Full Transcript: Cold Plunge Science, Without the Noise

This transcript is provided for reference and study. Timestamps link directly to the source video.

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that we are live we're almost there friends happy Sunday all right so we're going to talk all about cold plunge therapy we have my friend Tom Seager with us here he's the author of uncommon cold and the CEO of morosa Forge yeah that's right an amazing I think by far the best ice bath out on the market I mean I've had this tool since 2021 it not only it's the only coal plunge out there my friends that makes ice and it has an ozonator that filters water and keeps your water nice and clean but Tom today let's really dive into well first of all we want to address some life questions when folks come on and so forth give folks just a few minutes to get on um there's a lot of controversy I think people there's a lot of misconceptions about cold therapy even though uh cold immersion I mean I would love to hear your perspective on the alma Pearl divers outside of Japan we can talk a little bit more about that later but as a tool to uh improve immune health and decrease inflammation and both of us have found independent anecdotal benefits with regards to improving testosterone and actually there's really good evidence now in the public in the peer-reviewed academic literature to suggest that uh cold immersions and Ice baths and cold therapy can improve testosterone levels so before we dive into it Tom I just want to acknowledge our live viewers grateful that you're here live on a Sunday my friends I would love to know where you're from and anything related to cold immersions cold plunge therapy ice bath therapy cold showers any questions whatsoever there's a lot of controversy people think oh my gosh women shouldn't do this because it's gonna harm their hormones and what if you have rods and all these different conditions whatever cold emergent therapy question you have we would love to hear from you live so uh we have Rob from Toronto in the house we have swamp Hawk who is always here which is fantastic so um maybe let's start out with the hormone conversation how did you get how did you discover that um taking regular ice baths in the Rosco Forge could improve your testosterone levels last time we talked was I think maybe a year ago it

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talked was I think maybe a year ago it was last summer and a lot has happened in a year but back then it was really just me and this one study from 1991 for me it was a total accident I was really working on my prostate it was inflamed I had a elevated PSA and I thought I'm not going to go through the allopathic medicine route and they're just going to lead to a biopsy next thing you know somebody's going to want to take my prostate out so I said I'm going to try this with ice baths first so I'm getting all my male Health Labs and sure enough I brought my PSA down from 7 to let than two I was really happy about that my testosterone went through the roof like 1180 nanog per deck ler that was flagged on my lab report as high and when you think at the time I was you know a 53-year - old college professor was extraordinary well since I solved my PSA problem in my head I'm like now I can go to the urologist now I'm going to get like a big pat on the back but I didn't he's about the same age as me and he looked at me and he's like here's this overweight college professor there's no way he's got 1180 he's got be using a cream or a shot or something he wanted one more test and that was luteinizing hormone so I didn't know what it was at he sent me back to the lab got the lutenizing hormone sure enough came back elevated 8. 9 so the urologist knows that this is just my exen exactly right now we've never talked since like he had zero curiosity about this that's so weird but in the last year a lot of people have really pushed back you know that ice basss and cold plunge they have taken off and some of the people in the social media influencing Health space have been so critical of ice bath particularly for testosterone because they know that if you use ice baths in the traditional way let's say you do a workout you use ice baths because you want to reduce inflammation or delay it onset muscle soreness it's going to bring your testosterone down and so they'll go on Instagram they'll say ice baths don't don't help your testosterone it actually suppresses your testosterone and the thing is they're right if you do the ice bath after your exercise the key

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the ice bath after your exercise the key here is to preol the workout with the ice bath this is what raises luteinizing hormone this is what raises testosterone well and since you and I talked a bunch of people had written to me and they said I saw your article I listened to what Joe Rogan said he does and now they're sending me lab reports and they're saying my testosterone has gone way up to unheard of levels so I've got these case studies of people before after that we're accumulating it is time for a new comprehensive clinical trial that shows whether this is a reliable repeatable phenomena in otherwise normal human beings wow amazing my friend so I think the really important point to underscore there is pre-exercise cold has the ability to improve testosterone and I think this is really we have some great questions coming in and so friends really appreciate you all being here thanks for the great questions we have uh Nick is in the house it looks like that message is no longer here we have Rob has a great question want to get to uh we have Roberto uh lesie and others so any questions regarding cold punch therapy please uh type them in the comment section below um but I I have a few questions that I want to get into regarding using cold as a tool pre-workout to improve hormone levels but since we are live we want to address uh some questions first let's start with Rob's question is it okay to plunge after weight training I hear it can reduce your gains and so this is really important so I would love Tom for you to just tackle this one there is one case in which your cold plunge after weight training makes sense and that is if you're trying if you're in a competition maybe it's a multi-day competition you want to bring yourself back to Performance level so you can do it again the next day The cold plunge can reduce some of the inflammation it can improve your Mobility can bring you back to competitive but that's weight competition not weight training and I'm going to this is an oversimplification but allow me on a live no no it's not

