure, accumulated across the session. He recommends ending on cold rather than heat. He spaces the session at least six hours from any strength training. And he describes the ideal temperature not by a fixed number but by feel: “uncomfortably cold but safe to stay in.”
Anyone who came for the protocol guide by goal now has it. More interesting is where those numbers come from, and whether this structure is the best way to hit them.
Where the numbers come from
Almost everything in the protocol traces back to a single study: Søberg et al. 2021, published in Cell Reports Medicine. Søberg studied a group of Danish winter swimmers who regularly alternated between cold water immersion and sauna use. Swimmers who practised both showed improved cold-induced thermogenesis — their bodies became more efficient at generating heat from body fat, a marker linked to metabolic health.
From those habits came the now-famous thresholds: 11 minutes of cold and 57 minutes of heat per week. They were not prescribed doses from a clinical trial. They were the observed exposure levels of the group that showed the strongest metabolic response. That makes them reasonable benchmarks, but they carry less certainty than the confidence with which they are usually cited. Doing eight or nine minutes across three sessions may produce similar benefits. We do not know, because no study has tested the threshold as a minimum effective dose.
But here is what matters most: those subjects did not do their cold and heat in a single session. They distributed it across two to three shorter exposures per week.
The concentration question
Huberman concentrates his entire weekly dose — all 11-plus minutes of cold, all 57-plus minutes of heat — into one Tuesday session. Efficient, structured, and suited to anyone who batches commitments into a single block.
But Søberg recommends something different. In her conversation on the Huberman Lab podcast, she explained that the goal is to keep the stimulus a stimulus — you do not want to build up the ability to stay in cold for extended periods, because that adaptation may blunt the very response you are chasing. She recommends spreading cold exposure across two to three sessions per week, keeping each one brief and physiologically provocative.
The hormetic logic is straightforward. Cold and heat exposure work as mild stressors, and the benefit comes from the body’s recovery response. Distribute the stress across multiple days and you trigger that response multiple times. Concentrate it into one long block and you may trigger one large recovery response instead of several smaller ones. Whether those two approaches produce equivalent cumulative benefit is genuinely unknown — no study has tested this directly. But — and this matters — the study Huberman built his protocol on observed distributed exposure, and the researcher behind that study actively recommends distribution.
To be fair, Huberman’s general advice to his audience is to spread cold exposure across two to four sessions per week. His concentrated Tuesday is his personal routine, shaped by his schedule and preferences. But because it is the version he describes most vividly, it is the version people copy — and the distinction between “what Huberman recommends” and “what Huberman does” has collapsed in the public understanding.
Element by element: what aligns and what diverges
11 minutes of cold per week. Clearly aligns with the evidence. Søberg’s subjects averaged roughly this amount, and it serves as a reasonable weekly target. The caveat — that this is observational, not a clinically tested boundary — applies equally to every number in the protocol and does not need restating for each one.
57 minutes of heat per week. Also observational, but supported by Finnish cardiovascular research — most notably a 2015 cohort study by Laukkanen et al. tracking over 2,000 men across 20 years — showing that regular sauna use at sufficient temperatures and durations produces significant health outcomes. The specific number is less precise than it appears; the principle (regular, sustained heat exposure matters) is solid.
End on cold. This is clearly the strongest element in the protocol. Ending on cold means the body must generate its own heat to return to baseline, which activates brown fat thermogenesis. Ending on heat bypasses that process. Søberg’s reasoning here is clear and her data supports it.
Temperature by feel rather than by number. Sensible guidance. Individual cold tolerance varies enormously based on acclimation, body composition, and water agitation. “Uncomfortably cold but safe” is more useful than a fixed degree for most people.
Three rounds of alternating cold and heat. A personal structure, not an evidence-based one. No research suggests three rounds is superior to two or four. It fits the time budget for hitting the weekly thresholds in a single session and provides a manageable rhythm.
Counting walls. Huberman describes counting the internal “walls” of resistance during cold immersion — moments where your body urges you to get out. He uses this as a mental framework, aiming to push through several walls per session. Counting walls is a useful coping strategy for the psychological challenge of cold exposure. It is not based on research, and it does not need to be. Recognising it as a mental tool rather than a physiological protocol element helps the reader adopt or discard it freely.
This is the clearest divergence. Concentrated exposure is not evidence-free, but it is less well supported for the specific metabolic outcomes Søberg measured. The research behind the protocol supports distribution.
The training timing question
Huberman recommends spacing cold immersion at least four to six hours from strength training. This guidance is built on a 2015 study by Dr Llion Roberts and colleagues at the University of Queensland, which found that cold water immersion applied immediately after resistance exercise attenuated muscle mass and strength gains over twelve weeks.
