Modern recovery culture often reaches for intensity first. This conversation offers a more useful frame: Paul Koepnick describes cold water immersion as a disciplined practice for readiness, discomfort, and personal capacity.
This transcript is grouped in two-minute sections. Each timestamp opens the source video at that moment.
what's going on y'all welcome back to the struggle of strength podcast your source for real life application on how to turn your struggles into strengths in all things mind muscle and money [Music] trav you've been doing cold water exposure right yes yeah i've been doing sauna in the morning followed by a cold shower and been seeing crazy benefits lower blood pressure help with like anxiety that sort of thing that's awesome and something that i've been wanting to do so we have this guy paul coming on today from coldwater effect who's going to talk to us about how to get involved in cold water therapy because i was under the impression that it just had to be freezing and it had to suck same yeah but it was better there's a better way like it does you don't have to listen to the cold bros on instagram and just get into 35 degree water and hate yourself the entire time like there's actually a really good process and the water doesn't even have to be that cold so we have paul coming on today who has done like in the past 740 days he told me that he's been done cold water exposure in lake michigan uh in or or in general for the past like 700 like he's done 700 out of 740 yeah and he does almost all winter he just gets into lake michigan but he realized that there was a lot of benefits to this and he also realized that there was a lot of like poor information going around the internet about how you're supposed to do it and you don't have to listen to the cold bro so paul is coming on today to explain to us how to get started with cold water therapy what the best like options are and then how like the the specifics of what the water temperature can be and how long you have to do wait for it while you're in there and also like your pre-cold water exposure routine and your post cold water exposure routine because that was another thing that i didn't really think of was like what happens before and after totally it's crucial yeah so having like a preparation on the front end and then a like
a like post cold water exposure routine on the back end really brings us all together so i'm really excited y'all tune in like stay tuned grab your notepads there's a lot of really good action items in this one um so yeah paul's gonna tell us exactly what to do so we'll see you guys inside i'm super stoked for this episode i like have just started dabbling in cold therapy myself without a ton of information you know a ton of knowledge about it and definitely like as part of a kind of holistic approach to some things i've seen some great like benefits so i'm super so i was super stoked to talk to you and learn about this oh yeah great great i'm excited yeah so so let's kick it off then and um you know you were kind of getting into like your brand story almost of like how you got into cold therapy in the first place um tell us a little bit more about like who you are and how you got here man right so my name is paul kepnick uh i'm from milwaukee wisconsin and i got into this i'm in a bad place i my background's in medicine so i was in veterinary school uh at the university of illinois and the competition the amount of work the amount of stress that was just going on with this very competitive high higher education right where you're fighting for every grade it started taking this this mental toll on me where was getting depressed and anxious and anxiety panic attacks and then i was working for the department of homeland security i was hand selected one of 30 students internationally to work at plum island which is this top secret laboratory for infectious animal diseases and control and transmission so studying like bioterrorism and how how we quarantine and the public health in regards to
in regards to epidemics and pandemics and and with animals in our agriculture system so that at the top of my game but hidden away was me being depressed insecure i was toxic i was just over uh coping in my relationships with alcohol and just so insecure about myself i was just driving me into this depression and anxiety and i ended up a year before i graduated i failed out like one i was in my clinical rotations failed out of veterinary school and i lost everything and i had this huge identity crisis where i was supposed to be this doctor i was at the top of my game and i had absolutely nothing and trying to figure out who i was as a human being back at the bottom um it was terrifying and i was trying to get help in my mental health because i started going deeper deeper into depression anxiety i ended up getting medicated and having a manic episode and i uh end up getting in some trouble with my behavior and it went viral like it was the worst day of my life the worst moment of my life um i got arrested for taking a car just so i could get home to see my family um and because of my behavior and my mental state uh it it went to this viral place and that's what i identified to to that i'm a failure i am a um now a criminal in the eyes of everyone even though it was just a ticket and but because the story was made around me that's the story that i decided to tell myself and it led me down to this depression i ended up homeless uh lost every
