Celebrities Who Cold Plunge (2026): Who Actually Does It, in Their Own Words — and What the Evidence Really Shows

Hundreds of pages list celebrities who take ice baths. Almost none link to the celebrity saying it.

So we did that instead. Everyone below is here because we found their own words, in a source with a name and usually a date. Anyone traceable only to a listicle got cut, and we say at the bottom who and why. Then the part nobody writes properly: cold water has real evidence, real limits, one documented downside for anyone lifting weights, and a way of killing people described in the forensic literature.

One distinction first. Cold water immersion — an ice bath, a plunge tub, a stock tank in the garage — is what everyone below does. Cryotherapy is a dry nitrogen-cooled chamber: not water, separate evidence base. Several names on these lists are documented in a chamber, not a tub. And a cold shower is a third thing — no immersion, no drowning risk, and a separate trial behind it, which is why it has its own page.

The people, and what they actually said

Lady Gaga. From her verified account, 18 October 2019: a post-show sequence of an ice bath for five to ten minutes, a hot bath for twenty, then a compression suit packed with ice packs for another twenty.

Chris Hemsworth. He swam in roughly 36°F Arctic water without a wetsuit for the National Geographic series Limitless. To Inverse, November 2022: "once I put my head in and I'm swimming and going for it, it was one of the worst pains I've ever felt." To National Geographic that month: "It was physically painful beyond measure from anything I've ever felt."

Joe Rogan. Verified Instagram, 26 July 2021, on twenty minutes at 33°F: "I was shivering after this for a solid 30 minutes. I drove to work, it's 90 degrees out in Texas and I had the AC off and I was shivering the whole way to work."

Mark Wahlberg. On The Tonight Show, 12 December 2023: "Wherever I go, I do my cold plunge. If I go to a motel and my daughter's doing a horse show, we steal all the ice from the ice machines on every floor to fill up the tub."

Kristen Bell. Her own caption, January 2023, plunging in a 58°F pool: "Experimenting on myself to find the benefits of cold plunging!" She added that it can increase dopamine by 250 percent — her claim, not ours.

Laird Hamilton. He uses ice water and specifically rejects cryo. To The Inertia, May 2018: "Thermoregulation is the most energy-consuming process that you do. It's a muscle, so when we do heat and ice, we're training the muscle in thermoregulation, which makes us more efficient."

Klay Thompson. To Sports Illustrated, February 2024: "You get out and you just feel like you can accomplish anything." "You feel so present when you're out in the cold water. You forget about time."

Andrew Huberman. From his own single-author newsletter, so no guest's words get pinned on him: "The key is to aim for a temperature that evokes the thought, 'This is really cold (!), and I want to get out, BUT I can safely stay in.'"

And one who refuses. Bryan Johnson, who measures his own body more than almost anyone alive, wrote on his own site in November 2024: "People often ask if I cold plunge. The answer is that I don't and here's why:" — then argued the longevity evidence isn't there.

What the science actually says

The mood benefit is smaller and shorter than you have been told. The best current summary pooled 11 randomised trials covering 3,177 participants (Cain et al., PLoS One, 2025). Stress dropped significantly at 12 hours after immersion — not immediately, not at 1 hour, not at 24, not at 48. On mood, only one trial measured it at all, and found no significant difference against control. The authors wrote that the claimed benefits remain unsubstantiated. Six of the eleven studies were a single dunk, and only one included women.

The famous "cold showers for depression" paper is not a study. It is Shevchuk, Medical Hypotheses, 2008 — a hypothesis paper, in a journal then editorially selected rather than peer-reviewed. The author described his own testing as involving a statistically insignificant number of people who did not have enough symptoms to be diagnosed with depression.

If you lift weights, cold water right afterwards works against you. Roberts et al., The Journal of Physiology, 2015, ran two experiments. In the twelve-week study, 21 men trained twice a week; 11 did light cycling afterwards, 10 sat in 10°C water for 10 minutes. Quadriceps mass rose 309g in the cycling group against 103g in the cold group, and type II fibre cross-section rose 17.1% with cycling and not significantly with cold. The second experiment, 9 men with biopsies, showed why: p70S6K signalling rose 3.6-fold after cycling versus 2.2-fold after cold, and satellite cell numbers climbed with cycling but not cold. A later meta-analysis of 8 studies, roughly 116 participants, put the pooled effect at a modest SMD of −0.22, credible interval crossing zero (Piñero et al., European Journal of Sport Science, 2024). Small, from a small literature — but a good reason not to ice down straight after a hard lifting session.

