[Transcript starts at 1:19]
Hello, hello, hello my podcast people and thank you for joining me for yet another episode of my favorite podcast. So in today's episode, we are talking about cold showers. This episode will drop on Thursday, January 12th, so it's not quite like still the very beginning of the new year, but we know it's the time of the year, we got new resolutions and things like that, and I've seen some people trying to do cold showers. And while that's not my cup of tea, I did experiment with the whole cold shower, cold plunge thing back in 2016, 2017, I went all in. I literally put my body all the way in, but also went in with the research and courses and things like that.
And so I wanna share with you what I learned, what I know, hopefully simplify some things and kind of tie it into just building a habit in general and the steps surrounding that so that you actually stick to the habit. Because I see people jumping in or trying to jump in and really suffering through it, which actually is not the intent of a cold shower. It's not the best way to get the most out of a cold shower. So I want to go over all of that today.
Now as it relates to cold showers, realistically, uh, the main benefit that I wanna talk about is in relation to the nervous system. Yes, there are other, uh, positive effects and positive benefits, thermogenesis, um, brown fat production, things like that, but, and, and potential like hormonal and um, uh, immune system benefits to be had, but actually a little tangent here, it should really be called the neuroendocrine system, uh, cuz the nervous system ties into all those. But the benefits that I wanna talk about relate to the nervous system. This also isn't to be confused, or I don't want to be confused with using ice post-injury, which is a very outdated way to treat an injury.
I'm not gonna lie. When I hurt my knee three months ago, I did a little bit of, we'll call it contrast treatment, where it was ice for just, you know, five, 10 minutes max, and I was 100% using it for the analgesic effects just to help with pain mitigation. It slows nerve conduction velocity, so it can actually absolutely help with, with pain. We're, we're slowing the conduction of the, that, um, uh, those, the, the, the nociceptors there. Of the information being relayed from the nociceptors in the tissue, but uh, as a treatment modality, post-injury, very outdated and actually not very good for helping with swelling and especially for helping with healing in, in the acute phase.
So if you want to learn more about that and why ice is very outdated, uh, check out my guy Mike Stella. He's an ATC, athletic trainer. Uh, he is @mikestella_atc on Instagram. We'll link everything in the show notes. He also has a course, an online course called uh, the End of the Ice Age, I believe. So if you are interested in any of that, check him out.
Next part, yes, there are circulatory effects or benefits, especially to be had from contrast therapy where we go hot cold, hot cold, hot, cold. I'm not, I don't really wanna talk about any of those today. The thing that I wanna focus on in this episode is cold showers as it relates to the nervous system effects, which is what I think most folks are actually benefiting from, and really, um, I want people to be focused on that and understand better, understand that.
So, like I said, um, in the intro, I believe, I don't know, I talk so much I don't remember when I said it, but I have been dabbling in this and playing around with this stuff since 2016, 2017 when Wim Hof really came onto the scene.
Brian Mackenzie was doing a ton back then, and I still think that he, uh, and his crew, I don't even know they changed their name. They went from like, uh, I don't remember the original name was, and they went to Shift and I'm not sure what it is now. Um, we'll find that and I'll link his Instagram account, or at least the company account, um, in the show notes.
But I took his breath and exposure course. I did the Wim Hof experience, uh, out in LA and I was all up in the cold bath and things like that. And I did this and did this investigation simply to learn more, not because I felt like I needed and needed it. And I think that's a very important distinguished, thing to distinguish, uh, because as we hop into the new year and people have resolutions and goals and things like that, we also wanna make sure that they are our goals. And are our, it's so hard to say are, our goals and resolutions.
So something like cold, just in general, something like cold period, it's unpleasant. And so my goal wasn't to, if I should, let me back it up. If the goal of exposing myself to it was not my own, I'm gonna stop because it is very unpleasant. Whereas if it is my goal and my reasoning for doing it is not just because everyone else is doing it because I think it could actually help me or because I wanna learn more about it, then we're better able to kind of, uh, push through.