Roberts’s finding is significant and the study well designed. But Roberts tested immediate post-exercise immersion, not delayed. That specific four-to-six-hour gap is Huberman’s extrapolation, based on the logic that acute inflammatory signalling peaks and subsides within a few hours. It is a reasonable inference, but no study has tested it at that interval. A 2024 meta-analysis confirmed the broader pattern — cold water immersion may produce a small attenuation of hypertrophy — without clarifying the timing question.
For readers who train for strength or muscle growth, the simplest approach is to keep cold exposure on separate days from heavy lifting, or at least several hours away. The four-to-six-hour guideline is reasonable; just know it sits closer to informed best guess than established fact. For endurance athletes, the concern is far less relevant — cold immersion after endurance work does not carry the same trade-off.
The dopamine claim, briefly
Huberman frequently cites a 2000 study by Šrámek et al. reporting a 250% increase in dopamine and a 530% increase in norepinephrine following cold water immersion. These numbers have become the headline neurochemical case for cold exposure.
Real findings, but the study used one-hour immersion at 14°C — conditions that bear little resemblance to a three-to-five-minute plunge at 3°C. Shorter, colder exposure likely produces a catecholamine response — cold activates the sympathetic nervous system regardless of duration — but the specific percentages do not transfer directly. Citing them as though they describe what happens in a typical cold plunge overstates the evidence. As a general neurochemical effect, the catecholamine response is well supported. What remains unknown is the exact magnitude for the exposures most people actually do.
How to adapt the protocol to your actual life
Huberman designed the protocol around his equipment (a cold plunge and a traditional Finnish sauna), his schedule (a dedicated Tuesday block), and his goals (cognitive performance, general health, the experience itself). Most people do not have that exact setup. Here is how to work with what you have.
If you have an infrared sauna instead of a Finnish sauna. Infrared saunas operate at lower air temperatures — typically 45–65°C versus 80–100°C for traditional saunas. The cardiovascular stimulus is milder, so you may need longer sessions to approach comparable thermal load. Extending sauna rounds to twenty-five or thirty minutes is a reasonable adjustment. The end-on-cold principle still applies.
If you cannot commit two hours on a single day. The evidence actually favours your constraint. Three shorter sessions of ten to fifteen minutes each — a brief cold plunge followed by a sauna round, or just three to four minutes of cold on its own — spread across the week will accumulate the same weekly dose with better alignment to Søberg’s recommendation. Usage patterns from cold plunge tracking apps indicate that most regular users accumulate eight to fifteen minutes of cold per week across multiple sessions, hitting the threshold without concentrating it into a single day.
If you are a beginner. Start with cold only. Two to three sessions per week, sixty to ninety seconds each, at whatever temperature feels challenging but manageable. Build toward three to four minutes per session over several weeks. Add heat when you have established the cold habit. The protocol’s full structure is a destination, not a starting point.
If your cold plunge does not go below 10°C. You will need slightly longer immersion times for a comparable thermal challenge. Five to six minutes at 10°C can approximate the stimulus of three minutes at 3°C, though the experiences feel quite different. Adjust duration upward and judge by feel: if you are comfortable, it is not cold enough or long enough.
If your primary goal is hypertrophy. Keep cold exposure on non-training days, or at least six or more hours from lifting. For many recreational lifters, the mood, sleep, and subjective recovery benefits are worth a potential small trade-off in muscle growth. For competitive bodybuilders in a gaining phase, it may be worth periodising cold exposure away from intensive training blocks.
If you want the simplest evidence-aligned version. Three days a week. Each session: three to four minutes of cold, fifteen to twenty minutes of heat (if available), ending on cold. Total weekly cold: nine to twelve minutes. Total weekly heat: forty-five to sixty minutes. This clearly hits the Søberg thresholds, distributes the stimulus, and takes under thirty minutes per session. Arguably, this version is more faithful to the research than the protocol that made the research famous.
The protocol is a starting point
What Huberman recommends — 11 minutes of cold, 57 minutes of heat per week, end on cold — is well grounded. His temperature guidance is sensible. His training timing advice is reasonable. But the concentrated Tuesday is a scheduling choice, not a finding from the research it is based on. The researcher whose data forms the foundation of the entire protocol recommends distributing exposure across two to three sessions, and her reasoning — rooted in hormesis and sustained metabolic signalling — is at least as compelling as the efficiency argument for batching.
Those numbers are the anchor. Distribution is the variable. Søberg’s real insight was never about a magic number of minutes. It was that brief, repeated cold is a stimulus the body keeps responding to — as long as you do not let it become routine. Your best version of this protocol is not the one you copy from someone else’s podcast. It is the one you will actually do, consistently, for months, because it fits your recovery routine. Stop copying. Start thinking.
