Ice Bath

“And again, the data on this is now pretty clear. Any idea? I mean, you would be the person that might know this, how that compares to Ice Baths, like as far as the dampening of the signal, because we know that's the negative thing that people always talk about with ice baths, right?”

“Do you know if it is it a similar percentage? Is it as negative, more negative? I don't think there's any studies on joint health post-repeated use of ice baths. We do know that it reduces the muscle building and strength building signal if it's used right away after a workout.”

“We just have the studies, though. I don't think we have studies on ice baths. So it'd be hard to speculate. No, I'm interesting about the muscle building side. So we, if because you're saying the NSAIDs also do that, so do ice baths. Which one's worse? Oh, I mean, I would bet that the NSAIDs are worse just because of the medicine that also could stress the kidneys, can also affect the gut lining.”

“You know, if I, I don't want to make more of like what I did in the book or what I'm trying to do in the podcast or public education, but like let's take the ice bath, for example. I've taken a lot of shit for the ice bath thing. You have too. We both know they don't like the cold. That's why they're talking about this.”

“That's why they're talking about this. But we know for certain, and I go through the data finally, putting yourself into a high adrenaline state where your body and brain are freaking out and doing that deliberately gets you better at dealing with high stress states, which in my mind is only a good thing. This should be basic training for children, you know, not young children, right?”

“and norepinephrine and to be able to trigger that with cold water safely, like cold shower, getting into a cold ice bath, it's safe as long as it's not so cold, as long as you're not hyperventilating beforehand on purpose. That carries over to your ability to keep your head straight when other things trigger adrenaline.”

“problem. I want to find real-time tools for mitigating stress. So I started hanging around with people from special operations who sit in ice baths and cold water. And they don't actually do ice baths, by the way, in the SEAL teams. They spend a lot of time in cold water during their training.”

“the way. But then also, there are a lot of people that throw shit at the wall and much of it doesn't stick. One of the most popular interventions that people are talking about, contrast therapy, sauna and ice baths. What does the evidence say around cold and heat exposure for longevity?”

“I try to do some of that myself as hot as I can bear. Ice baths, contrast, it makes sense scientifically, hasn't really been studied. But cold therapy, we do know it can activate brown fat, which is very good.”

“negative. So he makes an ice bath for me. This was way before it was cool. Wow. Throws me in there to get my fever down, walks out of the room and screams, oh my God, I don't want my son to die.”

“They should take ice baths. I can tell you more about this. Oh, ice baths. I think this helps. Seriously. Yeah, well, ice baths. Yeah, let's definitely talk about ice baths and ultra races because you're training for one. No, but I think what you said is exactly right and extremely important for humans and probably unique to humans as opposed”

“Which brings me to the ice bath. Should I briefly talk about the ice bath? Because this is relevant, actually. So, I started doing these a while back. One of my former colleagues, Justin Feinstein, who now runs a float clinic on Maui. I forget how it came about, but we were talking about floating ice baths.”

“Second week, it's also, you know, your breathing goes up, your heart rate goes up. But gradually, and kind of with some automaticity to it, now I go into the ice bath immediately. My heart rate goes down, my breathing goes down, I get super relaxed.”

“It generalizes for me. This is an experiment of one, but for me, it generalizes. So previously, prior to the ice bath, I'm driving around Pasadena. And I don't know, in the last year or two, this seems to have risen somehow.”

“Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So there was an immediate automatic down-regulation of my autonomic emotional response to a psychological stressor, to somebody honking at me, that was trained and generalized from the ice bath.”

“awe for the fact that we have so many days of life to live forward. It's very interesting, and it almost speaks to the ice bath again. Like you have this very compressed, stressful experience that gives you that gap, that gap between stimulus and response that seems very hard to access unless we subject ourselves to these kinds of perspectives.”

“I love it. My neuroscience colleagues are doing ice baths, training for 100-mile races, and doing the question is: is it helping my nature papers as a consequence of any of these things? That's a different metric.”

“You say more is better. And it's just a funny, funny joke because I treat a bunch of military guys, right? And these guys come in and they're like, I can do five minutes. I can do seven minutes. I can do 12 minutes. I can do these kids were up to 18 minutes in the ice bath. And I'm like, and we do 32 degrees, right?”

