Transcript: Cold Adaptation Begins With the Breath

This transcript is grouped in two-minute sections. Each timestamp opens the source video at that moment.

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right now it's the day at the beach your body will feel tingly that's okay you just remind yourself this is okay my body can handle this and breathe so some people when they plunge into cold water just start freaking out and i get it i've also had my share of screaming but my friend bob soulier has studied with the wim hof method and met wim hof also known as the iceman personally he showed me how to approach cold therapy properly and why we should even bother plunging into freezing cold water so you guys know that i'm into all this cold adaptation and cold thermogenesis it has like a million names and bob soulier is one of the first people that introduced me to the wim hof breathing techniques and helped me take the plunge so welcome to my channel well it's great to be here hilda great thank you for being here thanks for coming to visit us and our dog who might pop in and out of the bed yeah this is lacey lacey's very sweet she needs loving this is her third home bob was telling me she owns this joint so talk to me about how you first got into cold therapy right so you know i call it the party trick that opens your heart um and it began with a challenge it began with someone coming from a brian mckenzie workshop down in virginia beach a crossfitter who told us that you could do more push-ups holding your breath than you could um you know normally breathing normally and and that led me to investigate whim which led to the cold shower challenge first and that was really the the genesis it was like a hard thing that changed me so i started doing those showers so talk to us about that cold shower challenge in case some of us want to just start with that okay so there's i mean it's an online thing too i mean posts it and i send it to all people that take my workshops but it's basically for it's a 20-day challenge for the first uh five days you do 15 seconds and you put it on your fridge and you check it off so you all it

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and you check it off so you all it doesn't you can start warm but finish cold okay so just always finish cold um and then the next week it's i think it's you know 30 seconds then 45 and then a minute so at a minute you've pretty much you're able to tolerate what we would normally do in an ice bath so once you can do a minute of cold showers you've sort of reached the point of self-control where you're not just going to jump out and you're going to be able to manage three minutes in the ice um your breathing is now under control you've you've generally after i don't know 30 seconds or so your breathing is going to come under control so in the beginning when you're doing the 15 seconds that might be a challenge in the beginning you know and when he says you're breathing under control what it means is that first you're like like your body is saying no this isn't good and what you have to do is help your mind reassure your body through your breathing everything's okay and then it's so cool because it builds your resilience and then when you meet any obstacle during the day you're like i can do this because i was just in the freaking cold water for a minute laura yes this is what i'm talking about right here right now oh you got in a little quicker though now we're in i'm getting there i'm totally getting there let's get loud get load get loads get a picture of the high five ben if you can baby you got that one more here we go all right is that good you got it all right here we are we're already at two minutes and 24 seconds you know and so this is a party it's a party yes do it like a party and when you're used to being cold it it's like your body's like i've done this before i can handle this can i get one more high five yeah sure ready all right there we go you're using your breath to train your vagus nerve you're using the out breath to calm and to tell your body that everything's okay so you're really you're hacking

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you're really you're hacking your nervous system using your breath and you're using it to control yourself in a situation that you usually perceive as something you would never do you wouldn't want to be there really uncomfortable some people perceive it as you know almost death and um and you're okay yeah and in fact you're calm and as i tell people they ask you know so how long do you stay in the ice path the answer is until you're calm until you're smiling and when you're smiling you're good you're that's it you're you've done it so because then you've learned the self-control and then you get these awesome you know benefits from the cold too right that's what i was gonna say yeah like bubs into how strong and resilient and focused and just how good this is for your spirit but it's so good for the body too and i think that's what won me over when i realized oh my gosh like well i want you to explain but it's just good for so many functions right i mean so my game is autonomic self-control in many different ways but whatever allows us to manage our own nervous system our own autonomic especially those parts that we believed weren't under our control so you know inflammatory response uh our circulatory system and so on all those things learning to control those intentionally and there are tons of from coal tons of benefits uh anti-inflammatory benefits uh norepinephrine boost which is your you know stable mood alertness uh neurotransmitter uh so mitochondrial rich fat production you know so-called brown fat production um and then psychologically it's as we say it serves as a mirror for yourself that day so how you show up in the cold is sort of how you are at that moment so that gives you it's a feedback loop which is really