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but allow me on a live no no it's not okay to do cold plunge after weight training most of the time you will suppress your testosterone whatever you're trying to do for the weight training gain TR strength build muscle you're going to be counteracting that goal if you do the cold plunge after but here's what you can do instead do the cold plunge before you will speed your recovery and there's some good data on this we've got an article at Morosco Forge if you want the benefits that you would ordinarily get from cold plunge after do it before you will still get much of that speedy recovery benefit love that and I think a natural segue or question that I have from that Tom would be how long would you want to stay in the coal plunge pre-workout uh would it be 90 seconds up to 3 minutes like is it variable based upon your where you at where your tolerance is the longer you stay in the more heat will be extracted from your body the possibility of lowering your core body temperature increases the longer you stay in the cold plunge now if you have a gap between your plunge and your workout maybe it's 30 minutes cuz you got to drive to the gym or something staying in a little bit longer will retain that feeling of cold that feeling of shivering so that by the time you get to the gym you're still going to have that that cold energy but what I do is I get out of my Morosco I'm on the balcony I pick up my steel mace I pick up the kettle bells I do the push-ups the pull-ups I only do two to three minutes because I get right out of this is 33 ° water and then I get straight to the exercise that seems to be working really really well for me so if you're trying to manage a gap then go a little longer extract a little more heat you will retain that feeling of being cold for your workout when you start I want to drill into the mechanisms I have a few questions there but of course want to address our live questions as well so I'll hold that thought that I have there um thought as food this is the YouTube handle says proper temperature for the health benefits let's tackle that one the any temperature is a good temperature for metabolic benefits if you feel the gas reflex then you know

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you feel the gas reflex then you know you've activated the sympathetic nervous system You' probably activated your brown fat if you have any you know you're getting some benefit but the psychological benefits they only really kick in at those temperatures that scare you so this is heart rate variability there are studies that have looked at cryotherapy and cold water and heart rate variability is your uh heart's capacity its ability to adapt to different uh stresses needs that your body has the higher your heart rate variability to typically the better your psychological resilience it's the heart rate variability effect that you get at the really cold temperatures that either I say frighten you or make you uncomfortable that that you really don't want to do so the proper temperature if you're starting out 50s people are getting benefits but as you become cold acclimated 50 is going to be boring yeah no I agree I mean you get acclimated surprisingly quickly takes about 10 days yeah and then most most people I mean at first getting into to either a freezing ocean lake river stream or a Morosco Forge it's really intimidating the first couple times but then once you get acclimated to it it's no big deal I mean it's really impressive and you take a breath you go in you say I've done this before right and then your skin gets numb and that's when all the magic starts to happen I mean I have a story that we can share later we did a contrast session yesterday there is a question here about the sauna uh but going from hot to cold we both independently we had about four people with us experienced this euphoria and I want to get into maybe what your thoughts are after having 24 hours to process that Tom but I do have another question here um so we tackled that thud is fought I would like to go down to Hazel Brum because Hazel says female here I love how I feel after plunging but it makes me extra sleepy during the day any thoughts she's not the only one uh a lot of people report improvements in their sleep Hazel might be going you can tell let us know Hazel how long and at what temperature you might be overdoing it a little bit if it's

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overdoing it a little bit if it's knocking out your energy too soon I Plunge in the morning first thing right at dawn and I sleep great but what's really interesting about hazel is all of the rumors or the hearsay about women we didn't know a lot about women and cold plunge there's one study and it wasn't really focused on testosterone but this was young female undergraduates comparing men and women the women put one hand in a bowl of of ice water and they got an immediate boost in salivary testosterone much greater than the men it looks like the women don't need to exercise after the cold and there's a reason for it in women testosterone is produced in the ovaries but it's also produced in the skin in the adrenal glands and in the fat cells there's nothing better to stimulate your skin cells adrenal glands and fat cells than an ice bath so the proportion of testosterone that a woman produces from these secondary sources is much greater than in a man a woman can get an instantaneous Boost from the skin the fat and the adrenal glands two women have written to me one of them she had a hysterctomy she had her ovaries removed and she said she was on a male testosterone replacement cream and this is all medically supervised just to because now she's surgically menopausal to keep her tea levels up they were at 14 nanog per decaler and it's not abysmal but she was saying I'm really interested in this ice bath thing she did that for like a couple of months she didn't exercise afterwards at least she wasn't like religious about it she had her labs done again and she sent them to me 160 she more than 10 xed her testosterone without any ovaries in her body and of course her clinician is saying let's get you off the testosterone replacement therapy and she's like no I'm not doing that right she's said now she's off it she wants to retest she wants to see what she's got if she's only doing the ice baths wow but she's not the only one