“This is. I am. And then we did ice bath and red light therapy and you know, beam that. So we did a whole novel combination where we have the key. We have literally the click, right? Here it is. It's right here.”

“But all these hormetic stressors put together, all that stress that you want to put on your body when you go to the gym, when you go to the ice bath, when you go to the red light, all the, all those stressors, man, all that stuff is actually good for you. So when you do that, you can make the mitochondria more efficient.”

“And that is the impetus of every single thing that I've done since then, right? The hyperbaric oxygen, the ice baths, the saunas, the neurofeedback therapy, the cognitive behavioral therapy, structural energetic therapy, all that stuff came from my traumatic brain injury because I needed to fix myself.”

“Do you recall the nanometer wavelengths you're using? No, okay, so using the red light therapy, uh, sauna, yep, uh, ice bath. Are you um going uh sauna, hype uh, sauna to ice bath? Sona, no, not doing the back and forth, but we just did the one, right?”

“Then drink water, then do your red light, then do ice bath, then do yeah, it's it's hard because I don't like to do the ice bath and the sauna before and after one another. I like to give that space, that's my personal opinion. I do the ice bath in the morning, I do sauna night before bed.”

“dry off, I allow myself to cool off in a shower. I don't do the ice bath, or maybe I'll do one 15 to 30 seconds to bring my temperature down a little bit. I sleep so much better. It's like a secret sleep hack.”

“Repeating as necessary. And I take those deep because look, everybody, when they do ice bath, they do the whole, ha, ha, ha, ha. But what's this? This is sympathetic nervous system. This is parasympathetic nervous system. So I want to relax.”

“Wow. Like ice baths, Wim Hof. Damn, you're like the OG of it. I've been into it for six years and it's changed my life. Me and my brothers were like always kind of, I don't want to say like on the, yeah, maybe on the forefront of like saunas, ice baths.”

“may be leading to inflammation. Biohacking techniques that reduce inflammation are things like cold exposure therapy. Remember, cold showers and ice baths are great. You don't need to invest in an expensive ice bath. You can simply take a cold shower at the end of your shower. 30 seconds”

“I think there's just value in having your body flooded with adrenaline somewhat against your will, but you're controlling some of it and learning. I think it's a great space to explore.”

“Okay. That's a reasonable theory. That's actually what the ice bath will do. That's what a morning workout will do. It turns out that's not what happens when, when people go into these flow states and you get this long tail of, of flow opportunities, because the tendency when people's stress threshold goes up too high is that they tend to engage in a lot of meaningless behaviors because they're”

“if they hate cardio. If you love the ice bath, your anterior mid-singulate cortex, which by the way, predicts successful dieting, predicts successful completion of any of other hard things, all of that relates to whether or not the thing that you're introducing is something that you do not want to do in the moment that you do it.”

“Figure it out. Which in your case is an ice bath. Well, I'm just teasing. 80. Yeah. Set the sauna to 105, which is the perfect temperature for a sauna. Easy. I mean, you could put one in the other. You could ice bath and sauna. How much research has been done on that, Andrew? Not enough. We could create the world's first ice bath sauna.”

“and therefore I'm going to heat up my core body temperature. So this is a little bit paradoxical, but it's a good way to, you know, it's very practical. People think, oh, if you get into cold water or an ice bath, your body temperature is going to drop.”

“I did ask. I'm doing something so advanced. You do the ice baths, right? You soak in them. Yep. So I'm doing something so extensive that I'm exercising myself into a new race.”

“you're at 48 hours. Okay. So like, I don't know. Cause people always ask like, what if I lift in the morning and ice at night? I don't know. It's probably better than lifting and immediately getting into your ice bath, but probably so is it four to six hours because of the, the, that's what that number comes from.”

“Right. And I, and Dr. Luke Van Loon, who was a guest on the podcast as well, had done some, he has done some research on that. In fact, showed that doing deliberate cold exposure, like a cold bath immediately after resistance training workout does blunt hypertrophy. I mean, so that's.”