Why did we make this app?
This app has been specially made for contrast showers enthusiasts who wanted more control over their routine. Yes, you can use a simple interval timer and program it to follow your routine but in order to help facilitate habit building we decided to build our custom timer as an app.
What does a basic routine look like?
You have three levers to play with when creating your own routine. These are: 1) the amount of cycles, 2) the length of each cycle and 3) the intensity (colder/hotter) of each cycle. Various combinations of these will create a basic contrast shower routine. From the research you can see that many papers call for a three to one (3 to 1) lenght ratio between hot (3) and cold (1). Others call for a minimum of three hot-cold cycles (hot-cold, hot-cold, hot-cold). And the last piece is to always finish with cold water. Given those guidelines, the biggest return on investment can be seen with the routine pictured above.
Warm wash, then 3 cold-hot cycles and lastly one cold ending
We begin with 5 minutes of warm water, use this time to wash your body as you would regularly. The water should be as warm as you can possibly handle without discomfort. After this we begin our contrast cycles, this is composed by three (30 second) periods of hot water followed by cold water. The cycle ends with a longer (75-90 second) cold cycle.
As you progress in your own personal contrast shower journey, you will find that you can withstand more cycles, longer periods and even colder temperatures. I have made it a personal goal to come up with the best way to create an improvement program like this for myself and others. If you are interested in the same, subscribe to our newsletter for tips on how to do this.
Modify the settings to your personal taste
- Warmup - Wash Body - Default: 300 seconds (5 mins): Modify this slider to the specific amount of time you would like your normal shower to be. This preceeds your contrast shower cycles. We recommend to keep this to less than 5 minutes to conserve water.
- Cold Cycle Length - Default: 30 seconds: Use this slider to adjust the lngth of your cold cycle. Our advice is to test out how long it takes your shower to go from hot to cold and add that amount of seconds to the cycle length. For example if you want a 30 second cycle but your shower takes 14 seconds to go from hot to cold; then make this value 44 seconds.
- Hot Cycle Length - Default: 30 seconds: Use this slider to adjust the lngth of your hot cycle. Our advice is to test out how long it takes your shower to go from cold to hot and add that amount of seconds to the cycle length. For example if you want a 30 second cycle but your shower takes 10 seconds to go from cold to hot; then make this value 40 seconds.
- Cold Water Ending Length - Default: 90 seconds: We recommend this value to be 3 times the length of your cold cycle.
- How Many Cycles? - Default: 3 cycles: We recommend you start with 3 cycles and work up to 5.