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ice baths wow but she's not the only one there's a younger woman in her 30s entirely healthy and she was at 1. 1 and I'm trying to remember the units because she's in the United Kingdom they were Moler instead of uh nanograms she went from uh 0. 6 Before ice bath to 1. 1 after she saw a similar not 10x but she wasn't coming from the same low base so there's now more case studies and a little bit of evidence on the hormonal particularly testosterone benefits for women and it doesn't seem like it even requires exercise interesting that's fasting so there was a question here that came in are are you saying that a hand plunge is enough what a great question it's cold stimulation the Sakamoto study from 1991 the Archie study uh that was salivary testosterone in women they were using the cold pressure test so Sakamoto in Japan it was everything from the elbow down on the non-dominant hand this is to activate the nervous system but it's not a lot of heat extraction so there's something happening here which is not entirely metabolic there testosterone is both a physiological and a psychological phenomena yeah just cold stimulation was enough to get a measurable response wow and so there is a individual here uh who's commenting tsg saying where's the proof show me the proof that getting cold can improve testosterone levels uh and so admittedly yeah we are talking about some anecdotal stories myself Tom uh some customers and so forth that have sent some uh you know feedback in but also you mentioned uh the Japanese scientists who have looked at this so I think you know there is there's speculation on on every everything out there and I think it's good to be naturally skeptical um but do you want to briefly talk about some of those studies tsg here's the problem science can't prove anything science can disprove but I'm a positivist so my PhD is comes with a little bit of the philosophy of science we formulate a hypothesis because we see evidence we

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hypothesis because we see evidence we say well we're really curious about this we set up a study and just because my labs jumped through and just because I've got these five six people with documented case studies that says wow look at this 10x this 3x boost in testosterone that doesn't prove that it's going to work for everybody the proof for you is in your own labs and in your own experience because nothing matters more than your n equals one self experiment I'm not interested in trying to force science to Pro prove things it can only indicate things that's beautiful beautiful point there um we have vinman 918 says I'm about to do a cold Plunge in a few minutes what's your opinion on the optimal duration and his his plunge gets uh it's about 40 degrees so great question vinman uh I don't know how much experience you have uh when you're starting out it's different than when you're already acclimated think about the analogy to weight training I couldn't tell you hey you're going to start weight training this is the optimal number of reps and this is the optimal weight because it depends on how well Tred you already are if you're just starting out and probably vinman's been at this for a while but there might be some people who are just starting out you go cold enough to gasp so you get in the water you feel like you you're going to catch your breath you go long enough to shiver but after you've been at this for a while if you're doing it every day for two weeks you're not likely to shiver anymore unless you're dropping the temperature maybe you started at 50 and you're working your way down to 35 if you're not challenging yourself at a colder temperature and you can really only go down to 32 33 yeah then you're not likely to feel the shiver and you need a different rule of thumb for me it's 2 to four minutes unless I'm shooting a video in which case it might be 18 minutes cuz I need three takes and I'm not very good at speaking extemporaneously in the cold yeah 18 minutes would be a lot especially inos go for that's a long time yeah that's a long warm-up period yeah but I like that idea about two to four minutes yep that's a good good point uh Nick rapis has a great question here Thomas what are your thoughts about Americans only

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are your thoughts about Americans only doing sauna I'm sorry doing sauna only without cold therapy yeah well full disclosure I talked to Nick this morning about it so he's tuning in and he's asking the really difficult questions Sona is taking off and you've got some of the leading voices in the US saying I'm a big believer in Sona I've heard you of course you can keep going where that's sure where uh Michael say look all you have to do is spend 20 minutes in the SAA a couple times a week and there's some truth to that but there is not an epidemiological study coming out of Finland that would support that because Sona it means hot and cold in Finland it just does it doesn't mean just the hot box it means both it's that they take the cold for granted in Finland they have the snow they have the lakes and so there's always cold available they don't need a morasco I live in Phoenix Arizona I don't need a Sona I just drive around in my car with the heat on if I want to get hot in Phoenix but I do need an ice bath the Sona research the when people are citing the Sona statistics they are leaving out the fact that all of the best research and the epidemiological the longitudinal studies are thermal contrast therapy so Nick's given me this question so that I can say if you're doing Sona without cold you can not rely upon the findings that have been uh popularized via social media to apply to you you probably still enjoying it you're probably still getting some benefits but don't think that that study is what you're really doing wow I you know what this is actually mind-blowing for me because I've never um put language to it in that way or thought about it because you know you do look at Yari laman's research and it's pretty impressive a 60% reduction in the OR reduced risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer's uh sudden cardiac death all these longitudinal studies we bring up a great point in Finland in the Nordic countries and and part of Russia and so forth uh Eastern Europe there is cold baked into the sauna practice always wow yeah I've never thought of it that way that is and so you couldn't do a study in Finland of