In fairness, two things cold water does not hurt and one it helps. Endurance is unaffected: six weeks of sprint interval training with cold immersion afterwards produced the same gains in peak aerobic power, VO2max and 2km time-trial performance as control (Broatch et al., American Journal of Physiology, 2017; 19 men acutely, 16 completing six weeks). And for plain soreness there is a modest benefit — a Cochrane review of 17 trials, 366 participants found reduced soreness at 24 to 96 hours versus passive rest, though no difference against other active recovery, on low-quality studies (Bleakley et al., Cochrane Database, 2012).

The safety part, stated plainly

This is the section most pages leave out, and it is the one with a body count.

Cold water triggers the cold shock response, and it is not a matter of toughness. Hitting cold water produces an involuntary gasp of two to three litres, then hyperventilation you cannot talk yourself out of, plus a jump in heart rate and blood pressure. It peaks around 30 seconds and is strongest between roughly 5°C and 15°C — exactly the range people plunge in. It overrides conscious control of breathing, which is why the physiology literature calls cold shock a precursor to drowning (Datta & Tipton, Journal of Applied Physiology, 2006). Gasp underwater and the gasp fills with water.

The second hazard is worse, because it looks like a technique rather than a risk. Hyperventilating before going under — the pattern in the Wim Hof breathing method — blows off carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is what makes you feel the urge to breathe. Strip it out and you can stay under past the point where your brain runs out of oxygen, with no warning, and simply switch off. Forensic pathologists in Darwin reported three fatal drownings in young, healthy adult men over 14 months, all linked to underwater breath-holding, and named the Wim Hof hyperventilation method (Neblett & Tiemensma, Pathology, 2023 — a one-page conference abstract, not a full peer-reviewed paper, and we label it as such).

The most useful sentence here is Hof's own. His site says: "Never practice the Wim Hof Method (or any other forms of deep) breathing ahead of or during immersion in or over water, when piloting a vehicle, or in any other situation where loss of consciousness could cause harm to yourself or others." The man whose name is on the method says do not do the breathing near water. That is his warning, not ours, and it is routinely ignored by people who learned the method from a thirty-second clip.

We are not going to give you a protocol, a temperature or a duration. If you want to try this, ask your own doctor — particularly with any heart condition, high blood pressure, Raynaud's, or if you are pregnant — and have someone physically there with you. Never alone. Never with breath-holding. Never with the breathing exercises anywhere near the water.

The honest paragraph

Look at what actually made these people famous. Hemsworth's body is a full-time job with a team attached. Klay Thompson has an NBA training staff and no commute. Lady Gaga's ice bath happens after a stadium show, in a building with medical staff in it. None of that transfers, and none came from cold water.

Notice how thin the mechanism gets once you read the studies: one 12-hour stress signal out of eleven trials, a null result on mood, a modest soreness benefit against doing nothing, a real cost if you lift. And we picked these people because they won. Plenty get in cold water every week and quit because it did nothing. You never hear about those.

Who we cut, and why

Cristiano Ronaldo — a cryo chamber, not water, and no on-record quote from him at all. Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Aniston — the widely-repeated quotes are unreachable at any original source, and their documented practice is a cryo chamber. Kevin Hart — real footage, no verifiable quote about cold water. Kate Winslet — her cold-water reputation is Avatar production, and even those quotes are about breath-holding.

Two are attribution errors rather than thin sourcing. The line credited to Dax Shepard ("He's the one who got me into sauna and cold plunging") is Zach Braff on Armchair Expert; another misattributed cold-plunge line belongs to Will Arnett on SmartLess. And the ice-bath-and-anterior-midcingulate-cortex material credited to David Goggins everywhere is Andrew Huberman on his own show. A guest's sentence gets filed under the host's name, then copied forever.

Where HealthBrew fits

HealthBrew has no cold-water feature. What it has is the thing underneath every habit on this list: something that asks at the end of the day how the day went, and remembers.

Sixty seconds at night. After a few weeks it shows what you cannot see from inside a single day: which behaviors keep turning up before your good ones, and which you only believe are helping. If cold water is one of yours, you would find out. Your first 30 daily closes are on us, no credit card, and you see the exact price in the app before you ever pay.

Educational content, not medical advice, and not a protocol. Quotes are attributed to the named speaker and dated where a date exists. Cold water carries real risk: the cold shock response can cause drowning, and hyperventilation-style breathing before or during immersion has been linked to fatal shallow-water blackout in the forensic literature. Wim Hof's own materials say never to do the breathing in or over water. Talk to your doctor first, especially with any heart or blood-pressure condition, and never get into cold water alone.