[SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to Power Athlete Radio, a podcast dedicated to empowering your performance every damn day.

[SPEAKER_00]: Join former NFL Pro and Power Athlete founder John Welborn as he dissects the greatest minds in strength, conditioning, and more.

[SPEAKER_00]: So whether your goal is to be the hammer, destroy mediocrity, or simply move the dirt, you've come to the right place.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now with the warm-up done, let the gains begin.

[SPEAKER_01]: Dr.

Sigurd, thank you so much for coming on Power Theory radio.

[SPEAKER_01]: I am excited to jump in on cold immersion and cold plunging.

[SPEAKER_01]: I got a whole bunch of questions.

[SPEAKER_01]: I want to know about frequency load duration.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to talk a little bit about erections and really just hit you with a bunch of questions that I showed over earlier.

[SPEAKER_01]: The big one that we get quite often is [SPEAKER_01]: coal plunging going to hurt my gains.

[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm in the gym and I'm banging weights and trying to put on as much muscles as possible, how is coal plunging going to affect that more importantly is again in the gate those gains and then how can I effectively use coal plunging to continue to drive my performance and get as jacked as possible?

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, this is a popular question.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not exactly the right question.

[SPEAKER_02]: You can use cold plunge to blunt hypertrophy.

[SPEAKER_02]: If that's what you want to do.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you've just done a big workout and you're worried about doms, the delayed onset muscle soreness, you can get right into the cold plunge.

[SPEAKER_02]: You can slow down that inflammation response and you can bring yourself back to performance ready faster.

[SPEAKER_02]: But only do that when you're in some sort of a multi-day tournament.

[SPEAKER_02]: And when you know you have to perform again.

[SPEAKER_02]: So the tennis players, this is good.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you're in the US open and you just played five sets in the heat, get into that ice bath.

[SPEAKER_02]: Because you're not there to build muscles.

[SPEAKER_02]: You want to get yourself back ready for your next set.

[SPEAKER_02]: the next day, golfing, same thing.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you're in one of these multi-day tournaments and you adjusted 18 holes, get yourself into the cold plunge and bring yourself back to performance ready.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it will blunt hypertrophy.

[SPEAKER_02]: Heroin's really good on this, and the science is consistent.

[SPEAKER_02]: He says, wait, if what you're going for is muscle gains, wait four hours after your workout to do your cold plunge, allow the inflammation to do its work.

[SPEAKER_02]: But I have a different take.

[SPEAKER_02]: pre-cool that exercise.

[SPEAKER_02]: Whether you're doing it for training or for performance, when you pre-cool your workout, you will notice a boost in your peak muscle power output.

[SPEAKER_02]: You will notice that you delayed fatigue.

[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to have more endurance as a result of cooling your muscles, doing some light exercise, and then doing your workout.

[SPEAKER_02]: and you will recover more quickly.

[SPEAKER_02]: So most people who are doing ice bath for recovery after they've gone to the gym are still doing it wrong.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not going to help you build muscle if you're using it for recovery.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you're using it for performance, that's great.

[SPEAKER_02]: But if what you worried about is training to build muscle, then pre-cool that work out instead of doing it afterwards.

[SPEAKER_01]: So one of the ones that comes up on a little research is the Blunting of I Perch fee with Suppressing Amptour Signaling and Satellite Cell Activation.

[SPEAKER_01]: How real is that?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I mean, you know, like in, I think people really, [SPEAKER_01]: kind of fuck up a little bit, especially with hypertrophy where they think about putting on muscle, like even if like the the sets are to failure and you're working in the perfect environment, you're only talking maybe a few grams, you know, like over the course of a year if somebody puts five or six pounds of muscle on it's something phenomenal and [SPEAKER_01]: you know, I think the problem that we're running into in this internet age and especially in social media is we have a lot of people taking a lot of performance and dancing drugs.

[SPEAKER_01]: So people are like, I magically put on £30 a muscle.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've lifted weights almost every single day of my life since I was 15 or 14 years old.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I mean, I'm coming up on like, [SPEAKER_01]: You know, what's that?

[SPEAKER_01]: 25, 30 years of lifting weights and the amount of muscle that I've put on has always been in very, very small amounts, but it's been consistent.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so if you're putting on, let's say, you know, a few grams of muscle a week, I mean, is it really enough, you know, you're talking about, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood at 10 to 15 minutes, a cold exposure spread out over five to seven days.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, is it really enough to blunt that.

[SPEAKER_02]: You and I have a mutual friend in Dr.

Kirk Parsley.

[SPEAKER_02]: He's familiar with the coal, he's a former Navy SEAL, now he's a physician, and he works inside the body.

[SPEAKER_02]: He'd probably be the right guy to ask about that.

[SPEAKER_02]: I work outside the body because I'm an engineer.

[SPEAKER_02]: My doctorate is a PhD, not an MD, and so I'm not the expert on M.

Torre's signal.

[SPEAKER_02]: And yet I think your instincts are really good here.

[SPEAKER_02]: almost all the studies about cold for recovery are short term.

[SPEAKER_02]: So the grab a bunch of football players will look at the Italian rugby team or something into the lab and they'll take half of them and they'll work them like this and then do ice bath after and then they'll take the other half and then they'll work them like this and they'll do just tap it water as a control.

[SPEAKER_02]: And then they'll say, well, who came back the next day better prepared or what did their physiology look like?

[SPEAKER_02]: These are short-term studies.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think in the short-term, they're pointing to something that is real.

[SPEAKER_02]: On the other hand, getting into the cold is wonderful for your metabolism.

[SPEAKER_02]: It stimulates vital biogenesis and not just in your round fat, but throughout your body.

[SPEAKER_02]: It improves the energy production of your system.

[SPEAKER_02]: So let's say you just did a big workout and you got into the cold, do you need to beat yourself up over like whatever my new fraction of your gains you just shaved off when you know you're doing something that's healthy for your metabolism and your body?

[SPEAKER_02]: No, I wouldn't worry about it.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think you're right that this is a fine tuning kind of a thing to consider.

[SPEAKER_02]: However, you can do too much of anything.

[SPEAKER_02]: You can do too much exercise.

[SPEAKER_02]: You can do too much cold.

[SPEAKER_02]: You can do too much fasting.

[SPEAKER_02]: The automatic stress curve is an upside down view.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't do enough, you suffer.

[SPEAKER_02]: When you do the right amount, you get a lot of benefits.

[SPEAKER_02]: And then when you do too much, you go back down.

[SPEAKER_02]: the mentality that you've described of a lot of people and I'm sure you saw them in college on the football team, I'm sure you saw them in training camp at the NFL is more has got to be better because they're driven, they're ambitious, they're willing to sacrifice, [SPEAKER_02]: and they might push themselves so far that whatever they do is gonna damage themselves instead of benefit.

[SPEAKER_02]: Cold is like that too.

[SPEAKER_02]: A little bit will go a long way toward your metabolism.

[SPEAKER_02]: And if what works for you is you do a big workout, you get yourself all overheated and you want to take your temperature down.

[SPEAKER_02]: Hoping that ice plunge for a minute or two, the worst thing that could happen is those two-a-day high school practices that you're on in August.

[SPEAKER_02]: We think of football as a fall sport, but of course the trials and the practices are happening in the late summer in Florida and in Texas where it's hot and it's humid.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's a real risk that the brain will overheat if you're in that condition, then get yourself in the ice bath and stop worrying about your gains.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Now back to the show.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let's get into a little bit of the idea of frequency load and duration.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, let's say you have an individual who's maybe metamorphically not that fair.

[SPEAKER_01]: A little bit metamorphically broken, the tapping a few issues, and they want to add cold plunging into their routine.