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so you couldn't do a study in Finland of people who just Sona but don't do cold you wouldn't be able to find the subjects and we don't know how much of that 60% reduction for example is due to getting hot and how much of that is contributed by the cold exposure that they're also doing wow this is brilliant I mean it's sort of like the inverse of the healthy user bias that gets um baked into nutritional epidemiological studies where people say well see it's meat or uh processed red meat in general that is linked with cardiovascular disease and often times people are not eating red meat in isolation they're having red meat IE a hot dog and the hot dog bun probably some french fries in a soda so these nutritional epidemiological studies say see red meat is going to clog your arteries and is linked with sudden cardiac death and all increase all cause mortality and what Tom is saying here and it makes a lot of sense is when we read the epidemiological studies uh highlighting the health benefits linked with sauna therapy in the countries in which they're being studied sauna is not being used used in isolation they're also utilizing the cold wow that's really impressive uh friends I just want to check in how are we doing if you're enjoying the content please hit that like button we really enjoy your live questions a lot of great questions are coming in thank you Nick for that one um mball says rather than cold plunge how about cold exposure this is a good question how about cold exposure like walking in cold weather with no warm clothes I love it your neighbors are going to think that you're a nut uh but you know go out in the winter if you happen to live live in one of these colder States this doesn't apply to Phoenix but I did my PhD at Clarkson University in Northern New York that's north of Lake plet we would come out of the gym playing racketball or something - 30 Fahrenheit and we weren't bothered at all t-shirt sweaty and we could do that for say 10 or 15 minutes long enough to get from the gym back to our dorm because of all this warmth that we had I love being out in the cold weather I call it underdressing and it is a great way to activate some round fat to get your metabolism going however the

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get your metabolism going however the water will extract heat so much more effectively that you've got to be in cold air sometimes 10 times as much 10 times as long just not as efficient yeah you either got to get the air way cold uh that would be like a cryochamber negative 150 Fahrenheit or you have to be out there for a longer time so if you're going to take a walk and you've got 45 minutes put it to good use underdress right however uh 4 minutes in the ice bath is fits into my schedule way more efficient I love that but again if you don't have access to a cold immersion or you're trying to save up for one this is another way to go about it I like that uh aspect of underdressing Idaho uh AR minan says cardiac risk for those over 60 great question this is a really good question if you go to Wikipedia Wikipedia is going to make you think that an ice bath is going to kill you there is um a theory and this is coming from Mike Tipton in the United Kingdom at the University of Portsmith Mike Tipton is extraordinarily concerned with drowning this is his career how to prevent drowning deaths some of those drowning deaths happen in cold water so he speculated that in the cold perhaps it's a heart arhythmia that is caused by conflict between the gasp reflex and the dive reflex the gasp reflex is when any mammal will experience it you get into the cold water and you need to catch your breath if you're trying to catch your breath and you wind up sucking in a lot of water it increases the risk of drowning but about 30 seconds after the gasp reflex the dive reflex will kick in the dive reflex is your parasympathetic nervous system it reduces the rate of oxygen consumption it's preparing your body to I don't know dive down and get lobsters or muscles or whatever we needed to do whatever our ancestors needed to do Tipton's theory is that the gasp reflex and the dive reflex if they're experienced together could create autonom I conflict that would

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create autonom I conflict that would cause heart arhythmia and perhaps the people who drowned in the cold water were experiencing this heart anomaly and that's the real cause of death now I haven't found a case anywhere of this being true and it's been an extraordinary distraction from the real contraindications to ice bath hypertension is the most important one and there are a couple of documented reports of people with high blood pressure who go into the cold water swimming or they go into the ice path the baso constriction in their limbs increases the blood pressure in their core and then they can experience an acute hypertensive event both of the cases that I've heard about were resolved under medical supervision but that's a real contraindication and much rather the Wikipedia rewrote their article and said hey if you have high blood pressure take it easy on the cold what we have not seen is this hard arhythmia heart attack phenomena now I'm not suggesting if you've got a pacemaker if you've got like a diagnosed you know you have a heart condition I'm not saying get into 34 degrees because I'm not a medical doctor my doctorate is in engineering I build machines I'd much rather that person consult with their physician yeah excellent point um tsg says people die in cold water because they gasp and drown is that part of that gas refle I think Mike Tipton would agree with him yeah but the weird thing about the cold water is cold water protects the brain the cold temperatures allow the brain to tolerate hypoxia so there's no pulse there's no blood there's no Oxygen going towards the brain but I talked to an emergency room physician from Baltimore who told me they aren't dead just because they look dead she says they're not dead until after we resuscitate she has brought people with no Vital Signs cold water drowning victims back to life as much as 24 hours after they were pulled out of the water because the colder temperatures protect the brain from the damage that would otherwise be caused by by a lack of oxygen this is one of the