But also, um, and we're gonna talk about this a little bit later, we're able to set things up in such a way that I can actually stick to it. But suffice to say, if you're thinking about doing cold showers, awesome. Just make sure that the goal is yours and you're not just like, I'm doing it cuz I'm supposed to, or some like health guru said I had to. Cuz you don't have to. You can get the benefits, especially from the nervous system in other ways. Um, it's just the cold will always be cold. And so we'll dive into that. All right.
So next part here, and if you've tried doing any kind of cold showers or cold plunges, things like that, you may have already experienced this and that all cold is not created equal.
Some cold feels colder and is colder than other cold. So if we're looking at, uh, water versus air, so going in a cold shower or going in a cold bath versus going outside in the cold cause a bunch of you live where the weather hurts your face. So could you do this just by going outside? Yes. But I will say that if you try this with like a bath, or you understand that why you don't wanna get wet when it's cold, it's cuz your, the body loses heat faster when it's in, uh, cold water versus cold air because water is a better conductor of heat. So we lose that heat faster.
Second part is cold showers versus cold baths. So a cold shower may feel worse than a cold bath because with a cold shower, the water is constantly being replaced. So it's like cold, cold, cold, cold, cold. Whereas if you were to sit in a bath, not like in the ocean, but in a bath, a smaller container, that water does theoretically have some time to heat up as you lose body heat. Uh, so it can feel worse if you are in the shower and there's like, you know, turn around and now it's on your front. So something to be thin, something to be said about that. Just want to put that out there.
Okay, so let's hop on into like the nitty gritty of this.
So the whole goal when using a cold shower, in my humble opinion, is to elicit a sympathetic response, right? We have the parasympathetic nervous system. We have the sympathetic nervous system. A sympathetic response is gonna be flight or fight. Cold will always elicit a sympathetic response. Cold is always going to be cold.
The benefit to be had from cold showers and cold exposure is not just that you were cold, it's that you have this sympathetic response and then you get to train your response to that sympathetic response. The goal is not to dampen your sympathetic response. It's to have that sympathetic response, that flight or flight that, oh shit, get me out of this thing, and then you have the opportunity to respond to it. And that's what we're looking to train. Is that response to the sympathetic response. You could use anything to elicit a sympathetic response. You could go on Instagram and use trolls, right? They elicit a sympathetic response, but the cold will always be cold, physiologically it touches you, and you're like, oh, shit. I'm awake. I gotta do something. What's, what's going on here? And so you always get that sympathetic response, which is why it is such a, um, helpful, valuable, easy tool to use.
Now again, the focus needs to be on the response, not the stimulus, right? So the goal here, if we're focusing on our response, right, the response, the sympathetic response, the goal that we want is to get back to calm nasal breathing as quickly as possible and then remain there. And we're gonna go into why it's nasal breathing. Y'all know I love me some breathing. So all that to say if you are taking a cold shower or you're trying a cold bath and you are just sitting there just shivering like crazy, you're holding your breath, you're just like miserable, you're defeating the purpose of doing this, right? Because the goal is not just to expose yourself to the cold. The goal is to expose yourself to the cold, have that sympathetic response, flight or flight, get me the hell out of here, and then look to retrain your response to that.
Well, like I said a little bit before, we're gonna dive into the breathing side of things. I love all things breathing, and so I'm gonna shamelessly pitch my breathing course. I don't actively really sell it anymore because I am in the, uh, you know, online business space now. But I will always be The Movement Maestro. And this is where I got my start. And actually the very first online, uh, or yeah, we'll say the very first online product that I ever created was the online course Breathing with the Maestro. So, if you wanna check that out, I will give you 20% off. Why? Because I can, because I can. It's mine. So if you use the code MAESTROONTHEMIC, all caps, you'll get 20% off of my, it's a two hour course, two hour online course about all things breathing.
And we're gonna go into some of the topics here. And so if you're like, Hey, I wanna go deeper with that, um, yes, I talk about mouth breathing, of course. Uh, I talk about taping your mouth. I talk about breathing strategies and how to use it for pressurization. I'm gonna go into the, the, um, neurological effects and tie-ins within the rest of this, this podcast episode.
But if you wanna dive in, you wanna go check it out, just go check out the, uh, registration page and you can see all the things that are in it. And then if you wanna buy it, amazing. MAESTROONTHEMIC, all caps saves you 20%. The link to get there will be in the show notes, themovementmaestro.com/440. That's the episode number. Check that out. All the things will be there.