[SPEAKER_01]: What does that look like for an individual like that versus somebody who's [SPEAKER_01]: maybe been doing it for a few years.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's pretty metabolically fed and doesn't have any issues and then on the far spectrum, you know, somebody like Doc Parsley, who's just emotionally broken and dead inside.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like what is the load and duration and kind of frequency look like for those three different parts of the population?

[SPEAKER_02]: Parsley's not dead inside, but he does tell me.

[SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't shiver.

[SPEAKER_02]: Recall does emphasium in the least.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I think that guy's been so through so many other more activating experiences that now he's acclimated.

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what it takes to get a rise out of duck parsley or neck when you get it.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've only seen it once.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've only seen him get upset once.

[SPEAKER_02]: I wasn't anything you did, y'all.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, it was actually one of the guys that worked for me.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was not real kind and said some shitty shit he should of, and I was actually waiting for Dr.

[SPEAKER_01]: Beat his ass and exercise, extreme restraint, and then after the fact, I'm like, I can't believe he didn't beat that dude's ass.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Dr.

was like, well, he's one of your employees.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, dude, I have anybody talked to me like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: I would have fucking stomped his face.

[SPEAKER_01]: But, uh, honor, I'm pleased.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, former employee mind you, but I'm in the same boat.

[SPEAKER_01]: I have no shiver response.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what I will do is I'll get in for, you know, somewhere in like the 30s and get in for four or five minutes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I get out and then I just stand there and, you know, when the wind blows, especially when it's cold out, I kind of like wait on that shiver response.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I had a lady who was, you know, this big breath worker ice cold kind of person.

[SPEAKER_01]: like be like I don't believe you and so she came over and did it and she's like no I think you're metabolic or you're emotionally broken the fact you can't shiver so I always wanted to get into that and ask you [SPEAKER_02]: Most people are going to get into the cold and they'll have what's called a sympathetic nervous system response.

[SPEAKER_02]: So this is activation of their flight or flight reaction.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's a panic response.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it's coming through the nervous system.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not biochemical.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's first straight from the hypothalamus into their muscles and into the round fat saying, we're in danger and we got to make heat.

[SPEAKER_02]: But you can acclimate to that.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you've done enough cold, if you've had enough experiences, then your nervous system was like, me, we've done this before.

[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I've done a lot of cold, but I don't go 39.

[SPEAKER_02]: For me, that's boring.

[SPEAKER_02]: I gotta see the ice chunks.

[SPEAKER_02]: floating around in there for me to really get that knot in my stomach that says, I don't want to do this.

[SPEAKER_02]: This is why Joe Rogan goes at 33 degrees with the ice floating in the water.

[SPEAKER_02]: I do the exact same thing because I'm looking for that psychological benefit.

[SPEAKER_02]: I still want to ride that edge of doing something that scares me.

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if it's possible to scare Kirk, but for ordinary human beings, any temperature that gets that gas-free flex going is going to be the right temperature for you.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you're just starting out, you go cold enough to gasp and you go long enough to shiver.

[SPEAKER_02]: No matter what Google AI tells you about the optimum time and temperature, it's a bunch of nonsense.

[SPEAKER_02]: Everybody is at a different state of cold training, just like [SPEAKER_02]: everybody's at a different state of weight training.

[SPEAKER_02]: You can't like challenge yourself with the same weight on the bench press that you would recommend for someone like me.

[SPEAKER_02]: You'd say, hey, well, Professor Sieger, let's see how strong you are.

[SPEAKER_02]: Let's start you at a level where maybe you can do 10, 12 reps, but the last two are going to be really hard for you.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's the same thing in the cold.

[SPEAKER_02]: You want to challenge yourself at the right level that makes you gasp and you want to stay [SPEAKER_02]: that shivering urge that might be way the hell out there past where ordinary people who are less acclimated to the cold would feel the urge to shiver.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm interested so for those new people that come in what would you recommend like maybe one to three days a week and maybe six to nine minutes of total like frequency and somewhere at a temperature that they can handle which might be [SPEAKER_01]: 59 degrees or 60 degrees.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, obviously, somebody like you that's much more adapted to the point that you have your own company that makes these insane units have actually produced their own ice, but for like the average person who's trying to get into this.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then, like, what do you think that, like, you know, you talked about that upside down curve, like, what do you think that's sweet spot is for time and a week?

[SPEAKER_02]: It used to be that medical doctors thought there was no such thing as brown fat in an adult human being.

[SPEAKER_02]: Kids have a ton of it.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's the brown fat that has all the mitochondria in it.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's what processes the energy to produce heat.

[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas white fat stores the energy, the brown fat burns it up.

[SPEAKER_02]: So the medical doctors thought, well, adults don't have any of it.

[SPEAKER_02]: The only way an adult can generate heat is through muscle shivering, but that wasn't true.

[SPEAKER_02]: For those adults who still get cold exposure, they still maintain brown fat, but it's only about 5% of the American population.

[SPEAKER_02]: So now that we know there is brown fat in adults, there's this huge explosion of research into what's it doing in the body, metabolically, how does it work?

[SPEAKER_02]: How do you get more of it?

[SPEAKER_02]: And Susanna Soberg at the University of Copenhagen did a whole dissertation in brown fat.

[SPEAKER_02]: She found these Danish winter swimmers.

[SPEAKER_02]: So these were people who jump in the fjord.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's like four degrees Celsius in there and they swim around and then they go to her lab and she measures the brown fat using positron emission [SPEAKER_02]: She asked him, how long do you go in?

[SPEAKER_02]: You know how often are you there?

[SPEAKER_02]: And she computed that the average was 11 minutes a week.

[SPEAKER_02]: Some people did it twice a week, some people every day, but on average this group did 11 minutes a week and they all had brown fat.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's not the same as a minimum effective dose.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's more like a maintenance dose.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you're trying to read [SPEAKER_02]: burst your Type II diabetes.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you're trying to correct a thyroid disorder, get into that called every single day for two weeks, because it takes about two weeks to recruit new brown fat into the adult human body.

[SPEAKER_02]: When you have it, the brown fat will be in constant communication with your thyroid.

[SPEAKER_02]: Brown fat converts the inactive form of thyroid hormone into the active form.

[SPEAKER_02]: So it produces more of this active thyroid hormone in this way than the thyroid plan does.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you're working on a specific issue, get in every day.

[SPEAKER_02]: Then, after you have the brown fat, you can go to a maintenance dose of like two, three times a week.

[SPEAKER_02]: Now, if you don't have a thyroid disorder, if you're not type 2 diabetic or pre-diabetic, if you're not working on insulin resistance, that's sober, gruel of thumb, 11 minutes a week, break it up, however you want.

[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's proven to maintain brown fat.

[SPEAKER_02]: You might be able to get away with a little bit less, but I go every single morning.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you do it every single day and at 33 degrees it could be somewhere like you said like this morning you did 45 seconds sometimes you go a little bit longer.

[SPEAKER_01]: Is there, do you ever get to the point?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, talked about in Arizona when it's real hot like is there a benefit to maybe doing like a series of like you know morning and night twice a day and shorter duration kind of higher intensity colder water more so than you know how warmer water and sitting for longer periods of time.

[SPEAKER_02]: there is for me.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure that there is for everybody, but dang it, Phoenix is the hottest city in North America.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I visit on the ASU campus in Tempe, you know, sometimes I'm walking in between the classes and it's 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

[SPEAKER_02]: I have a Marasco on campus, I have one at home, and just to cool down and give my brain a break, I'll get in a couple of three times a day during the summer.