ended up homeless uh lost every relationship that i had and ended up suicidal to where i didn't want to live because like i had nothing to live for i didn't know who i was and so i remember being at this this uh i was living out of my car in madison wisconsin and i was at this lake uh this campsite and i was at the lowest point of my life and contemplating just the deepest and darkest thoughts and said you know what let's just like go take a shower and you know let's just see after you take a shower and get cleaned up let's see what happens and the shower was cold and when i was taking a shower my mind shut off and i started kind of thinking about different things that i could do and all of a sudden my moods are getting better i'm like whoa whoa what was going on and and i remember reading something about tim ferriss about these silicon valley guys like do it becoming more productive than their metabolism and hacking like fitness with cold water immersion and cold showers and so i was like let's just make a run at this and let's just see what happened so i started about five years ago just taking cold showers every single day and things started to improve things started i just kind of i i was getting out of my own headspace and kind of getting into um you know just taking it one day at a time and and i was just the thoughts and the happiness i was coming over and i started making a little bit of progress to the point where i started turning things around and that's when i really started getting serious about uh cold water i'm like maybe there's something to do with this and i was sick of my life and i'm like i'm gonna manifest and create the life that i want and i'm going to
the life that i want and i'm going to create the story myself and i'm going to use cold water as the vehicle as the catalyst to get there and so that's when i started going into lake michigan i moved to milwaukee and i started going to lake michigan every single day ev for throughout the winter and you know one day turned into 600 really quick and in that time you know i got married i um i went from cleaning out gutters with a leaf blower to an executive of one of the biggest real estate companies in wisconsin in just a short year or two of time and so it was really kind of this practice of going in and doing the hard thing and then i got i went and i learned this all from wim hof so i have advanced putting one off and i started taking this and wanting to learn how to do it faster and optimize it and be more efficient with it i'm learning how i could take this stress that i was going through and sharing it with a the physical stress of cold exposure because if i can adapt to a physical stress stress i should be able to adapt to a mental stress that i'm making up in my own head um so that's kind of like the back story of how it all went on and now i decided uh to do it all over again so left my job of this corporate real estate and started teaching this to other people and started just rebuilding and and putting my own spin on this world of cold exposure and the things that i've learned with doctors at the mayo clinic and medical college wisconsin and what we're doing in the future with with students and
and academics and and how and and academics and and how putting this into student organizations to help out kids mental health in general that's awesome man well travis well you were going to have a question i was too what's your question yeah yeah should we say it at the same time and see if it was the same yeah ready yeah one two three what are the most i called exposure i was gonna ask damn it i was dude so many times i feel like we have a question it's the same question so that's what i was wondering i was going to ask well i was actually it's kind of similar i was going to ask what the most like what your favorite or the most surprising benefits of cold exposure are so it's kind of the same question sure sure i i think the uh most surprising benefit of cold exposure is it gives you access and it gives you the key to unlock your subconscious and unlock those processes and all beginning with that first initial dip what a lot of people don't you're putting yourself in a fight or flight state which actually starts shutting down your prefrontal cortex that part of your brain that is responsible for all the mind racing for all the worry the anxiety it stops it in its tracks immediately all you can think about is being in the cold because that's an evolutionary hard-wired response just to stress it's the good stress because we used to have you know every day we thought about getting eaten by you know a saber-toothed tiger and when you're faced with a saber-toothed tiger in the wild you're not thinking about you know how much is my mortgage you're not thinking about that because all you're thinking about is is how to survive so you're kind of hacking into
survive so you're kind of hacking into your brain and telling it to stop with this word your fears actually end up disappearing so you get into the space of pure mental clarity and then you learn how to adapt to bring back that mental space in a um in a reset you're totally reset so once you go back online you have nothing there so you're totally clear with what you want and and you're in line with your subconscious that you just accessed but you don't have all these racing thoughts you really can go in and do the work i think even the concept of getting comfortable in that fight-or - flight state it it widens your window of tolerance to be able to think logically and clearly under those fight-or - flight circumstances and while you were talking i was thinking about an experiment that they did with travis pastrana you guys know travis pastrana yeah dirt bike guy first got ever do a double backflip like you know so they put him in a rally car and keep in mind this is a guy who for those of who the listeners who don't know he's a red bull athlete extreme sports athlete um i actually met his mom on a plane once uh way back in the day but they're like burlington yeah arlington people yeah yeah they i think they are um yeah they are yeah he's vermont yeah so he grew up just riding dirt bikes so he grew up like constantly putting himself into high stress situations but being able to think really clearly you think about this with most extreme sport athletes who are comfortable upside down like 20 30 feet in the air and have the wherewithal and the proprioception to understand where their bodies at in space think clearly logically to get themselves to land back on their feet back on their wheels whatever it may be but they did this experiment with travis pastrana where they put him in a rally car
