When most people get up in the morning, it wouldn’t occur to them to put on a vest filled with ice packs and wear it around the house for an hour or so. But that’s exactly what I’m doing right now whilst typing this blog.
A Saturday afternoon pastime usually wouldn’t involve standing in a chamber in minimal clothing for 3 minutes while being chilled to -240°F using liquid nitrogen. And yet Cryotherapy places are popping up all over the place. I have yet to pluck up the courage to step into one of these chambers but it’s something I feel I need to work up to, so first things first!
The number of people who submerge themselves into ice cold baths, plunge pools and lakes without any kind of insulation are increasing every year.
Why are people doing these torturous things to themselves? Why am I, as someone who hates the cold (ok, so the title was a lie), even contemplating doing such torturous things to myself?
Well, anyone who knows me, knows I love a self experiment and am intrigued with body science and improving on my bodies systems, even if it means using some bizarre methods. Most of my experiments are centred around nutrition or training, so I guess to focus on another area that ‘could’ improve my health, longevity or athletic performance, appealed to me.
And, as it turns out, there are a whole host of benefits to immersing yourself in freezing temperatures on a regular basis. I do hope these ‘claims’ are true!
‘Known as cold thermogenesis, the practice of exposing your body to very low temperatures can cause significant changes to your biochemistry and body composition, and can lead to overall improvements to the quality of your health and potential for longevity.’
Cold thermogenesis can happen at a number of levels and it’s best to start small. I’m such a lightweight when it comes to being cold so my first taste of this was last summer and it wasn’t so bad. It was warm, it was sunny. But now, it’s November and today, it is sunny, but not so warm!
When you’re first getting into experimenting with cold thermogenesis, sleeping in a cold room can be enough to get you started. It’s useful to have a thermometer for the bedroom as around 65°F is what you should be aiming for. In the summer I always sleep on top of the duvet with the window open and have a fan pointing directly at me. But during the winter months, I just make sure the heating is turned off in the bedroom. I don’t like it to be too hot anyway. Supposedly, to experience a deeper sleep, it does help to have a cold shower just before bed. I shall reserve judgement on that one but am keen to find out how true it is.
So, what exactly does the November Challenge entail? What will I be doing to subject myself to colder temperatures and learn to become cold adapted in order to gain all of the health benefits?
Well, apart from wearing my ice vest each day, it’s basically going to be a 30 day COLD shower challenge which is exactly what you think it is: every single day for 30 days you take a cold shower. Nice and easy right? In reality, it’s not so easy, well it wasn’t for me the first time I did it back in August 2016 (it was ‘awful’ to start with but over time it became completely bearable and actually very refreshing) so I need to remember this.
Firstly, there are the overwhelmingly positive responses from the many people who have tried this before. These ‘courageous’ biohackers/self experimenters reported increased energy, mental clarity, alertness, motivation, and so much more. It does make a lot of sense really. Have you ever jumped in a freezing cold lake or pool and found it incredibly invigorating after the initial shock?
If you need more convincing, here’s the science…
Like exercise, short-term, intense cold exposure creates stress on our body. And again like exercise, our bodies adapt to this stress in different ways. These adaptations are linked to a wide range of health benefits and go far beyond just feeling warmer in the cold and increasing our ability to thermoregulate.
Unfortunately, it’s not about taking one cold shower on a Monday morning and hoping that’s it, cold conditioning must be, like exercise, practised regularly to create the adaptive responses and therefore health benefits we are hoping for. But “regularly” can be as little as a few minutes in a cold shower once a day.
Increase Your Brown Fat!
All fat is not created equal. All of us have a ratio of white fat to brown fat, with infants and lean people having a better ratio of brown. White fat is the stuff we immediately think of as fat. The fat which is visibly stored on our bodies usually in the stomach, hip and thigh regions. This is the type of fat that doesn’t metabolise easily.