[SPEAKER_02]: However, mostly it's once a day, unless I'm doing a photo shoot and I can't get the takes right or something.

[SPEAKER_02]: Let's just some other reason.

[SPEAKER_02]: And one of those other reasons is stress.

[SPEAKER_02]: If I don't know, maybe my director at ASU is called me up to bitch me off or something, I put on Twitter because I got a big mouth.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's maybe I'm in trouble because somebody complained, I said something impolitically incorrect in class again.

[SPEAKER_02]: When I get that anxiety, the ice bath will take it away, and it doesn't take long.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's 15, 30 seconds, I'll be in there.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I'll start with the gas reflex, but then I'll calm myself down.

[SPEAKER_02]: I will structure my breathing.

[SPEAKER_02]: Box breathing, or just counting out my breaths, doesn't matter as long as I'm in control of it, and the anxiety melts into the water.

[SPEAKER_02]: I start thinking, [SPEAKER_02]: What is I even worried about?

[SPEAKER_02]: I get a call from my daughter saying she just backed into somebody's car in the parking lot and I'm all like, but I taught you how to drive you know better than this.

[SPEAKER_02]: Just get in the ice bath and I'll say, well, [SPEAKER_02]: You better leave a note, and it doesn't seem like it's any big deal anymore.

[SPEAKER_01]: Nice.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know we kind of touched on this a little bit with some kind of some of the circulation, but one of the positive side effects that I experience is with an amassive erection cold or post-cold plunging.

[SPEAKER_01]: I have talked to a few different people and it turns out that this is a little more rare than I thought it was but I've asked people I might do you get this and they say actually no, but when I talked to Doc Parsley He actually agreed and said hey, this is a physiological effect that I've experienced with a vascular rebound nervous system shift and nitrogen dioxide release But it was a great indicator of hormonal health and also the fact that you have good circulation down there [SPEAKER_01]: Is this something that's more common or is it just a weird side effect for reserve for people like me?

[SPEAKER_02]: I hear this from a lot of readers.

[SPEAKER_02]: Older readers, especially, maybe they're mitochondria or in decline, but I might have a 65-year-old guy text me, and it's embarrassing.

[SPEAKER_02]: Men don't talk anywhere near enough about this kind of stuff.

[SPEAKER_02]: But he might say, Professor, I'm waking up with erections that I didn't use to have anymore since I started the cold plunge.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I thought that part of my life was over.

[SPEAKER_02]: Is this normal?

[SPEAKER_02]: totally normal.

[SPEAKER_02]: You should tell other men about your experience because they are not as metabolically well as you are.

[SPEAKER_02]: You should probably also talk to your wife about it.

[SPEAKER_02]: You should get her into the ice bath with you because the ice bath will stimulate synthesis of sex hormones.

[SPEAKER_02]: All sex hormones originate in the mitochondria.

[SPEAKER_02]: It is in the mitochondria that cholesterol is converted into what's called pregnantalone.

[SPEAKER_02]: And all the other sex hormones like testosterone and estradiol are downstream of pregnantalone.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't have enough mitochondria or your mitochondrial membranes aren't functioning very well, then you're not going to have testosterone.

[SPEAKER_02]: That is the lust hormone in both men and in women.

[SPEAKER_02]: allows you to be aroused, which causes you to blast for sex with your loved one.

[SPEAKER_02]: However, physiologically, there are men who are aroused, but just can't maintain an erection.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's not a question of testosterone.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's a question of their endothelial cell function.

[SPEAKER_02]: These are the cells that line the blood vessels that supply blood to the penis.

[SPEAKER_02]: For a man to maintain an erection, he has to have good blood pressure in his penis.

[SPEAKER_02]: is to open up all the blood vessels that connect the heart into the penis.

[SPEAKER_02]: That means you need vaso dilation.

[SPEAKER_02]: Now the ice bath is vaso constriction.

[SPEAKER_02]: So you might think that's going in the wrong direction.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's where we get the sign fell jokes about shrinkage.

[SPEAKER_02]: But when you get into the ice bath and you stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis, you will promote mitochondrial function.

[SPEAKER_02]: in the endothelial cells.

[SPEAKER_02]: It is those mitochondria that produce nitric oxide.

[SPEAKER_02]: Nitric oxide is responsible for baso dilation.

[SPEAKER_02]: So the nitric oxide will relax the smooth muscle tissue allow those blood vessels to open up and now the blood can flow freely into the corpus [SPEAKER_02]: A reptile dysfunction is the first clinical marker of metabolic disorder.

[SPEAKER_02]: So those men who are beginning to experience ED need to talk with one another and their doctors about what's going wrong in their mitochondria.

[SPEAKER_02]: They might not have lost their interest in sex, but their mitochondria is losing the ability to produce the nitric oxide required [SPEAKER_02]: acquired for their sexual performance.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's no accident that the ice bath improved sex function and improved satisfaction.

[SPEAKER_02]: In women, the testosterone is still synthesized in mitochondria, but of course it's not in the testicles.

[SPEAKER_02]: They have ovaries instead.

[SPEAKER_02]: ovaries are responsible for only about 25% of a woman's total testosterone and it turns out that testosterone is the dominant sex hormone in women just like it is in men.

[SPEAKER_02]: We don't we don't know this because the units in the lab report [SPEAKER_02]: are reported differently.

[SPEAKER_02]: That is extra dial and testosterone have different units and you have to convert them before a woman is even going to realize she's got more testosterone in her body.

[SPEAKER_02]: A healthy woman has three or four times the testosterone in her body then she'll have extra dial.

[SPEAKER_02]: and it's the lust hormone in her too.

[SPEAKER_02]: But the testosterone is made principally in the skin, in the fat, and the adrenal glands of the woman.

[SPEAKER_02]: So you get in, and when you get out and you re-warm, you feel aroused.

[SPEAKER_02]: She's gonna feel aroused when she's in the ice bath.

[SPEAKER_02]: I have video of this, John.

[SPEAKER_02]: I have experienced this with a woman that I've used to date.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it's very confusing for the man when they get in with the woman.

[SPEAKER_02]: And you know what about a minute and a half or two minutes, she's starting to lean in and she's feeling very affectionate at a time when the man hasn't got the same surge of testosterone.

[SPEAKER_02]: He needs to do a little exercise and re-warm.

[SPEAKER_02]: But if you ever find yourself in this situation, take my advice and go with it.

[SPEAKER_02]: Make out a little bit.

[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to restore your circulation and then you'll be able to enjoy that your wife has done it with you.

[SPEAKER_01]: Nice.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, makes a claim for having a large ice deal similar like your meros.

[SPEAKER_01]: So like mine's, I think I have a, what is it?

[SPEAKER_01]: Ice barrel.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I have like a ice barrel that you sit in.

[SPEAKER_01]: The reason I went with that was because Texas is so egregious with heat and everything.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't have a covered area.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it was plastic and I figured if this thing melts, I'll be fine with it.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it's kind of a one person deal.

[SPEAKER_01]: So make a claim for actually having a bigger one.

[SPEAKER_01]: The other thing I wanted to jump into is what does the science look like on the front tier?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like there's so many significant gaps in the current research and cold exposure, like the long-term effects, hormonal response, and nervous system remodeling.

[SPEAKER_01]: But like what are we going to learn in the next decade either, validate or up in this, and like what do we know today that you see happening in the future?

[SPEAKER_02]: there is a lot of science.

[SPEAKER_02]: I wrote this book called Uncommon Cold.

[SPEAKER_02]: There are like 600 scientific citations about cold plunge therapy, it's benefits, and it's risk and protocols in that book.

[SPEAKER_02]: Most people have found out wanted to read about testosterone and sex hormones.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I followed it up, you can get this one on Amazon.