they put him in a rally car and i think he was going for a world record long jump and it was like something i don't i'm gonna butcher the the distance but we'll just call it like 127 meters or something crazy and they had him hooked up to all sorts of uh medical equipment to measure like his heartbeat and his blood pressure and all sorts of things and the one that i remember the metric i remember was was his heart rate and his heart rate was i think it was like 80. like as he was putting his suit on as he was putting his gear on it was 80 as he was getting through the car it was 80. as he turned the car on he starts driving towards the ramp it was 80. in the middle of the air it was 80 it landed it was 80 and then he got out of the car and spiked 260 to celebrate and he had such control over his heart rate and every like system in his body during that time that he could control that and so this is kind of what it sounds like to me is like the first time you get into a cold tank you're like holy [__] and it spikes your heart rate through the roof and you get that like massive fight-or - flight response but i imagine the longer you sit in it the more you're able to control it the longer you do it the more you're able to control it and i imagine that translates to other aspects of your life life 100 and i was just speaking about this at the national alliance on mental illness did a big presentation on how we can use this type of cold exposure to transform you know some of these stress related problems because that was everything is that i was experiencing i was just kind of tying back to stress and fear and the the physical responses that we have to it and when you put yourself in fight or flight and then are able to adapt to it and activate some of these the opposite reactions to the parasympathetic nervous system system for rest and digest
for rest and digest you can actually start reprogramming and reconditioning a subconscious process in your reactions to a stress response so you're literally changing the way you are perceiving something in the external world and then by doing that you are able to kind of influence your behavior inside of that to be able to rise above it right and so you see with consistent practice with this that your body starts to do things automatically in a stressful situation to where you are you know what it feels like to be like oh this is stressful but you're not thinking about it right it's just happening automatically and that is a really powerful transformation um because you're not afraid to go do things that you're normally afraid of or your body's telling you oh you know this is fine this is just normal this is what we do now you're kind of like raising your tolerance yeah i like yeah doing something that's like maybe foundationally or fundamentally more difficult than you know stressful situation x like for your brain then you're increasing your brain's resiliency tolerance to these stressful situations at like a foundational level so that you know on the front end you notice less panic or freakouts or like get you don't feel as out of control when these situations like happen to you basically yeah dude i think about this all the time everybody every human especially those of us who suffer from mental illness like every human has been in a situation where they get into a conflict or some sort of tension with another individual and when that gets brought up instantly your your window of tolerance is like at risk right so you might go outside of winter tolerance you're like oh [__] and
winter tolerance you're like oh [__] and that might be the same feeling that you get the first time you enter into cold water where you're like oh [__] but as you get better at having difficult conversations with people as you get better at being able to prepare and brace for those challenging conversations it turns into less of an oh [__] and more of like okay you know here we go and it turns in from less of a reaction into more of a response where you're not thinking logically you're not thinking um in a high stress emotionally driven state you're absorbing information and especially when it's a an important conversation between two people or a group of people you're able to perceive that information better you're able to to obtain perspective from other sides better but like the first time it happens you're like holy [__] this water's cold and eventually it just turns into water and you can think a little bit more clearly so it's it makes sense even on like the most basic foundational level it makes perfect sense but how does this actually impact your systems like we know that there's data to show that this is beneficial for your internal systems right you mentioned something about smoothing muscles and blood cell count like how does this impact that right so well let's let's go let's take um the cardiovascular system so they just came out with a study a couple weeks ago i read it on yahoo that the number one cause of cardiovascular uh distress is stress emotional stress um that pressure that the inflammation that comes with that the core constant stress levels of those in your blood that's you know that's one thing so learning how to manage this stress and or reframing the stress learning how to control the responses is going to be highly beneficial for the cardiovascular system not only that you have it's an exercise for your smooth muscles