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by a lack of oxygen this is one of the most remarkable things so a cold water drowning is sort of a a special medical situation the number one concern when you're doing winter swimming like in the lake or in the ocean is drowning it's the surf it's the Rip Tide it's getting trapped by the ice it's the Panic that can come with that in an ice bath it's a lot safer no I agree very controlled and this is why you want to do this with friends and be smart about it you know if you've never done this you're over 60 you're hypertensive you know you have some heart issues genetically or in your health history then just go and waste up or I mean you know just around your belly button and and call that good and then just like we wouldn't advise people to go run a marathon if they've never run in the last 12 months I mean that would be foolish so we should build up to this and so we're talking about this because most of you are really healthy you exercise you go in the sauna after the gym and things like that but this is just another tool that can possibly help you and with that point there was a question that came in here about um how deep should you go into the cold this is from uh David David says should I be plunging up to the chin I find it super hard to go to the juggler I agree yeah uh I agree with David that it's super hard and I'm not going to tell him that he should I'm going to tell him that I do and I get a lot out of it now I will start almost every ice bath with a head dunk and I don't you know the top of my head doesn't really get all the way in but just covering my face with the cold cold water causes a panic which is kind of why I do it I've tried to submerge and just slowly exhale I never hold my breath under the water but just slowly exhale my record is 11 seconds which is pathetic you know because the Panic that I experience becomes overwhelming and then I'll come out I just go into my chin and I can breathe I structure my breathing use some box breathing and then it feels okay so David what you're experiencing when you say you have a really hard time going to the juggler means you're normal this is what mammals

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means you're normal this is what mammals are supposed to experience try relaxing yourself with the breath uh you might do in on six out on four or whatever Rhythm works for you and see if you can inch a little lower and a little lower you might find that this takes weeks and that it gets it's never going to be easy but you become a little more accomplished at dealing with the feelings that come up yeah excellent point uh there was a question here from was it Jeremy Jeremy Adams says best workout after a nice bath weights or cardio and I think this will help close the loop on the conversation how we introduce this conversation so for those of you that are just joining us we're talking all about the health benefits of cold immersions and using this as a tool to possibly improve testosterone recovery and Beyond and so we talked about how you don't want to do cold immersions after exercise you actually want to do your cold plunge pre-workout and the mechanisms here and I want to address Jeremy's question about the best workout but one thing I wanted to come back to was the mechanisms Tom so how do we what are your thoughts regarding how would pre-exercise cold cause one to increase their testosterone and luteinizing hormone once they start exercising after they've been cold the mechanisms are one of the great Mysteries uh you could Point towards the cacom response the adrenal glands but remember that testosterone is psychological as well as physiological and so this means that the mechanisms could be too pronged and sort of interrelated very difficult to disaggregate for me I come out of the ice bath I pick up my steel mace this is a 25 lb steel Ma and it took me like three weeks to learn how to swing it around and I feel like a Persian Warrior or something I feel like a tough guy you know now I'm not saying I want to get in a fight or anything but I in that moment I feel Invincible that is the kind of feeling of victory of having done something difficult and accomplished well that boosts your testosterone and the weird thing is you win at a video game your testosterone goes up

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game your testosterone goes up testosterone is associated with that um feeling of striving and making progress towards your goal it might not be physiological in that sense at all right on the other hand when you think about the adrenals and the fat cells and the sources of testosterone you think about the way the testes work in men keeping them cold uh we know that elevated temperatures in your testicles will suppress your testosterone so there are likely physiological mechanisms as well Sona not a good thing for testosterone and sperm count and so I do cold every day but I don't do Sona every day as far as weight training versus cardio I'm not the right guy to ask I don't do cardio uh and you know I've done it in the past but for me it's not a lot of fun I live on the 32nd Floor I want to exercise right away so I have weights for that yeah but I don't do a lot of weights on the other hand the Sakamoto study it was 20 minutes on the exercise bike stationary bike that's itard card zone two probably what I've heard from readers is that both work fine one guy he's older than me he's in his 60s he read my article he jumps in the pond and then he just like power walks home like he's some kind of soccer mom and that's it he doesn't do weights he got his tea levels total te up above mine he took himself off of trt because he's like I don't want this anymore I don't need that he's in the 1200s which is unheard of for a his age that's really impressive um what I've been doing is a combination it just depends on the day so I think uh any movement is going to naturally improve your body temperature which is going to be suppressed if you do this sort of tactic if you will this protocol of pre-exercise cold therapy as a way to optimize testosterone levels among other things I think there's there's other benefits there but I do want to address one Live question from Tate International um she was commenting on how we were talking about in parts of Europe and the nor ntic countries Scandinavian countries um how sauna is