[SPEAKER_02]: This is Uncommon testosterone, and there's 250 citations in there too.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's some overlap between the two books, but we know a lot.

[SPEAKER_02]: But we don't know enough about yet is the essential role of brown fat in the body as a secretory organ.

[SPEAKER_02]: Brown fat is associated with increased levels of neuroprotective factors.

[SPEAKER_02]: So BDNF is one.

[SPEAKER_02]: FGF21 is another.

[SPEAKER_02]: And RMB, they know they all have these acronyms.

[SPEAKER_02]: cold is really good for the brain.

[SPEAKER_02]: But we don't know exactly how.

[SPEAKER_02]: We know that, for example, Alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes.

[SPEAKER_02]: We know that when you become insulin resistant and the cells in the brain become insulin resistant, you lose cognitive function, which can decline into dementia.

[SPEAKER_02]: we don't know yet enough about is how to heal traumatic brain injury using cold exposure to promote neurogenesis, to promote repair, to promote remilination of the nervous system.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that as people get more [SPEAKER_02]: into their cold research, especially at colder temperatures when they stop thinking about how to get, I don't know, an extra tenth of a second out of a sprinter and they start thinking about how to deal with people who have had multiple concussions or traumatic brain injury.

[SPEAKER_02]: The research is going to get more difficult to do and a lot more rewarding.

[SPEAKER_02]: So we sent a morosco over to the Lithuanian sports university where they've done some of the best work on cortisol and cold exposure.

[SPEAKER_02]: They were using what I would call cool temperatures.

[SPEAKER_02]: Now they can get their people in, you know, there they would say one degrees C with the ice floating around and see what happens to the nervous system and the brain while they're doing it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what do you think is happening on a neurological level?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I mean, there's probably an automatic response, or autonomic response of relaxation.

[SPEAKER_01]: But do you believe, and it's funny, as I was doing research for this podcast, I feel like there's science, and then there's a lot of, I don't know, [SPEAKER_01]: magic.

[SPEAKER_01]: I would be an easy way that I read.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the thing I appreciate about your news letter in your information is it's very science-based.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, hey, this is the physiology.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is research what we know.

[SPEAKER_01]: Whereas I feel like there's just completely other side of it where the one thing I can equate it to is magic.

[SPEAKER_01]: and people are talking about it's rewiring the brain and it's, you know, there's increasing mitochondrial density and it's doing all these things.

[SPEAKER_01]: But in reality, if you take a step back and I feel like whenever I look at anything, I always try to look at it from an evolutionary model, like through the evolutionary lens and something that's been, you know, discussed and we've gone back and forth on text is the advent of [SPEAKER_01]: bathing in warm waters really with only within like maybe the last 70 or 80 years.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean for the entirety of our human existence we've bathed in cold water and primarily running water.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean within a stream or a lake so you're talking about cold water and you know the advent of actually having you know on tap hot water is really just very very frequent.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean they were very new in a lot of ways and you know I know like we were talking about like when my dad [SPEAKER_01]: You know, where were two hits they bomb Pearl Harbor and he's a little kid and they moved to California.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was the first time they actually had a hot water heater And he was like man the novelty of turning on the faucet and hot water coming out was something they hadn't seen so for the majority of our human existence and for the entirety of it We've bathed in some form of cold water.

[SPEAKER_01]: Why is it now that people are so wrapped up in the physiology or is it something is just inherent within our DNA?

[SPEAKER_02]: I think that until recently we could take cold water exposure for granted, of course it happens.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, my grandparents, you know, growing up in Maine, hot running water, I remember when my dad brought a color TV home.

[SPEAKER_02]: I was a little kid.

[SPEAKER_02]: It was the early 70s.

[SPEAKER_02]: What a novel thing that was.

[SPEAKER_02]: I felt like we'd made it, you know?

[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I got any program I want to watch on my cell phone.

[SPEAKER_02]: Well, hot running water was like that to our grandparents.

[SPEAKER_02]: It was like that color TV, miracle of you twist the tap, and then the hot water comes out.

[SPEAKER_02]: The human experience with hot running water is very brief, whereas we have hundreds of thousands of sort of physiological experiences with cold water.

[SPEAKER_02]: Most people don't realize that the human physiology [SPEAKER_02]: is meant to get wet.

[SPEAKER_02]: That is, we are meant to live at the water's edge and to be in the water all the time.

[SPEAKER_02]: We have downward facing nostrils.

[SPEAKER_02]: This is one example.

[SPEAKER_02]: And why is that?

[SPEAKER_02]: So we can dive without the water going straight up our nose and into our brain.

[SPEAKER_02]: We have subcutaneous bath like the whales and the manatee and the seals.

[SPEAKER_02]: Chimps don't have that, but no bows don't have that.

[SPEAKER_02]: Human beings have that because that's an aquatic mammalian feature.

[SPEAKER_02]: and our babies are born with an instinct to swim.

[SPEAKER_02]: Because our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers, used to give birth in the water.

[SPEAKER_02]: That water was cold.

[SPEAKER_02]: The oldest human fossils found are in East Africa.

[SPEAKER_02]: And you might say, well, that's the equator.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that's where it's warm.

[SPEAKER_02]: But there are four modern glaciers in the mountains on East Africa.

[SPEAKER_02]: And you go back 70,000 years to an ice age that caused a bottleneck in the human population where humans were kind of leaking out and existent at the water's edge, fishing in it, foraging in it.

[SPEAKER_02]: That water was cold.

[SPEAKER_02]: We're built for cold water immersion.

[SPEAKER_02]: The heat is very dangerous for us, but the cold is very healthy.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's only in the last 100 years that we've gotten away from it.

[SPEAKER_02]: heated leather seats, and we have triple plane E glazed windows or whatever so we can live in, you know, climate-controlled environments.

[SPEAKER_02]: We're disconnected from the sun.

[SPEAKER_02]: We're disconnected from the forest, and we're disconnected from the cold water, and that's part of what's killing us.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think I'm going to mess it up, but it's the Bayou people that are from the Philippines, the or Malaysia Philippines, they call them the Sea Nomads that have evolved, we're like, you know, they have a massive spleen, they can stand or water for like 13 minutes, and they, I think it was like, they, when they measured their spleen, it was like 50% bigger, they like rupture their drums as kids.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, they live their entirety in, in the water.

[SPEAKER_01]: and the adaptations we're seeing in them are pretty amazing to, you know, not only humans are extremely valuable, but I feel like this adaptation is probably the adaptation we had that we have since devolved over time.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think you're on to something, what you're pointing to is an extreme example of human physiology, pushed past whatever our normal expectations could be.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it can happen fast, but they're not the only ones.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's also this Korean group of women, and I'm gosh, I'm forgetting the name.

[SPEAKER_02]: the resources in the cold water.

[SPEAKER_02]: That is the fish, the shellfish, the plants that live there are extremely valuable.

[SPEAKER_02]: They've helped make people what they are.

[SPEAKER_02]: Your brain is made of a fatty acid called DHA.

[SPEAKER_02]: Other fatty acids like AA or a rackinodonic acid if I'm getting it right, are essential to your brain development.

[SPEAKER_02]: And we would not have as human beings the most enormous brands if they weren't being fed by the fat that we get from the fish and the shellfish and the plants in the cold water.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so for tens of thousands of years, it's been worth it.

[SPEAKER_02]: for people to go find that lobster or go spear spear that fish or go foraging in the water because that's where the food resources for our brain were always found.

[SPEAKER_02]: Some of those people carry on that tradition today and they're an example of what the human body is capable of going.