it's an exercise for your smooth muscles and circulation so when you're constricting those blood vessels in your extremities in your body and you're shunting everything to your core and then learning how to rewarm it you're actually exercising the smooth muscles around your your blood vessels so you're better able to regulate that blood pressure because those muscles are becoming stronger so you don't have to use your heart muscle as as much oh that makes a lot of sense hold on pause so could can this then help you lower your blood pressure if you have kind of like chronically like high blood pressure if you do it in the in a correct way in a focused way that focuses on that's where contrast therapy kind of is is popular because you're going from a hot to a cold to a hot environment where you're expanding those blood vessels and then constricting them and then expanding yeah that's what i've been doing and my blood pressure went from being like uh you know a little bit over uh good to being like perfect i gotta start doing that right and i was doing like 20 minutes sauna in the morning followed by like a three to five minute cold shower and i did that every day for like months on end i'm still doing i'm traveling right now but i'm still doing it but it's like the number one thing and i was like meditating and stuff too but it's like the number one change in my um in my uh uh you know routine and my blood pressure is like healthy now so i've got to imagine that that's amazing it has a lot to do with it yeah yeah it's really hectic yeah go ahead i was gonna ask if this like when you were explaining kind of the concept of like drawing blood to your core and then letting it go back to your extremities i don't have great blood flow to my hands and my feet like i've broken my my wrists and my ankles plenty of times is this something that would help my body
this something that would help my body improve its effectiveness like getting blood to my hands and feet is that what you're saying yeah i mean you can and so that's where i kind of coupled this in with some with the breath work and the visualization practices of what you're doing inside the water because where your focus goes blood flows right and so you can really with your mind back online and really focusing on where that cold is going and where blood is flowing they've done studies on this where you can increase that circulation to a specific area of your body just using your mind and this is just another part of that visualization of how do we go in this high stress right and then be able to visualize where we want to focus in for the health of no recovery no male listeners should doubt that you can send blood flow to an area of your body with your skin because i don't know if you remember being like 14 but it was almost impossible to not send blood flow to certain areas we call it we call them nrbs yeah every every guy listening knows what an nrb is all the girls are like thinking stop stop thinking ask your boyfriend what an nrb is yeah but but that's that's a really powerful exercise so what i'm curious about like can you walk us through like you go into a cold exposure what's your thought process what's this kind of look like what are you thinking of kind of almost from beginning to end right so when i first start going in it's first i want to prime up my my body right and so i use uh a really short breath work um that's similar to the wim hof method i don't know if you guys know when lost method um breath work savage it's kind of a it's it's called the 10 20 30 method
it's it's called the 10 20 30 method where you're taking 10 big deep breaths expanding that upper chest and then just letting that that breath kind of fall out doing that 10 times and then on the 10th um breath you're you're expelling the breath and then holding it for 10 seconds round two is 20 20 big deep breaths uh exhale and hold for 20 seconds then 30 big breaths exhale for 30. it takes like two minutes but you'll start feeling your arms start tingling um it starts alcohol alkaline alkaline turns your body into alkaline state let's say that um it's because you're breathing out so much carbon dioxide you're breathing out that acid in the blood and you're making it more basic which is increasing that ph which makes your nervous system start acting faster and start responding so you kind of start waking up the body start preparing before stress you want to match kind of the energy that you're going into then is i'm going into the water in a very slow and controlled way when you're going to a body of water like lake like michigan especially when it's really cold outside and the risk of cold shock and hypothermia those are the two big dangers of cold explosion so you want to be your body is going to want to take these big breaths in this gas reflex and we found that we want to counteract that so as your body is naturally going into fight or flight i'm priming my body with a long slow extended breath out and that comes from a study by kelly mcgonagall at stanford who is working with heart rate variability
with heart rate variability and though that meditative practice is that if you're able to extend the restricted airstream of exhale for over 10 seconds that your heart rate variability went up which means your heart rate is just dropping because you've activated the parasympathetic nervous system you're able to keep that mind online so i as i'm immersing myself in the water i'm going three two one long extended breath out to activate the rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system so that as my body is starting to hit with this fight or flight i am counteracting so i don't panic so i don't go into this respiratory um panic where you know where um hypothermia can sit in cold shot concern set in so as that takes about two and a half minutes to our your body to be able to come back into a normal breathing rhythm of just this extended breath out and then i'm just taking a a normal big extended breath with gentle breath in i'm trying to really consciously control my my breath out you can't think of anything else while you're in there so all you really want to do is take a long slow breath out just focus on your exhale and then i'm i'm sitting in in and i really um i really have like big three things that i kind of go over and the first one is is after i get over that breath work it uh never give your pain a voice right our thoughts and and what we think have power and cold exposure and stress it's the effects that you get from it