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you it's a feedback loop which is really powerful um and i mean so even for neuro regeneration though cold is uh it regenerates it has produces what's called cold shock proteins which um rebuild your your synapses so it kind of breaks them down and then they rebuild so it's it's very uh beneficial and it increases your insulin sensitivity so for a lot of us you know in this western world who's living on the packaged food diet and you know standard american diet our insulin sensitivity in a lot of cases has probably reduced we don't respond as well to insulin cold increases that sensitivity so that stuff that you want to respond to you respond to more so you it's you know getting getting your biochemistry back to a better baseline so those are some big benefits yeah those are some of the big ones right i always think of it kind of like weight training oh and also it's also a metabolic boost right you know you want to drop you can probably drop weight or lose fat but i mean it does burn a ton more you know calories in that time period so i'm definitely i feel since i started i feel more defined even though i'm not working out anymore but on top of that i was going to say i just feel like it's like weight training for the body but without lifting the weights in the sense that um you know when you're doing your heaviest weights you feel fatigued you're like in the moment your body is stressed your muscles are working hard but then they say the next day when you're resting you know the muscle repairs itself and so this is what he's talking about about synapses like kind of connecting again it's like things that are challenged in that moment rebuild and help your body be stronger and i mean cold you know i i say in my workshops it's been used it's been known for 100 years for you know handling trauma um if you go into a trauma you know level one trauma center if you're one of those people that's you know been

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one of those people that's you know been a terrible i don't know accident or something but they need to take your slow down all your processes they make you hypothermic on purpose it's used to save lives you know you hear those stories about the kids that fall into a cold body of water and they're at the bottom of the river for 45 minutes and then they're revived and they're okay is because cold preserves the conditions of the cells so it's it's a very you know restorative thing that you're doing and you're also you know here we sit in our house here which is at probably 68 degrees at the moment it exposes you to something outside of our narrow band of comfort which is like 68 to 72 degrees which we think oh my gosh above that i'm just not comfortable below that i'm not coming it gives you a moment to realize this is not how we evolve we did not evolve at 68 degrees yeah all year long you guys i used to well all of us um in the summer we cool our house to about you know 70 degrees in the winter we heat it to about like you said that band between 68 and 72 so my body never has to work to get my core temperature where it should be so this is one reason some postulate that people have diabetes or obesity because their bodies aren't working and i used to tell my husband drop me off like right in front of the store because i don't even want to walk from where the car parks to the store that's how ridiculous i was and now i've had a mindset flip as i've turned to embrace the cold and i can't get over how you know resilient and strong and and body positive i feel from putting my body through this short amount of stress now how often do you tell them how often do you do this so i was going to say i've just been posting recently um and i put something out on instagram about like we only have eight weeks of winter left guys what are you going to do with it get it this is like i don't know if you realize the opportunity here this is your chance don't avoid it get out there you decide what it is and that's what it is that's the beauty it's a party

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it's a party it's a you know a day at the beach right now it's the day at the beach your body will feel tingly that's okay you just remind yourself this is okay my body can handle this and breathe so the this the calming is on the exhale so you lengthen your exhale just and link to something in your environment it can be a person could be the sky it could be a bird it could be your own sense of self sometimes i'll make ripples in the water i'll even blow on the water just for fun just like and i'll even motorboat the water a little bit like [Music] so the more you turn it into fun yes and intention whatever your intention is the easier the more fun this whole thing becomes when i turn my shower to cold i will like yell yes because i'm telling my body this is what you want i could yell no and my body would react differently so right now i'm like saying okay bring it killed your music oh well it's okay we don't we have our soundtrack yeah we're okay we got our noise we got ourselves in we're partying now yes but yeah absolutely and it's so and if honestly you tell yourself it's not fun and guess what it's not fun if you do that and if you want to fight you could fight but you that would be very miserable you would not be happy so no it reminds me when i had children when i was burying my children i was like okay i've got to relax into this i let the waves of contractions float over me and it made the process easier it wasn't easy but it was easier and so right now i'm telling myself oh yeah i've had this tingly feeling before that's okay i can do this and you know so this this practice in the beginning had very much of a dude vibe to it of course right i mean it started with guys with a guy but the women you know obviously anyone who's done childbirth yes you've been through

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childbirth yes you've been through something incredibly challenging that you know guys can't relate to and and i i you know we've seen so many the women practitioners and the coaches are just amazing they have really expanded the field and has been really important for all of us maybe i'll do that one day right yeah coach it absolutely take people through yeah you can absolutely you're doing it right now well and this is what i was saying earlier you guys when you do something like this you realize the possibilities of what i can do are endless very encouraging i'll tell you the other thing hilda is the connection so this is easier with people with your tribe this is something when you are with others in the workshops people make it through because others are encouraging them they believe in them they're telling them they're okay they're telling them they can do it and we believe what we tell each other whatever someone puts in front of you you have to think about right whatever it is it could be a good thing or a bad thing so if people are all telling you you've got this you're going to go for it and you're going to do better you're going to go beyond your your normal limits and find out you can do these things and then you incorporate that and you realize you can do this yourself wow you can do it yourself so but it begins it usually begins with the tribe there's there's great power in that tribe we are at a minute and 31 seconds awesome so i'm not that good at math but that's halfway there right we're halfway there we're almost there if i actually i believe i said it for three minutes okay well anyways here we are so yeah really what we decide is what we get in in so many ways and this is just another example it's a you know a very stark example um and so you know if anybody by the way for the folks that have been through my workshops this is what i'm talking about come not hit my uh you know ping me on my uh phone cell or dm me or whatever