[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, I believe my final question was going to be about stress and resilience.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know we talked a little bit about your daughter backing up and hitting a car and you're not knowing what to do, um, but, you know, I knew what I just wish I'd done it earlier.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the twin girls at her 14 and we've started doing some driving lessons and, uh, it's going to be interesting.

[SPEAKER_01]: Good job.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, well, I feel like I started driving when I was probably 11 or 12, pretty, you know, like you would start with like cleaning the cars and back them in and we'd take them around to the point where I think I was maybe.

[SPEAKER_02]: I started my son at 11 years old, I'm like, look, somebody's got to drag this infield, you know, hook up the infield rate and get in the car.

[SPEAKER_02]: He had to learn how to drive a snake.

[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Good.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, it is good.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so for the girls, you know, obviously there, you know, maybe there's a program we can put together with cold water immersion to help us build resilience to teach your daughters to drive, but you've written about cold immersion building resilience through the anterior mid was it's simulated cortex, my saying that right.

[SPEAKER_02]: Look, when Huberman ran that phrase out for his podcast with David Goggins, I had to practice it for like a half an hour before I could even record the interior mid-singulate cortex.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I didn't get the whole medical vocabulary that Doc Parsley has because I went to school for engineering.

[SPEAKER_02]: But here we may this really interesting point with David Goggins.

[SPEAKER_02]: He said, when you do something that you don't want to do, or you don't enjoy, but you're motivated for other reasons to do it, it will grow this part of your brain called the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

[SPEAKER_02]: And he gave an example in athletes, it's bigger, because they're accustomed to training past the point of discomfort.

[SPEAKER_02]: And then he talked about the example of the cold plunge.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you love the cold plunge, you rumin says, then your anterior mid-singlet cortex is going to grow at all.

[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe you get in a 49 degrees and you think, oh, this is great.

[SPEAKER_02]: I love this.

[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you got to get to a colder temperature.

[SPEAKER_02]: Because huberman claims that that anterior mid-singlet cortex is the seat of the will to live.

[SPEAKER_02]: He says, that's the part of the brain in which will power resides.

[SPEAKER_02]: It will push you to do those things that you must do.

[SPEAKER_02]: even though they're uncomfortable.

[SPEAKER_02]: Even though you don't like them.

[SPEAKER_02]: Even though it feels like it's going to kill you to do it.

[SPEAKER_02]: This is like in our muscles we have to take them to the gym and we have to work them out and then they're going to get sore and some people sort of like that feeling I guess I'm not one of them but I've never regretted a workout.

[SPEAKER_02]: I've never regretted an ice bath.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's only beforehand that I have this urge to procrastinate.

[SPEAKER_02]: So, what gets us over that urge?

[SPEAKER_02]: We must practice it.

[SPEAKER_02]: We must strengthen, will power through practice.

[SPEAKER_02]: So it becomes more automatic.

[SPEAKER_02]: Well, now, resilience is not what happened to you.

[SPEAKER_02]: Resilience is your capacity to adapt to what happens to you.

[SPEAKER_02]: We get this stress response, and there's two different stories that we can tell ourselves.

[SPEAKER_02]: One story is, ah, this stress is killing me.

[SPEAKER_02]: And the other story is, well, this is hard.

[SPEAKER_02]: And this is gonna require me to do this in this, and I'm gonna do these things and I'm gonna see if I can get through it.

[SPEAKER_02]: Kelly Clarkson, not Clarkson, Kelly McGonagall, Kelly McGonagall is a faculty member at Stanford.

[SPEAKER_02]: She wrote a book called The Upside of Stress, and she cited research that indicated people who tell themselves the story, that the stressful experience is difficult, and it's worth it, and they're going to get through it.

[SPEAKER_02]: They live longer.

[SPEAKER_02]: The people who tell themselves that the stress is killing them, [SPEAKER_02]: They're right.

[SPEAKER_02]: They die quicker because the story you tell yourself about your experience is more important than your experience.

[SPEAKER_02]: When you voluntarily get into the ice water and you're telling yourself the story, I don't like this and that's why I'm going to do it because I want to get better at the things that are uncomfortable for me.

[SPEAKER_02]: that's exactly what happens.

[SPEAKER_02]: You become more calm under pressure.

[SPEAKER_02]: You become more resilient to all the different things that can happen to you in your life.

[SPEAKER_02]: And you get to tell yourself the same story in any situation.

[SPEAKER_02]: Well, this is going to be difficult and I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to be better off for having done it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, if you enjoy cold plunging, does that make a case for lying to yourself and being like, oh, I hate this so much as [SPEAKER_02]: No, it makes a case for going cold, it makes a case for turning down the temperature on your ice bath to the point where you hate it again.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's this great video of Joe Rogan in his backyard in Austin, and you know, Austin gets like one week of winter every year or something.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm not you know, I'm in Austin, Texas and it's a gut forsaken place.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've said this over and over again.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is the weirdest weather I've ever been around.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's hot like we are in obviously the end of October last weekend or no.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, not last weekend the weekend before we had our power out the collective and we were John McVeak came with teaching us a shooting course and it was 94 degrees on the range.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it'll be in the high 90s mid 90s all the way to the end of October and then we'll get like about a week of fall and which we're actually getting now it's probably like six or 70 degrees and it's real pretty will be like this for about a week and then in about.

[SPEAKER_01]: two weeks while all of a sudden be at like 30 degrees.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is the weirdest place.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's hot or it's cold.

[SPEAKER_01]: And when it's hot, like I think a couple years ago, we were 70 days in a row over 104 at like, you know, 80, 90% humidity.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's just, it's a God forsaken place.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's why I know Davey Croft gets said, hey, if I own hell and I own Texas, I'd rent out Texas and live in hell.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know exactly what you mean.

[SPEAKER_01]: So.

[SPEAKER_02]: then you probably remember it was snowing in January of 2024 and like the governor and Texas was worried about rolling blackout some power failures and stuff like that.

[SPEAKER_02]: Joe sets up this phone and he goes into his backyard and he's standing in his underwear over his morose coat in the flurry while it's full of ice and he says there is no part of me that wants to do this right now.

[SPEAKER_02]: which is why I do it and he gets in.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you enjoy your ice bath, then make it colder.

[SPEAKER_02]: Make the air colder.

[SPEAKER_02]: Make the water colder.

[SPEAKER_02]: Get it to the point where it's taking you out of your comfort zone.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's something called stress and notculation.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it works like this.

[SPEAKER_02]: If someone's experiencing a fear of phobia of spiders, then you will titrate exposure to them, of spiders, until they extinguish their fear response.

[SPEAKER_02]: So they might start out, they're sitting in like, I don't know, psychiatrist office, and they're just looking at pictures of spiders in a magazine.

[SPEAKER_02]: And gradually, you up the exposure so that they can manage their response.

[SPEAKER_02]: until they're in like, Raiders of the Lost Ark and there's Transylist Kron all over them.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm only exaggerating a little bit.

[SPEAKER_02]: This stress and notculation can ignore your response to stress.

[SPEAKER_02]: The cold is like that.

[SPEAKER_02]: When you push yourself outside your comfort zone and you do that thing that makes you that you think is gonna be miserable, it translates into other aspects of your life, not [SPEAKER_02]: only growing your anterior mid-singulate cortex will the will power resides, but also that story in your head instead of spinning a catastrophic phobia about the future you're saying, you know what?

[SPEAKER_02]: I can get through this.

[SPEAKER_02]: I can break this down into steps.

[SPEAKER_02]: I can do it one step at a time.

[SPEAKER_02]: And the next thing you know, you're performing better on your final exam or you're performing better in your trial or you're performing better at the big meeting that you had of work because you've calmed yourself down rather than letting your anxieties take charge of your nervous system.