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Scandinavian countries um how sauna is often paired with cold therapy she says that's why I really love theme baths in Germany they have saunas hot and cold pools all in the same place now even in South Korea I've traveled there uh parts of Indonesia all over Latin America whatever uh most Spas will do if they have a sauna they often have a cold pool even now Equinox has cold pools which that's great yeah they're not as cold as mosco Forge but I mean at least they're a start for some people which I think uh is fantastic uh swamp Haw thank you for your amazing comments as always uh swamp says any benefits to going colder than freezing temps by mixing in salt or anything uh it might be good for your ego swamp Haw because then you start to get bragging rights on the internet you say I put in 12 pounds of Epsom salt and I set my thermostat down to 30 ° but uh the risks don't justify the bragging right so I have two Engineers who did exactly that I got a call from one of them two days later and he said Tom I feel like I'm sunburned you know I can't even move everything hurts I said wow I I have no idea have you been out in the sun he goes no I said wait a second were you plunging with Mike like you you sent me that picture and all that slush in there he goes yeah well how's Mike Feel called Mike same same thing it was Frost nip so this is frostbite that hasn't gone through several layers of skin it feels like a sunburn and it's just it's killed the first couple of layers by creating ice within the skin cells so I was would say not worth it just so you can brag about it but now I got a really good story from my two Engineers yeah I've never been to Germany going back to Tay thanks for making that mention I've been to Iceland and I went through one of the spa things that they have there you know they're famous for their volcanic and okay great they had a cold plunge and people were coming out of their big volcanic feed hot pool thing and they were skipping right past the cold punch there was like a seven set circuit and I'm like well I'm I'm getting in here I was the only one in there and it wasn't even that cold 45 I

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there and it wasn't even that cold 45 I mean it's in Celsius there but around 45 and I'm thinking these people are all missing out they wanted to go straight from the hot tub to the Sona and there's a reason I don't like that in the hot tub you will experience Vaso constriction you ordinarily associate the heat with Vaso dilation if you're in the Sona and you're sweating yes you're getting the Vaso dilation but in the hot tub your body knows not to sweat there's no point in sweating into water there's a phenomena called hydrosis that shuts down your sweat response in the hot tub and this means your body needs to vasil constrict to defend itself from overheating if you're going hot tub ice bath you're going Vaso constriction basoc constriction really like with the dry heat or the Sona heat as long as you're sweating you know your body is working to Thermal regulate using vasod dilation I'm not a fan of going back and forth between hot water and cold water interesting that's really good to mention so thank you uh for that I want to address this question here uh Iris and I don't know how this myth really came about you know our parents and our grandparents probably told our parents you know if you little Johnny if you go play outside without your jacket on and it's cold out you're going to catch a cold so Ira says sometimes I'm worrying I I am worrying if underdressed and walking outside I can catch a cold in the winter um all available evidence that I've read I mean there was a epidemiological study I think it was a I don't know if you call it a randomized control Tri but a study uh in a workplace setting where individuals were instructed they randomized people to either do nothing or some of these workers and it was a multiple thousands of employees to take cold showers you remember the study so at the end of the study the people who took cold showers every morning reported less sick days and it wasn't just a little bit less it signicant yeah so why we still think that if you get cold during the winter you're going to catch

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during the winter you're going to catch a cold is it kind of like dietary fat makes you fat is it that Association I think there are two reasons for it uh I think iris is asking an important question um the first reason is there's a difference between the acute therapeutic cold and chronic it is true when there's a cold wave mortality goes up when you are exposed to Chronic inescapable cold it's not good for your body it's like uh running the marathon might kill me in the certain condition that I am when you overdo what is supposed to be therapeutic instead it becomes injurious and so people human beings are wired to be careful around the cold because too much cold is not good for you the other one is we've lost all our Brown fat that is when you're a kid I don't know where you grew up I grew up in Pittsburgh and it was the 70s and there were some hard winners and I made a lot of money shoveling sidewalks when it was snowing and I thought if school is canceled that's great I'd be outside all day and I would hear from my mother the same question you know put on your hat put on your mittens I'm like I'm fine mom and all my friends felt the same well we have a lot of brown fat kids know when they're cold they will come in they will say can I have some hot cocoa or something they know when to warm up they're choosing to be out in the snow but then we get to be adults we've lost all our Brown fat because we're so comfortable and we see our children and we forget what it's like to be that free and that playful and that and to have a metabolism like that and we want to sort of prot protect the children from feelings that we're having and we say put on a scarf come inside they'll let you know yeah that's a great Point okay so and and this was another question that came in about the hormetic stressor here and maybe we can drill down about how um this was uh the handle is food sorry thought as food um but the idea that you know some exercise is good but you can overe exercise and and chronically overe exercised people have you know increased rates of sudden cardiac death or all cause mortality and can be chronically inflamed and everything like that so excessive cold