it's the effects that you get from it are defined by what you say and what you think to yourself so what you experience in the stress actually has really physiological differences in it so we want to keep our self-talk into something positive you have to be creating a positive experience so i do that through gratitude so while i'm sitting in that water breathing out i'm saying thank you or reliving a really positive experience like the proudest moment i ever could think of or petting my dog and reliving that and letting that feeling wash over me that also starts bringing your heart rate down and then all of a sudden your body starts to adapt and then i'm sitting in there that moment for five to ten minutes you can do it in about three but from three to ten minutes i'm i'm sitting in that water and then i'm kind of letting that big screeching voice out of my brain um and i'm i'm waiting to listen for that that small inner voice that's you know telling pushing me into the right direction so that when that voice usually tells me okay it's time now to get out like we've reached at that moment then i'm getting out and then i'm rewarding myself up with some some different types of chi gong and breath work to really start activating that muscle again to really start rewarming me from the inside so we're doing a activation and then we're counteracting with the opposite and then we're activating that that stress response again back up to re-warm us up that's awesome i like the strategy and it's interesting you said like your body hears everything your mind says that's i i believe that to be true like to an insane level um and when you say
when you say your body tells you that you're ready to get out i think the first thing that comes to most people's minds who have never done this before is that feeling of you get into cold water it's like oh [__] get out it's yeah but it's not that it's okay you've achieved peace like you are calm you are tranquil you've done the thing like you've done it you can go now yeah right your body yeah you're exactly right because there's that first voice that tells you i don't want to do this um you can stay at home and go to bed that it's going to be cold and this is not going to be fun that's the voice that you want to say no i'm doing this anyway thank you for your input but i'm going in and doing what i know that's going to be beneficial for me in my life and you're really working on telling that voice to shut up and that you're more powerful than it that voice is always the big screaming voice that's the ego coming through and it's the process of getting through that voice and then there's the secondary inner inner voice that is just very quiet and it's usually that one that tells you hey you should be doing this but you're not and okay that's fine but it's usually just a whisper now usually it comes in a part of the piece where you're in that meditative space that says okay all right you've reached your what you needed to do today and you know it's you know get out or um you know whenever you whenever you're ready it's a gentler voice yeah i tell people to listen to it but i'm also usually there guiding them saying okay usually people on the first time they'll sit in the water um i took a group out in a lake i cut a hole in the lake in uh in wisconsin and uh they usually sit in their first
and uh they usually sit in their first time for 13 to 15 minutes and loving every second of it that's awesome but it but it's uh so sometimes i have to just tell them okay i don't want you to yeah there's too much heat yeah you got to get out now so for people who like we were just talking kind of before we got on the call like it's 95 degrees where you are it's like 100 in texas we don't necessarily have access to like a frozen lake um what are your favorite options for people who live in warmer climates to still have access to cold exposure i've seen barrels i've seen like the chest freezers that people convert some people just do the shower like what would you rank as the best options for people who might not have access to a frozen lake sure um cold exposure where you're dipping into a tub is the most widely studied so i always you can get some on amazon just like cold spas for like 60 bucks and go to to your um like a tractor supply or again if if those are in your area kind of in the rural areas with stock tanks you can do it in a garbage can um but i like the full body immersion all at once because then your body can can start adapting and you have this consistency and that's what's studied the most because it's more controlled right you can actually control for these the full body cold exposures the next i would say cold showers are a little bit more difficult just and they're different because you have to be moving around those those showers all the time you got to be exposing different parts and then other parts are starting to warm up so you always have to keep in
in in rotating or exposing yourself which sometimes i think cold showers are actually a little bit harder than going and adapting i think so i think it's harder you're continually going and and exposing uh and having more cold shock but just because of you know the the scientific that they aren't studied as well they're not well documented you're going to have more people saying that they're going to recommend the full body exposure because that's just where the metrics are but there's nothing wrong with cold showers and um i i liked if you had ice those ice barrels and those cold tubs that you can get on those are great if you have twelve hundred dollars to spend on it right i i think that's a little out of my price range for you know doing a cold water immersion i think you can get just the same effects of going into a cold bath or with ice or a cold shower all you really need is about 57 degrees to get these effects that was my other question is uh what's the temperature and um what how much ice would you put how many pounds of ice would you put in like a hundred gallon trough for instance sure to achieve the right temperature so i would if you want the right temperature i would get just kind of like those meat thermometers those instant meat thermometers those those work really good um i'm usually putting in about 40 pounds of ice into the the water coming out of the bubbles into a nice bath um that's going to get you to about 50 degrees for the yeah about 50 degrees 48 degrees i like it a little bit colder than the