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phone cell or dm me or whatever these are set up all winter oh my gosh and it's ambient temperature it's right now i guess 38 40 degrees um but i'm happy to get in here with you guys and a couple of my workshop participants have come by we call this ice church that's awesome because you're basically here getting the faith you know we're in it we're here to win it and it's just making the connections sometimes one of the more fun crazy things is at night yeah come out here at night and you have basically what i call the jack london experience oh my gosh where it's dark you're in the cold the stars are out you're you know if the fire's not going you're really by yourself right in this dark cold place and you're okay and it's wild it's just so beautiful two seconds one second we did it three minutes that was three minutes right on man that's it yeah right yes yeah and i have to interject here that i used to say to myself okay hold on you can make it through winter it's only one season of the year like i would just be like but i was fighting it bob on the other side i was like oh no it's just one season i've got to just get through but now i'm like this is great it's an opportunity it is oh my god this is your chance yeah this is your chance to like expand your range of comfort yeah you know go and go to that edge and beyond it so like what is my practice these days well out in the back here i have two uh 100 gallon stock tanks and those are i let them get to an ambient temperature whatever it is out there and a couple days ago the ice was about that thick we actually had to take a sledgehammer to break it we were laughing our butts off because it was like just making slushies in the backyard when we got in it was you know it was awesome at the moment because it's a little bit above freezing from the ice but the water's about 36. okay 37 is what's you know pretty cold um so you know these days it's breath work and

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it's breath work and i'm either in here or you know amazingly at our ymca we have a sauna at the local y and the for some reason that water coming out of the shower is really cold also i mean it takes your breath away so i've been sort of doing some hot cold stuff there i've also been doing some hot cold stuff here okay so some cardio for people getting started remember he said you can just work on building up how long you're cold in the shower but another technique i've heard of is this toggling back and forth between the temperature of hot and cold can you explain what that might look like well so usually it's um i guess you you always end cold that's if you want where you begin it doesn't matter as much as how you act so you end cold so you could be in a sauna or you could even be in your own bathtub with just hot water if it gets hot enough um and that's up to you that's what nine minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes in the sauna 100 i mean if you can get 175 degree sauna for you know 15 minutes great but uh not all of us have that so some kind of hot though um and then into the cold um for us that's out here in this tub and i you know three minutes i've done that times five but um that's a great by the way that's a workout that is a workout by itself that metabolically will kick your butt and that's your workout for the day and it's also going to go through a bunch of water you're going to use a lot because water is your insulation so you're going to use that to regulate your temperature so you're gonna need more water when you're done with that um but as a starter i don't first of all it's not a place to start because you can you have what's called what is it called oh my gosh after drop sorry about that yeah that's fine yeah where if you if your body perceives that you are now warm it will release the cold in your extremities into your core that's not cool that is cool it's too cold but it's not it's it's not good for

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cold but it's not it's it's not good for you if that happens quickly and it's out not in your control so in the beginning and if you're not conditioned you don't want to start with hot cold therapy you want to get used to cold first but can't you just do hot cold in the shower well you can do that that's not as extreme it's not as exciting it's not as extreme right but you wouldn't want to do um ice bath to hot okay um without some conditioning first you want to get used you need to be able to be really calm in an ice bath before you start moving yourself into any kind of a sauna situation because otherwise because your circulatory system is getting a massive workout here it's you know 160 000 kilometers of little muscles around all your tubes that learn to relax and constrict through this training and and it doesn't and if you haven't been going through this this kind of training it's not going to know what to do so it might you know your hypothalamus is the thing that kind of regulates um homeostasis and says okay we're cool everything's good now i can release that that uh blood and the cool blood but if if he hasn't been trained to receive uh what is okay it might decide that you know you just stepped inside after being really cold i'm just gonna release all that cold to your core and that it can be painful it can actually be dangerous that's why when bob first walked me through doing an ice bath he was like okay don't go inside immediately like do a little bit of movement outside like kind of transition so i like that idea yeah the recovery is actually sometimes and often the most challenging part of this whole process the recovery after the cold because you need to rewarm yourself intentionally and that's when you need to really stay focused actually that's the pro focus matters for all of this but after the cold when you would normally shiver you set your mind i'm not going to shiver you decide i'm not going to shiver i'm going to manage this i'm going to stay focused i'm going to stay calm i'm going to stay in this moment and stay stay