[SPEAKER_01]: through all your research and everything that you've done, like, what do you think the recommendation for people that, like, like we talked about, like, hey, I want to get into this, what do you think like the best way to start is?

[SPEAKER_01]: Is it in your bathtub, but just go getting some some ice bags, some just wondering, like, maybe going down to tractor supply and buying like a horse trough, [SPEAKER_01]: getting that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like I've seen a million different, you know, and then people kind of take up a next step and get a dedicated deal with the killer and then obviously, you know, you guys with the Taj Mahal of ice deal where it's actually a unit that's producing its own ice and able to keep it an amazing temperature, which when I got in docked parses, I have to say I get mine pretty cold and it does have kind of a continuous water, but there's a dramatic difference of getting in cold water, a post from getting in water that has sheets of ice in it.

[SPEAKER_02]: I agree.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_02]: Part of it is psychological, and part of it is thermodynamic, but I can tell you, I didn't start that way.

[SPEAKER_02]: I started with cold showers.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'd read a book that said, cold showers are going to toughen you up, and I'm like, okay, I want to be tough, you know, I'll take a cold shower.

[SPEAKER_02]: But I live in Phoenix, Arizona, John, you know, the tap water is only like 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter.

[SPEAKER_02]: And that was enough for me to be uncomfortable and get a gasp at that time.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I used to say, hey, you know, go cold shower, fill up your tub with tap water, and this is a good one.

[SPEAKER_02]: Just fill up your tub from your cold water faucet and get in there.

[SPEAKER_02]: You'll probably feel the gas pre-flex and this might give you a sense of what the experience is like.

[SPEAKER_02]: But it has been [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, seven, eight years since I started doing coal plunge therapy and I'm no longer an advocate for starting slow.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think most people would like to say, well, I'm going to go outside in the winter time and shorts in a t-shirt.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to go for a walk and this is healthy for them.

[SPEAKER_02]: But if you're working on something, if you're working on a thyroid disorder, you're working on insulin resistance type 2 diabetes, if you're trying to manage an autoimmune condition like multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia or Parkinson's for that matter, if you've got serious things, if you've got dementia or cognitive decline that you're trying to reverse, I don't want you to start slow.

[SPEAKER_02]: I want you to get a Moralsco.

[SPEAKER_02]: Not everybody can afford a Moralsco.

[SPEAKER_02]: Desert Plunge is a company in Tempe.

[SPEAKER_02]: Matt Kiper is a friend of mine.

[SPEAKER_02]: He makes a much more affordable, cold plunge option.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not the same.

[SPEAKER_02]: You can't put Epsom salt in.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not grounded, but it's only like 3,500 bucks.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's a good way to start, too.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think when you are ready to get serious, you gotta have a machine so that you can control your temperature.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you start with like going down to the Quiky Mart and buying 200 pounds of ice, you're going to quit.

[SPEAKER_02]: Because it's such a pain in the ass to buy all that ice, especially if you live in a hot city like me.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it feels like 15 minutes later, it's all melted because you're backyard.

[SPEAKER_02]: It was 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

[SPEAKER_02]: you won't do what's really difficult.

[SPEAKER_02]: But if you make it easy for yourself and you have one at home, you will get in there every day, a couple of minutes, scare yourself a little bit, you will build your insulin sensitivity.

[SPEAKER_02]: You will remodel the dangerous visceral fat into subcutaneous fat.

[SPEAKER_02]: You will boost your sex hormone levels testosterone, especially, you will change your body composition.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so, [SPEAKER_02]: I guess I don't want to discourage anybody from getting a little cold in their life, but if you're going to ask me the best way to get started, get yourself a reliable machine.

[SPEAKER_02]: Marasco is one, desert plunge is another.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, you brought a visceral fat.

[SPEAKER_01]: We had um, Dr.

Shana Mar on the podcast a couple of weeks ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, no, his uh, his information on visceral fat and the way he's attacking it and using, you know, MRIs and a bunch of like imaging within the abdomen, you know, his contention is that the visceral fat around the heart is the major driver for all systemic inflammation and a lot of the problems that we're having today.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the idea that the jiggly fat, like the subcutaneous fat is not nearly as damaging and causes the problems as visceral fat.

[SPEAKER_01]: Have you seen anything within your own research or just people that you've worked with where you've seen a reduction in visceral fat around the organs from frequent cold plunging?

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't have data on people.

[SPEAKER_02]: A Sean has these wonderful cross-sectional scans where he can show you people who are what he called skinny fat.

[SPEAKER_02]: That is, they look thin, they might have a narrow waist, but there's no muscle in there.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's just all fat and it's all inside their body, rather than right underneath their skin, which would be the subcutaneous.

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't have those kinds of scans from my readers.

[SPEAKER_02]: Instead, what we have are clinical trials and animal models.

[SPEAKER_02]: non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a good example of how dangerous bissful fat is.

[SPEAKER_02]: So this is fat that exists inside your liver.

[SPEAKER_02]: And when you get cold without losing weight, without even changing your overall body composition, controlling for that, you will re-model the fat.

[SPEAKER_02]: Bissoral fat will go down and subcutaneous fat will go up.

[SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that Sean doesn't emphasize enough is what caused the visceral fat?

[SPEAKER_02]: What are the conditions that led to the visceral fat?

[SPEAKER_02]: He's very good about showing you the association between visceral fat and adverse health outcomes like death.

[SPEAKER_02]: But how did you get in such a crappy condition and it is a metabolic disorder?

[SPEAKER_02]: That visceral fat?

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know exactly why the body is responding.

[SPEAKER_02]: Why is it depositing fat in and around your internal organs?

[SPEAKER_02]: What could it possibly be protecting itself against?

[SPEAKER_02]: And the answer is, your metabolism is all messed up.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it's causing your body to make these mal-adaptive responses to too many seed oils in your diet.

[SPEAKER_02]: Poor, light, hygiene.

[SPEAKER_02]: Too many carbs without a break, without any fasting, without any contosis.

[SPEAKER_02]: You're so metabolically messed up that your body has adapted in ways that are unhealthy.

[SPEAKER_02]: Sean and I had an exchange on Twitter, which really helped me with a certain section of the uncommon testosterone book called The Boner Bounce.

[SPEAKER_02]: Sean said one of the ways without getting a super sophisticated scan, but one of the ways that you can see whether you're metabolically healthy is if you have outward markers of your pulse, he pointed to two of them.

[SPEAKER_02]: One was in the crook of the elbow, you can sometimes see your heart beat because there is a, I'm trying to remember.

[SPEAKER_02]: an artery or a vein that will pulse with your heartbeat, and you can see it, and you're like, oh, if I can see my pulse, I must be healthy.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's inside the elbow, and Sean will explain it better than me.

[SPEAKER_02]: But the other one he said is the boner bounce.

[SPEAKER_02]: When you get an erection, if your erection is popping up and down with your heart rate, it is another indication that you have good cardiovascular health.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going back and forth and I'm like, oh, [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that explains a couple of things.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm about 22% body fat, John.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a sedentary obese college professor.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it is possible to have this distribution of subcutaneous fat, which is still metabolically healthy because [SPEAKER_02]: exercise and cold have a lot of overlapping metabolic benefits.

[SPEAKER_02]: Cold in this way is an exercise memetic.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's some things that exercise will do.

[SPEAKER_02]: Build cardiovascular endurance, for example, cold won't do it.

[SPEAKER_02]: But there's some things that cold does that exercise won't do.

[SPEAKER_02]: Recruit brown fat, take care of your brain and take care of your thyroid.

