Mystery Gift Box #027 | Start Cold Plunging: Everything You Need To Know

Getting to very, very cold water. You know, 30 degree Fahrenheit or even low 40 degree Fahrenheit can put somebody into a state of cold water shock. I mean, people can die doing that. So obviously you want to approach this with some caution, but for most people getting into 60 degree water or 50 degree water, or if you're acclimated and comfortable with it, you know, 40 degree water or 45 degree water can have tremendously beneficial results

Here's a general rule of thumb. It should be cold enough that you really want to get out, but not so cold that it's unsafe.

It was only about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. the interesting thing is despite that fairly modest cold temperature, by simply extending the duration of time that people were in that water, they experienced enormous

11 minutes total of deliberate cold exposure per week is a pretty good number to use if you need a number in order to keep you consistent. So what do I recommend, I recommend that you get at least 11 minutes total per week, but at the point where 11 minutes total per week is very easy for you, where is no longer representing a significant mental challenge, meaning you're not experiencing many of these walls, you're excited to get into the cold shower immersion. Then I would say either lower the temperature safely, of course, extend the duration safely, of course, or increase the frequency so that you're doing this perhaps every day or maybe five days a week or three days a week. I personally get tremendous benefit from doing deliberate cold exposure three times a week

Timed protocol because that one is very straightforward, although I do not think it is as powerful for building mental resilience. The time protocol would be Monday, I do one minute of deliberate cold exposure at a given temperature. Wednesday, I extend that by 50% and Friday, I do deliberate cold exposure for twice as long

It doesn't have to actually have ice in it, provided it's cold enough for anytime, anywhere, excuse me, between one and five times per week. But it turns out that just one exposure per week can be valuable.

If you are somebody who experiences a lot of delayed onset muscle soreness, taking a cold shower after your training or getting into a cold immersion after your training, even if it's a few hours later ought to help. And if you are doing particularly intense training, then you probably want to ratchet up the number of cold exposure sessions that you're doing even if those have to be done on separate days from your training, because a lot of the inflammatory effects of training, endurance and strength training are actually occurring some hours away from the training stimulus.

If you really want this to accelerate fat loss. And you want to get in until you just start to shiver… people like to look real stoic and tough when they're in there. Like they're just grinding through it with no pain at all. But the stillness is actually reducing the stimulus. If they sift around a little bit, you break up that thermal layer. That's where the real action is. Like do 50 degrees with a whirlpool jet on,

Alternating perhaps a minute to three minutes of cold exposure followed by a minute to three minutes of drying out in air and going back into the cold exposure, et cetera. I can tell you this from experience, this is a pretty brutal protocol.

when we have an eaten for some period of time, our baseline levels of norepinephrine and epinephrine are already elevated. And so cold exposure at those times ought to have an even greater effect on metabolism and resilience and so on. So for you fasters or your intermittent fasters out there, if you really want to get fancy, you can do your deliberate cold exposure when you are fasted. I certainly wouldn't recommend doing it with a very full stomach in any case.

So for those of you that are primarily interested in using deliberate cold exposure to increase dopamine levels in your brain and body, you can also do a combined protocol whereby you ingest caffeine 60 to 120 minutes before the deliberate cold exposure.

And the point is this, there are a number of quality studies showing that if you do deliberate cold exposure, in particular ice baths or getting into very cold water immediately after an endurance training session or a strength and hypertrophy session, it can indeed, yes, it can disrupt or prevent some of the adaptations that you are seeking with strength and hypertrophy and endurance workouts. Okay, so you heard that right. And I believe that to be true based on now several quality peer-reviewed studies.

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