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everything like that so excessive cold is just as problematic as excessive anything you can overdo protein you can overdo sleep overdo water you name it you can overdo supplements what what is a micronutrient at one dose becomes a poison at another dose and this is the the classic hormetic responses in toxicology where you through exposure therapy can strengthen your tolerance to things that otherwise might injure you right and so maybe if we can drill down on some of the hormetic benefits here you mentioned Brown adapost tissue um you mentioned the vasod dilation Vaso contriction response I think it's really a good exercise for your vascular endothelial tissue especially if you're able to do the contrast what other hormetic mechanisms are exciting for you the most important thing to mention is the mitochondria are the key to longevity I saw a clip from David Sinclair who says well the most important thing is your blood glucose he's right and he's wrong blood glucose is a symptom of damaged mitochondria your mitochondria need to be stressed and recover just like your muscles do just like your skin needs sunshine and it needs Darkness your mitochondria need that hormetic stress and then they need time away from the carbs they need lower concentrations of seed oils in your diet so that they can keep the cell membranes and the mitochondrial membranes in good shape they need good light hygiene so they can make their own melatonin when you stress your mitochondria which could be through exercise or it could be through cold exposure or it could be from eating that super that half a pumpkin pie that I had for Thanksgiving right you got to give the mitochondria time to recover there's mofas which is elimination of the damaged mitochondria and there's mitobiogenesis one of the fastest ways to stimulate mitobiogenesis is cold water therapy interesting yeah and so mitobiogenesis but also mitophagy as well or just both this is an animal study uh because you can dissect the animals you can examine the brown fat you can uh but the the mitochondria in

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you can uh but the the mitochondria in Rat are not so much different than the mitochondria in human beings that we have to be super concerned there are things when you're moving from animal models to human beings that we should be cons super concerned about that the mitochondria studies that show cold this is acute not chronic but brief bouts of acute cold exposure will stimulate myasia and mitobiogenesis I think are pretty reliable and I say this because when you do every day sort of s to 10 days you will Recruit new Brown fat it's a process called beiging of the white fat that will restore Brown fat to your body and what makes it beige new mitochondria we can measure this in human beings that we're making new mitochondria all the time and we can put ourselves in the right sort of hormetic conditions to stimulate that to optimize that that's amazing so that's one of the is that what gets you more excited about it is that one of because a lot of people talk about dopamine you get I heard you say is it a 3X increase in dopamine well this is from one study that hubman loves it's coming out of Poland and it was 250% which means three and a half times that's a lot of dopamine and I'm not knocking it but we haven't seen um reliable studies that have reproduced it since then now you know the feeling you get the feeling of euphoria you know you're getting the adrenaline and so you don't really need to draw blood samples to say yeah I think I'm getting a dope hit off of this and it's all endogenous rather than getting it from some injection or something else that you're getting out of your body and our intuition say if you're making your own dopamine and you're earning it by doing something hard well that's probably a lot better for your psychology no 100% And it's I mean it could create a propensity for you to want to continue to do it which would lead to the health benefits it has happened to me where I crave the cold and U I get to miss it after a couple of days uh I went down to Columbia carda Columbia the cor asked me to goity it's lovely but did you know the

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goity it's lovely but did you know the ocean there is warm I'm going out in thean you're like get nothing here the tap water is warm everything is warm I spent a week working for the Army Corp when I came back I experienced some of those new sort of like novice like oh my God this is so cold what am I doing I'm up to my neck and I I'm going to die in here I lost some of the psychological acclamation interesting yeah cart Hana uh Columbia is just a beautiful country uh entirely but yeah I think the it's interesting in cahen and Columbia Latin America sauna is not a thing no people are into more cold but yeah they're definitely not into the sauna which makes sense um gosh a lot of great questions here Tom so much commentary yeah yeah um amazing stuff well tsg was coming back about arthritis and this is an important thing arthritis is not a contraindication for cold but I can understand why tsg would be hesitant about it there is a medical safety nurse she's a medical safety specialist so she watches the medications for counteractions between them and she's in California and she suffers from rheumatoid arthritis she wrote to me and she said I reached the point where I couldn't open pill bottles and I couldn't handle the equipment now she's only in her early 40s she said my boyfriend who's a firefighter got me into the cold therapy symptoms gone she sleeps great she wakes up the next day she can move her hands now if she stops with cold therapy the symptoms of arthritis will come back rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disorder and those are very difficult to reverse however she can manage her pain without the meds that she was on without the injections that she used steroid injections to bring down the inflammation by doing regular cold plunge therapy so I wouldn't want arthritis to stop tsg from trying it um and you've got to listen to your body it's going to be very frightening to do it when you first get started oh absolutely no it can be uh very very challenging I want to but I mean there's

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challenging I want to but I mean there's just like with exercise the first time you go and squat you're going to be sore for a while yeah but um I think the long-term benefits it's been something that I got into just going in the lake you know in 2015 I built my little galvanized stock tank unit that I was using then invested in the Rosco so uh which is where I want to you know kind of finish things off there's a so many products out there right now when it comes to cold immersion I mean it's really quite impressive how the marketplace has responded to Consumer demand but in my opinion the Rosco Forge is the best on the market for many different reasons but if people are looking if they want to try a Morosco you can go to your website and people can actually find one locally yeah yeah maybe there's some commercial facilities that have it and you know they charge like 25 bucks a plunge or something like that there's some things to look for if you're on a website looking for an a cold plunge or an ice bath and it's advertising to you cutting edge leading innovated technology then it's a fraud Refrigeration is over a hundred years old there are no like super new Innovative I don't care whether it's links into your smartphone or whatever it does it's a refrigeration machine and I get emails from Chinese manufacturers two or three a week saying don't you want to like sell our they are all the same piece of equipment there are a few companies that have innovated the things about morasco is it makes ice nobody gets colder than that we use ozone an exclusive oone there are no chemicals there's no chlorine I don't want it anywhere near my customers or near me there's no chlorine stabilizers or agents that you have to add and it's grounded and this is a huge one when the body of water and the tub is connected electrically to ground then you get the grounding benefit which you would get in the ocean or you would get in the Stream in this respect Morosco is the second best thing to Nature so if you're I understand not everybody can afford a Morosco and morasco is not for everyone not everyone needs to get down to 33 ° so if you're looking at one of these that