[SPEAKER_02]: So the ultimate is pre-cool your workout.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I mean, it's like, you know, when we had shown the podcast, we went through a bunch of different things like, you know, like a little bit of fasting, you know, sauna, cold exposure, you know, aerobic exercise, you know, lifting some weights, you know, eating a, you know, more what I like to say, like through that evolutionary lens, like we talked about, you know, something similar to, you know, one ingredient, something a little similar to the paleo diet, like I had, uh, [SPEAKER_01]: My good friend Rob Wolff on the podcast, who's also a good friend of Doc Parsley's, who's you know, credibly with a lot of the, you know, horsepower behind the Paleo diet, and I still eat that way 80 to 90% of my diet, and it's because one, it's the easiest way for me to eat and the way that I've eaten for years, but adding in these little kind of levers like the the sauna piece, you know, I mean, since it's here in Texas, it's kind of wild.

[SPEAKER_01]: I like the sauna for heat inoculation, you know, when we added the sauna, we started doing more sauna stuff.

[SPEAKER_01]: This summer wasn't nearly as bad as it's been in previous years, so I think there's benefits for that, but, you know, there are these kind of extremities where, you know, you're going up to 185 and then you're getting in the cold.

[SPEAKER_01]: Does this kind of lend claim that our bodies are designed to be extremely resilient and to test those boundaries of resiliency as a means to stay healthy?

[SPEAKER_01]: And that, you know, this idea of homeostasis and keeping everything nice and calm and stable and healthy and cool and easy is just a fast track to death.

[UNKNOWN]: Yep.

[SPEAKER_02]: One of the worst things that's happened to our understanding of human physiology is the analogy with the machine.

[SPEAKER_02]: So the Industrial Revolution comes along.

[SPEAKER_02]: And we start using mechanical explanations to try and teach human physiology.

[SPEAKER_02]: When I was a kid, there was the schoolhouse rock series.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's so catchy.

[SPEAKER_02]: You probably remember some of these songs.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, [SPEAKER_02]: conjunction, junction, what's your function?

[SPEAKER_02]: They were supposed to be educational for kids, and all of their information on health and human physiology was crap.

[SPEAKER_02]: They had this song trying to teach me that my nervous system is like a telegraph line.

[SPEAKER_02]: No, it's not, John.

[SPEAKER_02]: We are not machines.

[SPEAKER_02]: Machines are built to do the same thing every single time until they wear out.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not what helps human beings.

[SPEAKER_02]: Human beings need variety.

[SPEAKER_02]: They need dark and they need light.

[SPEAKER_02]: They need feasting and they need fasting.

[SPEAKER_02]: You are much better off trail running.

[SPEAKER_02]: over an uneven surface, then you are at the track, at school, going around in circles, or something like that, humans need variety.

[SPEAKER_02]: We need exercise, and we need sleep.

[SPEAKER_02]: We need hot, and we need cold.

[SPEAKER_02]: Because we're living creatures, we need the, it might feel extreme in today's modern age, but if you look at it through an ancestral lens, it's not extreme at all.

[SPEAKER_02]: What my grandparents used to consider hardship, [SPEAKER_02]: Therapy.

[SPEAKER_02]: He'd better believe my granddad was out splitting wood all fall so he could keep his house warm during the summer, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: Now there's Instagram videos of guy splitting wood saying, I do this because it's good for my testosterone and it is But my grandfather with laugh, you know when he got a boiler he's like thank goodness [SPEAKER_02]: I don't have to split wood anymore and all the sacrifices that he was making to make life better for me are magnificent.

[SPEAKER_02]: Now I got my heated leather seats in my SUV and I bring a red light into my bedroom to recreate what used to be available when I was outdoors in the sunshine.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's something screwy about it, John.

[SPEAKER_02]: we were meant for the extreme experiences of the environment that our human physiology is built for like our ancestors experienced it.

[SPEAKER_02]: Now we have this industrial life that is surrounded by technology, disconnects us as if being comfortable all the time, and having food all the time, having light all the time were convenient, but deadly.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I mean, you know, death through discomfort or I'm sorry, you know, comfort leads to, I guess, bad outcomes, but I think it was in what's his name, the guy that wrote the book, life span.

[SPEAKER_01]: he's been on Rogue in a bond.

[SPEAKER_01]: She's the English guy kind of a little dude talks about training his thighs a lot.

[SPEAKER_01]: But as I was reading through his book, one of the interesting pieces and I actually kind of globbed onto a little bit in that when he was discussing why these different kind of extremities work.

[SPEAKER_01]: He talked about, um, [SPEAKER_01]: a gene expression that when you put yourself into a situation where you're in these extremities in your in a situation where you're thinking like it's so cold I'm getting this like, you know, extremely nervous response where I'm going to die if I don't get out or I'm in the heat to the point where it's so hot I can't stand here another second that when you put yourself in these situations and it happens in training it happens in a lot of different environments you get a positive gene expression and at that point the genes are like, hey, we're in this together we're going to fight this, you know, and [SPEAKER_01]: I guess you could say this symbiotic relationship to be for survival, and if you don't do that, then the genes express in a negative way, where there's comfort, where obviously things are too easy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let's get rid of this guy because he's not the pinnacle, the peak, or the top of our society, because obviously he's not doing anything of value.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I thought about the...

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and you hear Cameron Haynes and you mentioned David Goggins and different guys where they talk about, you know, go out and do something hard each day.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I've made the joke new.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you don't have to carry a rock up a mountain.

[SPEAKER_02]: But like these guys are extreme because it generates attention on social media and it shows the ultimate capacity of the human body and they want you to believe in your own capacity.

[SPEAKER_02]: But shoot, would you just park further away from the game?

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, it's no, I get a thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: is it that easy like I've said this to on social media numerous times I feel like if the hardest thing you do every day is get into three minutes of cold water like we probably need to kind of readjust a little bit and I wonder if that's for me because cold water isn't necessarily a stressor.

[SPEAKER_01]: I feel super relaxed when I get in there I take a deep breath and like I don't feel that and maybe it's just I'm not going cold enough.

[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I got to get a Marossa Forge and get it at 32, 33 degrees and try to really push it.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like for a lot of people where, you know, and I've seen people for years post all this stuff on social media with like, you know, here I am in the coal plunge, you know, Joe Rogan over there, you know, if that's a hardest thing Joe Rogan does, which I don't think he is, because I know he just jits and he trains and he does other things.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like there's a certain badge of courage that people have attached to because we do not have hardship anymore.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think the author that you're reading on the lifespan book is on to something.

[SPEAKER_02]: What most people have been taught is that the DNA in their nucleus is like the chief executive of the cell and it's not like that at all.

[SPEAKER_02]: The DNA's job is to create [SPEAKER_02]: proteins that is they hold the information to create proteins, but how the hell do they know what proteins are supposed to create?

[SPEAKER_02]: There's something called the epigenome that coats the DNA and that's what turns a gene on or off.

[SPEAKER_02]: What controls the epigenome?

[SPEAKER_02]: That's the mitochondria.

[SPEAKER_02]: The mitochondria are the sensors that tell the DNA in your nucleus what to do.

[SPEAKER_02]: mitochondria have their own DNA.

[SPEAKER_02]: You inherit it exclusively from your mother.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not like sexual reproduction where you get this from your dad and that from your mom.

[SPEAKER_02]: It mitochondria exclusively from your mother and the mitochondria sense your light environment.

[SPEAKER_02]: and your metabolism, the food that you eat that goes through your gut, is transferred into the metabolites that enter your bloodstream.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's your gut microbiome that converts your food into your bloodstream, where your mitochondria burn it up.