Like I said a little bit before, the goal, when we expose ourselves to this cold temperature, this cold whatever, cold exposure, the goal here is to get back to regulated breathing. And with that breathing, we, we want it to be calm, composed, and primarily nasal breathing.
We don't want, we don't want that hyperventilation, which is a little bit of a misnomer, but we don't want that really fast breathing through your mouth. It can start there right in through the nose, out through the mouth. But ultimately we're looking to get back to nasal breathing. Why? Why nasal breathing?
Because nasal breathing is the shit. It's the best. So there's a little book actually called Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life. Pretty interesting. Um, I talk about all of this in that online course that I mentioned, but, the goal with nasal breathing. Few benefits to be had, quite a few, but we're gonna go over like the main ones as it relates to kind of the cold and nervous system.
Number one is clearly, especially if you're watching the video, you see this, but if you have a nose and a mouth, you understand this. Your nose holes are smaller than your mouth hole. Right. Your nostrils are smaller than your mouth. This creates resistance to breathing. This is a good thing, both for the inhale and the exhale. As it relates to the nervous system, the way that this ties in is that as we get resistance to inhale and inhaling and exhaling, it forces us to use our diaphragm more, especially with the inhale. So that means that we're using the diaphragm more, and from a mechanical perspective, the vagus nerve resides or runs through the middle of the um, diaphragm and so we actually get like a manual massage of that vagus nerve. The vagus nerve does what? It's gonna tie into that parasympathetic, parasympathetic activity, which is rest and digest. So we see by using our nose, nasal breathing, forcing our diaphragm to work more, we can actually get into a calmer state via the vagus nerve.
If we go on the kind of physiological side of this and we go into the Bohr effect, many call it the boring effect, but what we're looking at with nasal breathing is improved carbon dioxide tolerance. The carbon dioxide has a very important role, uh, in allowing our tissues to be oxygenated, and this is the boring or the Bohr effect.
So the more carbon dioxide that we have in the system, the more willing that hemoglobin is to release oxygen into the tissues. So you could be fully saturated and all of your, um, red blood cells have oxygen on them, but if they're not releasing that oxygen to the tissues, to your brain, you feel deprived. Right. So in order for that to happen, we need carbon dioxide in the system.
Smaller nostrils or smaller holes on your face, right via your nostrils means we blow off less carbon dioxide. When we exhale through our mouth, more carbon dioxide leaves the system. That means there's less carbon dioxide in the system, which means that hemoglobin wants to hold onto that oxygen. The next or the, I can go say, the tie-in to this is that we see this mouth breathing as a circular process where the reason that we breathe, I mean, the reason that we take a breath is actually to get rid of oxygen.
It's not to get, excuse me, the reason that we take a breath is to get rid of carbon dioxide. It's not to get oxygen in. So the better that we are at tolerating carbon dioxide in our system, the less of that impetus we have to take a breath.
And if you've ever done this yourself or you just like start breathing quickly, you can literally put yourself into an anxious state. You're not using that diaphragm as much. You're taking these really, really shallow breaths, and it keeps us in this sympathetic state.
So as we mouth breathe, as we blow off carbon dioxide, our chemoreceptors, they never get used to having more carbon dioxide in the system, which means that they get activated at lower levels of carbon dioxide.
And so it builds up a little bit in the system and it gets triggered to take a breath. And that perpetuates this cycle of shallow breathing, which can really greatly contribute to those, that feeling of anxiety, cuz you're in that constant flight or fight state.
So we see something as simple as nasal breathing, closing your mouth, taking those slower breaths can help get you out of that, uh, arou, hyper aroused state, right? Get you more into that parasympathetic state and bring things down.
So I know that this episode is about cold showers, but again, the, the biggest benefit that we're gonna see from exposing ourselves to this noxious stimulus is in how we respond to it. It's not the stimulus itself.
So in this case, this is why we see breathing, or excuse me, breath practices having such a profound effect on people as it relates to regulating their nervous system. Using cold is just a way, it's gonna thrust us into this heightened state, which can help when people are like, ah, it helps wake me up. Absolutely. Cuz it shoots you into this sympathetic state.