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if you're looking at one of these that says you know we are super solved this incredible problem you're talking about I don't know a pizza delivery guy who opened up a website or something when you're getting started desert plunge is a good brand it's $ 34, 000 Matt he's down in Tempe he's honest he will honor his warranty and it's a good place to get started it's not grounded and it won't CCH you freezing a lot of our customers have called us and said you know what I want this every day I want to go harder core uh I probably should have started with morasco but I'm ready to step up and I encourage that yeah that's awesome so um the businesses that are doing this are these like uh wellness centers are they gyms they're this has been a phenomena it is um unlike the corporation to adopt one of these sort of things that they say well it's fatty or it's Leading Edge it's too far out there but there has been a CAU cage industry of people who quit their corporate job and say I'm going to get a couple of sonas I'm going to get some cold plunge equipment I'm going to get some red lights maybe I'll mix in some halotherapy and some compression sleeves I'm going to create a Wellness Center these have popped up all over the country they're doing really well so we have extended sometimes uh ourselves to carry financing for some people who are really out on the edge because we believed in what they were trying to do we do less of that now um the space is getting more crowded uh people are starting to franchise ideas there's xpt wants to franchise Dave asprey wants to franchise and I have a feeling it's going to get more standardized but right now we're in this sort of metaphorical Wild West this Pro people don't know what business model is going to work they're trying a lot of different ones and there might be somebody good near you that has an approach that you're never going to find anywhere else yeah so that's great use your website to figure it out and see where people I mean I have my favorites there's sweat Shack in Tennessee think they're doing a great job there's outlive labs in Florida there's Revival

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outlive labs in Florida there's Revival in Southern California and now I've just offended every customer that I didn't mention but I'm saying these are the people that I'm in touch with regularly that's awesome and are they doing they have a like a barrel sauna or what kind of sauna are they doing yeah they're are all different kinds um the infrared saas have become super popular and they don't work with morasco that I mean if you want to get your sweat on and you're getting into infrared and you're at 150 degrees and it feels good I don't want to knock it but I had one and when I would go from morasco into the infrared it would take me 45 minutes to work up a sweat I really like what you have with your wood stove and maybe it's 220 in there sometimes but I don't have to sit there forever in order to start sweating yeah I mean that's if you look at if you want to do SAA I mean this is what you know people have been doing in bellarus Finland Sweden Norway I mean all parts of uh Eastern Europe so you want to do the Wood Fired stove that's the way to do it um and the I live in an apartment building they're not about to let right and so if you got to get to a 220 volt heater and you're getting one of these that will get you up over 180 then you're in that Realm of the research studies you're saying okay these are the temperatures that the fins have really done a lot of work on yeah we don't really know about infrared right right no it's true I think it's a nice way just like you mentioned there's other tools out there I mean I started with a galvaniz stock tank and I also started with an infed on them you just some what you got to do in a small space um and then but you know the the gold standard would be you know the morosa forge and a woodf fired stove sauna in my opinion you yeah that's the the way to go so friends thank you as always for tuning in if you're enjoying the content please hit that like button I really really appreciate and Tom does as well your amazing questions uh a lot of great questions we'll address one more here from m m ball a bathtub and ice cubes at home do it it's a great way to start awesome uh you go down to the Quicky or whatever is near you uh you pick up 100

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whatever is near you uh you pick up 100 lb of ice now it gets old fast but if you want to find out if this is something that you're interested in and you don't want to spend $ 20, 000 on a Morosco then you spend 20 bucks on Ice you put it in the bathtub especially if your tap water is already sort of cold now in Phoenix the tap water gets up to 88 ° in the summertime it's just not an option for me and I got so tired of buying ice at the gas station that me and my co - founder Jason we sat down and we said we ought to be able to figure this out we're engineers and that's how Morosco Forge started it was a couple of guys frustrated with the pouring ice cubes into the tub that's amazing that's a cool story awesome Tom really appreciate you coming on the show been a pleasure appreciate all of you being here and uh again your live questions were amazing so uh have an awesome rest of your day appreciate your likes your comments your shares we'll catch you on a future live later this week take care now all right cool felt great that was awesome yeah yeah um and I'll tweak