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to stay in this moment and stay stay present and you reward yourself intentionally you learn to do it we we can all do it and that's a great benefit that's like a gift because now you're learning real self-control because most people are gonna you know you're gonna shiver normally right so learning not to do the thing that your body is just so programmed to do that you don't even know you have control over yeah is just a huge gift so yeah and when you say that you don't have control over it reminds me of number one lucy here no lacey chewing on her little bone i hope you probably can hear that that's okay but the other thing it reminds me of wim hoff because they did studies on this man who's known as the ice man from the netherlands who was able to withstand long i mean guinness book of world records length of time right exposing his body to the ice but not just that they injected in his bloodstream i believe some viruses that they thought would cause disease and using his mind he was able to fight it and he did not become sick and the scientists were blown away isn't that right right he used his breathing to knock down his immune system but only the part that's hyperactive so he used he suppressed his immune response typically that endotoxin will cause fever will cause you know malaise and feeling horrible and out of the 100 000 other people that have ever gone through it before him they all had had that response and then he showed that he could control it so he was like the first and then he trained 12 other people to do it he also did there's another experiment that happened at wayne state in detroit where um in an fmri i believe it was where he and some other subjects were put through a cold suit in an fmri and they changed the temperature of the water on their skin and everybody shivered everyone got cold and for three of the iterations wim didn't do anything special and he felt

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didn't do anything special and he felt cold his skin temperature dropped everything just the same as anybody else and then they said whim now do your thing and on the fourth time he did his thing and of course and he'll say this on his own you know podcast or whatever but um he couldn't change his breathing he couldn't change anything he couldn't do anything because you're in that machine you can't really move all he could use was his mind and with his mind he raised his skin temperature and and caught and actually it was like one degree above uh normal and was able to keep it there it was cold water so and it was you and it was using the um the the uh periaqueductal gray which is like the base of the brainstem like the most basic part that we believe you know no one believed you could control at all and he was using that it was very activated his prefrontal cortex was like off it was off the whole your you know ego part of your brain was just off but his his animal part of his brain was very active so and that's just training it's true that's what i was thinking yeah it's like when someone sits down the piano and they play a beautiful piece don't think that they just did that the first time they sat down like they have been practicing and practicing practicing i'm not at wim hof's level but i like to challenge myself so in a minute we're going to get outside in this tub and experience the cold and try to use our breathing and our mindset to help us endure and not only endure but enjoy the experience right exactly as i said when you're smiling you're done yeah that's that's it now you've now succeeded yes so it has not there's no the winning is your own self-control right that to me is the best gift in the world because we the more we can control how we experience this world the more we can help others i mean the more we can you know truly give love and and experience love and be happy healthy and strong and that's you know that's what we all really want absolutely and i've heard more and more

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and i've heard more and more uh health experts like you talk about the importance of mindset and i think i used to overlook that i'm generally a positive person so it hadn't occurred to me how that is affecting how i perceive the world the way we look at it is the way it is so i can say oh my gosh it's such a gray day i'm never going to get anything done today well that's exactly how it's going to be or i can say it's overcast but i know that sun is still there and i'm going to go get some rays and i'm going to have a great day that makes all the difference right you're born into paradise on earth it's right here right now now go find it it's right there you see just it's here to see you're in it man you're in it right now yeah if you can believe that every moment you're you're what else is it now we're out of the ice actually this could be the most challenging part this is the rewarming so i will tell people in my workshops you you want to do some large focused intentional movement so that can include you know i mean squats or just squeezing the muscles behind your between your shoulder blades something that that um is a large muscle movement or back into the horse stance which you'll see a lot with the you know you watch wim you watch his instructors you watch the expeditions and we're doing this and you get into this rhythmic motion that re-warms your body in a much more controlled way and then you are in control you remain in control so people say well aren't you cold out there well actually right now i'm tingly i don't know how are you hilda i'm okay you know people ask me that too when i'm outside quote adapting and i'm like it's cold but i'm okay so as you keep your intention you stay in control and actually you're you're fine you're

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and actually you're you're fine i mean is it cold oh it's cold sure but we're not in trouble so as long as we perceive that we're okay we really are and these rhythms this is you know this is ancient stuff that we're doing here right this is like you know qigong tai chi and it's just linking up with the rhythms of your breath and your body and so we are re-warming you know slowly and intentionally instead of running we could just run inside to 68 degrees and you know what would happen it would hurt we'd be like oh my feet my hands because we'd be you know all the blood like i said might run from the extreme or in front yeah the cold blood might run into these into your core thanks for watching you guys let me know in the comments below what you thought of this video subscribe so you don't miss a thing and click on the notification bell so you can be alerted the next time i upload a video we'll talk soon hasta fronto