As it relates to, um, more like ongoing long-lasting benefits, we tie in the nervous system here and we see we get this sympathetic arousal and from there we have the, have the opportunity to respond with it and look to control things with our breath.
So as it relates to actually easing into this so that this practice, if you choose to do it again, there's certain, there's certain, and maybe I didn't say this earlier, but there's just certain personality types and neurological types of people that respond better to this.
I personally hate it. I hate the cold, but I'm also not living this kind of, you know, hyper aroused or anxious state. So, like I said earlier, the reason that I investigated this was simply to learn more about it. I definitely see some people within my system, my ecosystem, Ashley's one of them. I'm thinking about my girl Venus, that that tend towards more of this anxious side of things, um, or higher energy state with some of these things, and just in general, rather, in life, and something like a cold shower and eliciting that sympathetic response, and then training the response to it can be very, very helpful.
So if this is something that you're thinking that you might wanna do, my suggestion is to ease in. Just like with any other goal, you wanna set yourself up for success.
I understand the, I don't know the perception around this that, oh, I'm just gonna like jump in and like suffer through it. But. Remember, the benefit is not in the stimulus. The benefit is in how you respond to the response that you will inherently have because of that stimulus. So my suggestion as it relates to easing into this, number one, is you can start with just exposing your hands.
So if you're gonna do it in the shower, go ahead and have your regular warm shower. And then at the end make it cold and just put your hands in it. Start with that, and then you can look to go and either increase the time that your hands are in, or you can look to increase the amount of, you know, tissue exposure.
From there, you can move- I have found that putting your back in first, that's why we go to the fetal position, right? It's this, we can tolerate more back there. So, you know, putting your back in first and then doing that same thing where we look to gradually increase the time, that can be helpful. The focus again though, should always be on the breath.
So whether you're exposing just your hands or you're exposing your back, it isn't like, oh, I'm just gonna put my back and then just shiver it and I'm, the time is going more. The whole goal is can you get your breathing under control? Can we get back to a nice regulated state? Can we slow our breathing down and can it be all of that nasal breathing?
Again, it's okay if you start off with that to try kind of the Lamaze breathing, if you will. But the goal is ultimately to get back to a restful state, which is gonna be purely nasal breathing, right? If you're just sitting around in your house, I should not be hearing your breathing. That's disgusting.
I'm just gonna say it. It is disgusting. Should be able to just be breathing in and out through the nose. So many benefits to be had by this. I really, I should probably plug the course harder because just when I was selling it, you know, a few years ago, I was plugging it really hard, but just understanding the tremendous health effects and neurological effects that we could have just by closing our mouth and focusing on breathing.
So again, head to the show notes. The link to the course will be in there and save yourself some monies. Uh, but so bring it back into the episode. The goal here with exposing ourself to the cold using cold showers, something like that, is to focus on your breath, get that breath back to normal, to calm, to even, to all nasal as quickly as you can.
Big picture here and then I'm gonna wrap it up.
As it relates to goal setting, make sure that the goal is yours. I said that I'm not doing cold showers. That's not my goal. I, when I wanted to do them, to learn about it, like that was my goal. Learn about cold showers, experience it so I could communicate this and help other people out.
But I wasn't doing it because everyone else was doing it. I wasn't doing, cause I thought I should be doing it. It was literally because I wanted to be doing it. So as it relates to cold showers, or just any goals in general, make sure that they are yours and that you understand why you are doing the thing.
Lastly, as it relates to actually sticking to the thing, look to create a sustainable process. Ease into it. The process, most of the time is the point, so figure out ways that you can actually make each step of that process enjoyable and achievable.
All right. I do believe that is it. If you got any questions, shoot me a DM.
I actually really do like talking about this stuff. I will for will forever and for always, that's what I wanted to say, I will forever and forever always be The Movement Maestro, uh, and breathing is the most fundamental movement pattern that we have.
All right DM me if you want, text me 3 1 0 7 3 7 2 3 4 5 if you got questions about the breathing or anything like that?
As always, endlessly appreciative for every single one of you. Until next time, friends, Maestro out.
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