Transcription
Are you ready to take the plunge and get in cold water? I'm going to give a couple of caveats, and here's the deal, too. If you have any form of cardiovascular disease or challenges, you got to talk with your physician first. And if you are under the care of a physician for a diagnosed disease, you do want to get your physician's approval as well. Um, however, I have had clients who do get their physician's approval and really, really love the benefits they get from full-body cold plunges. So let's start talking on how to do this, and I'm going to share with you some really key benefits as to what this can do to support your body.
So first and foremost, by definition, a cold plunge is anything—PL—plunging into water that is colder than your body temperature. So your body temper—body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. You decide to try a cold plunge at first that's 90 degrees Fahrenheit; that is a cold plunge. Even though subjectively 90-degree water is not cold to your body, your body is losing heat to the surrounding water and needing to maintain its body temperature, and so it's learning how to heat itself up in a very, very gentle way. So you can simply start there, you know, and and the best way to do that is basically fill up a bathtub with water that you know feels warm to you. And you can get a bath thermometer—right, you can get a little thermometer, a water thermometer, a pool thermometer—to test the water temperature if you're interested, and just make sure the water temperature is less than your body temperature. And then, with with it, stay in as long as you want.
Now, I will tell you, the more—the colder the water temperature, the shorter you're going to need to stay in it to get an effect. You see these people who are in a full ice bath up to here; they only need to stay in for 30 seconds, uh, to get the to get the full effect. If you're in a tub like that, you'll probably need to be in there for 20, 30, 40 minutes if it's 90, 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Um, but that's a great, great place still to start. Um, you can also—and I have had clients start there—I absolutely have another happy, uh, like sweet spot in terms of temperature to start is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, which um, which feels cool but not the type of cold that takes your breath away, which you can get to when you're down to 40, 45 degrees. Right, it can start to really almost feel like like a catchy in the chest. Um, and so start there, start wherever you feel comfortable, right? And then, you know, start to drop it down. Knif—find a very sweet spot for most people to be around 50 to 55 degrees—somewhere in there—um, and that feels like a good temperature that can really facilitate the removal of heat from their body and force their body to heat itself up, um, without needing to be like this really intense 30-second ice bath and not needing to do this 45-minute, um, you know, 70-degree or 80-degree plunge. So, um, these this type of plunge can usually be accomplished with what it needs to between in between two and 10 minutes of time.
Something I learned the hard way: your body temperature does not get its coldest while you're in the water; it actually gets colder when you remove yourself from the water and you step into the air. And so I learned the hard way by, you know, starting doing these 50-degree cold plunges, and, you know, I wanted to start with three minutes, and three minutes felt great, and so I said, "Let's go to 10." Well, 10 minutes felt great because at some point the body—you—feels really calm; it's parasympathetic; it can be very calming, and you don't feel the cold anymore, um, at least not the same way that you would maybe with like those of you who know windchill and cold air. It's very different when you're actually submerged in water, and your body gets that cold tolerance that it—you reach about the 75-second mark, and the body starts to really feel okay. Um, and so then I said, "Well, let's stay in for 15, 20 minutes." 20 minutes, I got out, and after about 10 minutes of being out, my lips were blue, my hands and feet were white; the BL—blood had removed themselves from there. I started shivering uncontrollably; I couldn't keep myself up if I tried, you know, it was—I was miserable, and so I went in and I took a hot shower, um, because I did it wrong; I overdid it. I didn't realize how much my—further my body temperature would drop when I got out of the plunge. So if you're new to plunging, less is more. If your body is in a stressed—stressed-out state at all, less is more, right? Um, so if you're—if—so meaning, right, like this cold water is a stressor, but it's a beneficial stressor; it falls under the category of a hortic stressor, like exercise, like sauna; it's a stressor that we ask the body then to adapt um, afterwards to so that we become more resilient, and in this case we become really more efficient at making heat. However, it's still a stressor, and so pay attention to it. I want you to find the minimum effective time or duration that you need to do a cold plunge in order to achieve a benefit, and like I said, in general, that's about 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit water for like three, maybe two to 10 minutes, and that's not every day; three days a week is great for that. And if you're trying to conceive, if you're a woman trying to conceive, do not do it during your two-week wait, um, in other words, after ovulation when there's the potential for implantation, because that can be too big of a stressor; it can really—it can actually temporarily increase your immune system, which we don't want it to attack um a newly implanted um uh growing—growing baby.