[SPEAKER_02]: That is in respiration.

[SPEAKER_02]: They combine it with oxygen to generate energy.

[SPEAKER_02]: So your mitochondria know [SPEAKER_02]: what's in your bloodstream and your mitochondria are very sensitive to your light environment.

[SPEAKER_02]: It is your mitochondria that respond to that light environment by turning genes in your DNA on or off.

[SPEAKER_02]: Even if you can't change your genome, you can change the expression of your genome by altering your epigenome and it is your mitochondria that do that for you.

[SPEAKER_02]: When you get into your [SPEAKER_02]: the mitochondria are stimulated, mitochondogenesis occurs, and the mitochondria in constant communication with your genes will change your epigenome.

[SPEAKER_02]: That is turn on different genes that will make, for example, more heat shock protein, or more cold shock protein for your body, as that flows through your body, your brain responds.

[SPEAKER_02]: your cells, the muscles respond, your body can't help but respond to what the mitochondria are telling them to do.

[SPEAKER_02]: And this is one of the great misconceptions.

[SPEAKER_02]: We did the whole human genome project.

[SPEAKER_02]: And what does that done for us?

[SPEAKER_02]: Nothing has come out of the genome project because it's the mitochondria, the govern the state of the body and the rate of aging.

[SPEAKER_02]: Not the genes [SPEAKER_02]: I wonder if the lifespan author talks about that one?

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, whenever I think about mitochondria, I always go back to, as I think it was Dr.

Warburg and the Warburg effect from the 40s.

[SPEAKER_01]: You want to know about price with the idea that cancer comes from, you know, the mitochondria get weak.

[SPEAKER_01]: They can no longer produce ATP.

[SPEAKER_01]: So then for the cells to survive, they go to this ancient pathway of basically using fermentation to stay alive.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they ferment glutamine and sugar.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then, [SPEAKER_01]: those cells that use that fermentation process become cancer and that original warberg effect and the idea of grounding and sun exposure and exercise and eating well and not being obese was really his prescription and they were going to create these warberg centers and then they realized it probably could make money off of it and there are probably some holes within it because I think at the time we did not have the environmental [SPEAKER_01]: poisoning that's happening on this country, you know, out in Arizona, I don't know if you ever ran into a guy named Dr.

Tom Inklet on.

[SPEAKER_01]: Tom has a center called his place is called cousin to he's over in Scottsdale.

[SPEAKER_01]: He treats a lot of cancer patients and a lot of the cancers that he's dealing with and a lot of these people it comes from environmental things and he goes, you know, anytime you see anything where it says may cause cancer it's because it does cause cancer and he's like, you know, we whenever we talk about the rise of cancer he goes, you know, you can go back to, you know, metabolic dysfunction, I mean obviously obesity and a lot of these other things but he goes, we're also [SPEAKER_01]: at such a high load of, you know, environmental toxins that we've never had to the point where, you know, we get, you know, that big deal happened, I think was in Ohio and, you know, they decided to, you know, hey, we're just burn all this stuff and, and all that stuff goes up into the environment, you know, the clouds take it over and then it rains and now they're getting the exposure to these chemicals hundreds of miles away where they, they wouldn't have been before.

[SPEAKER_02]: So, as we, I think you're talking [SPEAKER_02]: Um, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, so it's a great example.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, so now we're getting into this, uh, you know, obviously it's not just mitochondrial dysfunction like it might have been 80, 100 years ago, but now with all the environmental load.

[SPEAKER_01]: So is there surprised?

[SPEAKER_01]: Is there like a detoxing effect?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, one one of the benefits for the sauna, uh, which I like is the fact that, you know, you sweat it through and then immediately when I get out of the sauna, I get in the coal plunge to, you know, wash off anything that comes off.

[SPEAKER_01]: But is there a detoxing effect similar to Sana?

[SPEAKER_01]: Is there like a detoxing effect for the coal plunge is the body releasing toxins in a new way?

[SPEAKER_02]: Nope, it's not the same, but don't think of it as detox.

[SPEAKER_02]: The DNA in your nucleus can be damaged and it can be repaired.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's something in the somatic mutation theory, which is this theory of cancer that it originates in the nucleus through defects in your DNA.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's a paradox that discredits that hypothesis and that paradox is the bowhead whale.

[SPEAKER_02]: The bowhead whale lives for like 200 years.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's the most massive mammalian creature, you know, right behind the blue whale, you have the bowhead and it's extremely long-laught.

[SPEAKER_02]: Why doesn't it get cancer?

[SPEAKER_02]: If cancer is an accumulation of defects in the nucleus of yourselves, then the bowhead whale should be riddled with cancer by the time it's 80 years old and it's not.

[SPEAKER_02]: So these researchers at University of Rochester get really curious about that and they discovered that a cold shock protein is responsible for repairing defects of DNA in the bowhead whale, which is you [SPEAKER_02]: probably don't know, spends most of its life in the Arctic Ocean, where it's really cold.

[SPEAKER_02]: Then they said, I wonder if that could be happening in human beings as well.

[SPEAKER_02]: Now, this research is like really early stages, but the mechanism that protects the DNA in the bowhead whale exists in human beings too.

[SPEAKER_02]: We have ways to repair those defects in the nucleus.

[SPEAKER_02]: And [SPEAKER_02]: Where does that come from?

[SPEAKER_02]: It comes from the proteins that can be stimulated in the sauna and in the cold plunge.

[SPEAKER_02]: So the mitochondria produce the energy responsible for all the processes inside the cell.

[SPEAKER_02]: they do something else that's probably more important and that is signal cell death.

[SPEAKER_02]: In a cancer cell, the mitochondria are dysfunctional, which is why it resorts to fermentation to produce its ATP.

[SPEAKER_02]: But you could say, why is the cancer cell even there?

[SPEAKER_02]: It's in this like deranged metabolic state that is nowhere near as efficient, although it can be faster.

[SPEAKER_02]: If the mitochondria were working, it would shut down the cell.

[SPEAKER_02]: It would signal what's called apoptosis.

[SPEAKER_02]: That is, kill the cell and recycle all the cell materials that could either be expunged from the body or used elsewhere.

[SPEAKER_02]: So don't think of it as detoxification.

[SPEAKER_02]: Think of this as, as the cold is mitochondrial therapy that will either repair the DNA in the cells that can be [SPEAKER_02]: fixed or signal the death of those aberrant cells so that they can be removed from the body.

[SPEAKER_02]: In a way, that's a detoxification, but it's not going to get the aluminum out of your bloodstream or something.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but if it's increasing the mitochondrial health, then there should be a downstream effect and then you put yourself into other situations.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, like you said, getting into a sauna, or just going outside and chopping wood in the Texas heat is probably one of the [SPEAKER_01]: you've like the sauna's bad at 185 degrees going outside in the in the heat of the day and cutting down trees and doing work is absolutely a thousand times worse and then you don't have to deal with.

[SPEAKER_02]: More men should be chopping wood.

[SPEAKER_02]: I've no doubt about that.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's rare in Phoenix to have the opportunity to [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, you guys have a lot of cacts.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of dirt.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, Doc, I think that's your time.

[SPEAKER_01]: I really appreciate you coming on, educating us on, you know, cold immersion.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a huge fan, and, uh, dude, just looking forward to, hopefully one day we get a chance to meet.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know, Doc parses out there and, and Scott Stale, so I'll be making a trip out there not too far.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, excited to do it.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's fantastic.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's wonderful to see you online, John.

[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for having me here next time.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm in Austin.

[SPEAKER_02]: I want to look you.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sounds good.

[SPEAKER_01]: Look forward to it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.

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