i like it a little bit colder than the 57 degrees now 57 degrees is where all the you know the the those effects are coming the 250 increase in dopamine you're getting 560 increase in norepinephrine or the adrenaline hormone and you're getting um a 350 increase in metabolism at at 57 degree water and learning how to adapt to it so if you're worried about the water because everyone's cold temperatures is different right and i think i'll give credit to the hubermann lab because he was he's a doctor at stanford of really trying to find your your cold talent and he gave some great advice that i have used to for other people is when you're just trying this out like go into a shower and turn it to uh the coldest until you're until your brain's like whoa this is really cold and then turn it a little bit colder until your body's like i really want to get out but i think i can stay in here safely right and that's a good place to start to find where your cold tolerance is and then gradually start making it colder as you can feel comfortable doing so you're not putting yourself in any cardiovascular shock response or danger of you know being really really cold or having some of these adverse effects the whole point about this is as to keep it as a positive experience um and and because it changes the type of stress that you ex that you have it reframes a traumatic experience into something that's positive that you stress that um that is beneficial for growth and
that is beneficial for growth and motivation and doing stuff and a distress which increases your cortisol levels and that's the stress that makes you sick so those that's kind of with with the advice that's out there right now um is how to get you know started with cold exposure finding that temperature but if you get to 57 degrees and below um and you're gonna get everything out of that okay yeah that's really good to know um because yeah 57 degrees is like not too hard to achieve that's definitely i'm sure a cold cold shower is definitely a lot colder than that or not necessarily a lot colder than that but it's definitely colder than that um and i've gotten in my i got like one of those 99 horse troughs from tractor supply co filled it up with ice and i got a little um thermometer thing and it was 50 degrees and that was cold and the first time i did it it was a little bit of like a shock but i was i acclimated like very quickly to it you know i feel like 35 would be a hundred times harder but um i was wondering if that was too warm but it seems like that's that's probably like a good place for me and then you know you just gotta ignore ignore the the bros on instagram who are gonna be like well you're not doing [__] unless it's 35 buddy exactly that's that's exactly correct and and i get this a lot like oh you're not doing it's not cold enough or or how long can you do this for and that's the biggest thing is it's not about the the length of time you're doing this it's about getting your body to adapt to it and just doing it consistently on a daily basis or a couple times a week and getting into the same practice the wim hof method which
the wim hof method which all respect to wim hof i didn't like how a lot of these people online are all about endurance because i don't think that that's not the point that i like to make of of it is not how long you can stay in the water but what are you getting out of it and how or is your body adapting to it and as long as you're just doing it you're getting the benefit yeah it's kind of like in weightlifting like ego lifting it's like it doesn't like stop they don't ask me how much i bench you know what i mean at the end of the day it's about like your connection with your body feeling good being healthy moving well that's what matters it's not like you know what i mean it's crazy how so many people can take anything to that point the same people who are like competitive about how much weight you know it's like like how cold you go for how long it's like all right man and there's a space for that i like the cold bros like that's yeah that's funny yeah we traded much of using that um but there's there's if you want to do it for if that's your goal is endurance like sure i can we can get your mind to an endurance mindset and how do you push further and i just haven't had a lot of people fulfilled by that like yeah because is are there adverse effects so like let's say someone sees something where they're like you know oh i really need to do 35 degrees and they do that like are there any dangers to kind of like pushing it too far at first like could you have heart issue like is there any sort of like danger to doing this yeah 100 i mean if you're going into too cold of water without knowing what you're doing and you have a cold shock experience your heart like there's a coronary spasm that you can have that that if your heart's not able to go from
that if your heart's not able to go from you know 70 to 170 and a huge spike uh there's the potential of death now is that that's pretty rare to have that but it's something to think about if you have a history of heart issues um a lot of people that push it end up pushing it into going into a pre-hypothermic state where they're having a real hard time rewarming themselves those are things where you can start having those different experiences where you're changing the stress from being something that's positive and it's just like lifting weights right you can go too hard and then you know bicep pops well if you go too hard you're you're gonna have some negative effects of of the you know hypothermia or you know blacking out this seems a lot like uh like when pen the penguin plunge became popular i just imagined the the things that would happen like what your experience what you're explaining right now would be like the super unhealthy overweight people who got challenged to do the penguin plunge jump into 34 degree water without having ever done it before and like weren't prepared for it and something bad happens the same way it would if that same person went into a gym and tried to deadlift 500 pounds right that's my only point about that is it's like when you're learning about this type of stuff you know don't look what other people are doing and don't listen to other people like go into it slowly find what works for you and slowly progress that's really the way to do anything and that's what you should do here too that's 100 you this is a personal experience this is something on um you need to be gradual with it and it's something of you against yourself it's