Brown fat, on the other hand, metabolises very easily and provides us with heat energy at a moment’s notice. While it’s burning calories to produce heat, brown fat does us a couple of other favours too. It uses triglycerides as fuel, removing substances associated with metabolic syndrome and it eats up sugars, an advantage that is being studied by researchers as a possible cure for type 2 diabetes.
Cold also activates a gene that is also activated every time we exercise. That gene is UCP1, which works to transform white fat into beige fat, increasing it’s mitochondria and helping it on its way to becoming brown. In other words, both exercise and cold exposure (and even better, both) work to increase the brown fat in our bodies, and that brown fat is what helps to burn the white fat that we don’t want so much of.
Can cold conditioning replace exercise
There seem to be a lot of similarities between the physiological changes exercise is responsible for and also that of cold exposure. However, cold conditioning will never replace the plethora of benefits that exercise provides us with. But taking a cold shower for less than five minutes a day, seems a small price to pay for the impressive differences it could make to your health.
What are those benefits
PHYSICAL BENEFITS
-Strengthens Immune System.
-Improves Circulation and overall Cardiovascular Health.
-Increases blood levels of antioxidants.
-Increases metabolism and calorie burn by activating Brown Fat (BAT) primarily found in your sternum, neck, collar bones and upper back whose function is to generate heat by burning the white fat found on your stomach, bottom, hips and legs.
-Releases a hormone called adiponectin that breaks down white fat and shuttles glucose into muscles which can also lower blood sugar.
-Causes glucose to be burned rapidly as a fuel to assist in heating the body before the blood sugar can potentially be converted to fat via the liver.
-Better Insulin Sensitivity.
-Reduces Inflammation in Joints and Muscles.
-Greater Resistance to Cold and Pain.
-Speeds up Muscle recovery
-Increases Lymphatic Flow which removes metabolic waste products and environmental toxins out of the body faster.
-Improves thyroid and adrenal function.
-Anti Ageing as it induces cellular autophagy which cleans out all the junk within its cells which leads to longer and healthier cell life.
MENTAL BENEFITS
Physical benefits aside, the immediate effects I experienced with my very limited experience of cold exposure were that I actually learned to like being cold (remember though, it was summer the last time I did this). It made me feel so invigorated and actually rather than stepping out of the shower and shivering, I remember feeling strangely warm. I didn’t like hot showers anymore and really did feel more alert and focused.
Scientific studies and statistics are all well and good but they do struggle to quantify things like ‘feeling amazing’ or achieving a meditative like calm. But these are all things I did feel after a very short time. So, I guess that’s why I’m doing it again.
Other mental benefits cold exposure claims to have are:
-It can build strong willpower and mental strength. You can train your nervous system to be more resilient to stress since the cold shock is so intense, most of “real life” stressors pale in comparison. So, it makes you more capable of dealing with situations or obstacles that may get in your way.
-It can relieve depression.
-It can improve the quality of sleep.
I’m was long way off experiencing most of the physical changes but mentally, the effects were felt even after about a week.
The next step
Once I’ve adjusted to being in cool temperatures regularly, it will be time to step my game up and take on more advanced cold exposure techniques.
The goal is to get cold enough on a regular basis to switch on metabolic activity in your brown fat. This is a critical component in sparking off the benefits associated with cold therapy.
This is where you will see me taking long swims in the near-freezing lake, regular cryotherapy sessions and the direct application of ice to parts of my body in ice baths! I actually think it is highly unlikely I will ever get to this stage but ‘never say never’.
Anyone brave enough to take the challenge? Here’s what to do.
As soon as you wake, turn on your shower as cold as it gets, step in, and remain there for at least a minute. Ok, so on Day 1, I actually started off with a warm shower and gradually turned it down to cold….and it wasn’t first thing in the morning, it was after training when I was a little bit more warmed up and ready to face it.
After a few showers, increase that time to at least two minutes, eventually building up to 5.
Repeat for 30 days.
I’d love to hear about you experiences with cold exposure.
Contact me: bex@my360lifestyle.com