So that being said, here's a couple of just general guidelines when you plunge. If you can, you do want to plunge up to your um up to your neck if possible, because remember this is our brown adapost tissue; we want that skin to sense cold and to have to have heat being pulled from the skin. That way you'll uh teach those mitochondria to be better at pulling fat from storage and generating heat. If you want to actually make it uh, you know, play around with it, try this: try sitting very still at first, which is kind of what the body naturally wants to do anyways, and then move a little bit, and when you move you'll notice that the the water will feel a little bit cooler, and that's because the water directly next to your skin has pulled heat out of your body into the water very efficiently, and then you can actually kind of replenish the cold water and to allow that heat transfer to happen again. Again, that can really shorten the duration of the amount of time you need to stay in the water because that water—that that water is continually—that freshly cooled—that's pulling heat from your skin. So that's the name of the game, right? We're pulling heat from the body; mitochondria since our body temperature is cooling, they need to heat us up for us. So this is the the the benefit that we get from this cold plunge is: number one, it will activate the brown atopos tissue; absolutely, it will do that, meaning it'll make those mitochondria very, very efficient at burning or uh burning body fat—burning white adapost tissue—to generate heat. Number two, when mitochondria become very efficient with that, there is an improvement in in metabolism, so that can facilitate that utilization, so we can—mitochondria actually become better fat burners, and when mitochondria can burn fat they make more metabolic water, and remember that water is everything for ourselves; that's energy; it's um it's a receiver of information; there's so much important—it's charge; it's this negative charge; it's just voltage in our cells that we want to maintain, and so if that's really, really key. So we get the brown tissue activation, we get the moo—we get the metabolic improvement of our mitochondria becoming better fat burners, and then those mitochondria are better at making water for us, which is cellular hydration; it's energy; it um its health; its vitality for the cells. So th—those are three very key things we get from this cold plunge, and it also makes winter much more bearable because we can now make our own heat. But remember, you don't have to jump in to a 30, 35-degree Fahrenheit cold plunge full of ice and stay in there for five minutes; it's not necessary. If you love to do it, go for it. I—you know, there's a local Polar Bear Club here that's always doing that, right? That's fine; they love it. Wim Hoff and followers of Wim Hoff love it; great, that's fine. But if you're get—if you're new to cold plunges, don't feel like you have to do that to get a benefit; you can go gradual, and as you go gradually you're getting a benefit all along, but it doesn't have to be quite a shock to the system; doesn't have to be super intense. I'm also not a fan um of necessarily doing any sort of hypervent—ventilatory breathing prior to getting into the cold plunge because we want to be in a calm state when going in, so normal breathing, gentle breathing is a very key thing to do, um, and so just try to regulate your breathing in a calm manner when you're getting into the cold plunge.
Recap, right? Start with whatever temperature feels okay; less is more when you're starting out, so start with two minutes, start with three minutes, and see how your body feels; build from there. You're not going to be your coldest when you're in the water; you're going to be your coldest when you get out, so observe how your body temperature fluctuates and your need to heat up changes over the course of the 20 minutes or so after you're out of the plunge. If you ever reached the point that I did where I was shivering uncontrollably and had white hands, white feet, and really, really blue lips, take a hot shower, take a hot bath; don't force yourself to go through that heating up; there's no need; do it differently next time; stay in a little bit shorter, or stay in a lot shorter, frankly. Um, if I were to redo that experience, I know that two to three minutes would have been the perfect place for me to start; 20 minutes was insane. If you can plunge all the way up to your neck, do so so that you can facilitate the brown adapost tissue feeling the cold in this area. If you can't, don't fret, but if you're able to, maybe even take a towel, a cold washcloth, or a cold towel, dip it in the cold water and wrap it in this area to expose that to the cold and can—and just replenish that because that's going to heat up as the W—as the heat gets pulled from your body, or splash that water up here; that's great. And again, less is more in my clinical experience; less is more, so maybe three times a week is great. If you like to do more and it doesn't feel like a stressor to you, go for it. If all of a sudden your sleep gets worse, if all of a sudden your immune system is getting worse, if all of a sudden your um menstrual cycle length changes—it can be either shorten or lengthen—you're doing cold plunging too intensely, and you need to back off on either the the temperature, the duration, or the frequency per week that you're doing it. But like I said, you can find this happy sweet spot, and for most people it's around 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit, two to three times per week for a duration of around two to 10 minutes. So play around with it, see how it goes, and we'll talk next time.