something of you against yourself it's not about you against anybody else and that's where you people see the most progress in this is when you learn how to adapt faster and let go and gratitude and you're just using it as this beautiful place that you can learn about yourself you end up going in the water for or you know for 10 15 20 minutes and you don't even realize it and so the key is my biggest thing is you can't fight the cold the more you fight the cold the colder that you get and the only way through it is to let go and surrender and when you surrender to that ego and you surrender to the cold and embrace it and just become a part of it then you're able to go further than you ever thought imaginable yeah that makes a lot of sense and i i'm really loving with their where this is going it's been very like uh very practical like a lot of really good takeaways here my last question is how often should we be doing this i'm thinking about buying like 40 pounds of ice at a time i'm like okay i need a big i need a bigger freezer how often should we ideally be doing this um especially when we're getting started i i think the the current uh literature says at you know 11 minutes a week is within you you get all these benefits of of a week now that's way less than i thought it was gonna be right no it it for me too which kind of but i've kind of been on the extreme where i did it every day for 600 days and freezing cold water um but i i tell you what i think i wouldn't recommend anybody do it for 600 days in a row the reason is is because i think you can also become desensitized right you want to maximize the
right you want to maximize the efficiency of these dopamine spikes of these um these hormone spikes that are propelling you forward because if you start becoming desensitized to them you start negating the effects so going you know a a couple days and then you know taking a couple day break and then doing it for a couple more i i always recommend people start out at like doing a 10-day challenge do it for 10 a 10-day cold water challenge just to get your body acclimated to it and see how that starts to improve your life or your mindset or whatever your attention to i think it's just the cold water but i think if you do it in spurts of but you're still scheduling then some some dedicated time to do that exposure yeah that makes a lot of sense that's wow it's way less than i thought it was going to be but even like two sessions per week would make sense and and i get like cycling it makes sense like we cycle all sorts of other things we cycle ashwagandha we cycle five http like all these different things um cycling or cold exposure makes a lot of sense well man this has been fascinating this is like everything i wanted to know about cold water therapy travis do you have any other questions no yeah i think i'm good yeah this is awesome great dude i really appreciate you coming on reaching out and uh wanting to get on the podcast to share this with us um i'm definitely going to start exposing myself to a little bit more cold water therapy i think that would really be really beneficial i highly recommend the listeners do too this has been like kind of a really good 101 to cold exposure so i i appreciate it man i
cold exposure so i i appreciate it man i know our listeners are going to want to find more about you so why don't you give yourself a plug man where can we find you sure yeah you can reach me at uh coldwater effect on instagram you can see kind of my 600 700 day journey in lake michigan every single morning and some of those tips and tricks for you um and also at coldwaterfx. com uh kind of get in touch with me with regarding coaching or if you want to try it yourself or you just have any questions i am there to help guide and educate and and help you get to the next level your life i love that man i love that this has been really really educational really powerful so i appreciate you sharing your story giving us a little bit of an intro into cold water exposure and um helping us just be better you know struggle to strength yeah get into that cold water embrace it so i appreciate you man and thank you embrace the stress exactly embrace that stress man thank you um thank you for coming on thank you for everyone who tuned in to another episode of the struggle to strength podcast we will see y'all next week [Music]
Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
The most valuable protocols are not built around spectacle. They are built around signals the body can read, recover from, and eventually use as a path back to steadiness.
Cold water does not wait for the perfect mood. That is part of its value. The ritual creates a small, controlled meeting with resistance before life delivers a larger one.
Many people wait to feel ready. Cold immersion teaches the opposite order. Enter with respect, settle the breath, and let confidence arrive through the body’s response.
Consistency matters, but so does judgment. Weather, fatigue, sleep, training load, and health all shape the right dose. A disciplined protocol listens as much as it commits.
Use cold immersion to practice readiness, not self-punishment.
Use cold immersion to practice readiness, not self-punishment.
Let confidence follow action and breath control.
Adjust the dose to the body in front of you that day.
