- [Melissa] Ice baths.
- It's cold.
(people screaming)
- They're expensive, cold and super popular
with some people spending thousands on memberships or tubs.
But I wanna know, is there science behind all of this
or is it just a scam?
So I did some research, talked to people
and took a plunge into the world of ice baths.
Thank you to our patrons and to Native
for sponsoring a portion of this video.
About six months ago, my friend said
"I have a really fun surprise for you.
Just bring a bathing suit."
And I was like, okay, what are we doing?
Are we going swimming?
But when I got to the place
I realized that we weren't gonna be going swimming.
Instead we were gonna be sitting in ice baths
where I would be dipping myself
into four degree Celsius water.
I didn't expect to fall in love with this so much,
but I've been going once a week for almost half a year now.
It's something in my week that I look forward to doing,
but I think it made me weird.
- Ooh.
- You are doing ice baths like voluntarily, right?
- Yeah, for fun.
- Please pitch me this.
- Imagine you're standing in front of a body of water
that is four degrees Celsius.
- Great, I'm imagining four degrees Celsius.
- But you go in and you feel good.
It's like, it's like.
I was going say, like you feel like you're being reborn,
but that does sound a little culty.
- So you are just running cold baths
instead of taking showers.
- No, there's a place that I'm going to,
I'm going to a place
and spending money to sit in an ice tub.
- How much money have you spent?
- Okay, hang on, hang on.
- I'm gonna make a guess.
- Guess.
- 200 bucks.
- I was gonna say like $500.
- I also thought it was going to be around $500
and I was like there's no way
that I've spent more than that.
- That's a lot of money.
- I know. - That's a lot of money.
- Okay, how much do you spend? - Say the number.
- I spent $1,100 to date to do this of my own money.
- I think this means we pay her too much.
(group laughing)
- After being shamed, I wanted to see
if I could experience ice baths
without spending as much money
to see if it was the ice bath or something else.
I picked up some ice for 20 bucks
and human sized garbage can for $100.
Turns out it's expensive
to put a human body in a garbage can.
Now I couldn't do my experiment safely in my own apartment,
so I borrowed someone else's backyard.
Thank you to The Sorry Girls for hosting my ice bath.
Wasn't exactly a walk in the park to assemble,
but we got an ice bath set up, finally.
Let's do this. (laughs)
I was going to be sitting in a garbage can,
but I wasn't gonna be caught smelling like garbage.
So thank you to Native
for sponsoring this portion of today's video.
Native sent me these three products
and I'm very excited about them.
One of them I actually already have.
I just really like their products.
It smells so good.
The one that I usually buy is the lavender and rose one.
It just smells really floral like a garden.
So if you wanna smell like me, try that one.
This one that they sent me, it's called lilac and white tea.
This one's also really floral, outdoorsy.
Prancing in a field of flowers.
This one's their peach smell,
I'm actually wearing this one today
'cause I haven't had this one before
and I was putting on my necklace this morning
and I like lifted my arms and I smelled myself
and I smell pretty good.
But they have a huge range of smells,
if you're not into these kinds,
you want something being a little bit fresher
or a little bit muskier,
the citrus and musk smells really good, also cucumber mint.
I have the cucumber mint body wash.
Look at this, it's like a little Native family.
But I've been using their products for a really long time.
You know what's also great about Native?
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So if you wanna give their products a try
and you wanna discount,
you can use our link in the description or our code.
You can get 33% off a three pack.
Thank you to Native
for sponsoring this portion of today's video.
And now back to ice baths.
(Melissa gasping)
Oh my goodness.
I feel like human soup.
I'm getting out, I'm getting out, I'm getting out.
(water splashing)
It wasn't as cold as I thought it was gonna be,
but there's definitely ice in here.
Definitely chilly right now.
Ooh, I'm just cold and I'm gonna go warm up now.
I'm here to report back from my experiment
and my findings say that all of that felt very wrong.
I will say that sitting in a garbage can
is probably very different than sitting in a fancy tub
indoors in a very controlled calm environment.
There were birds flying, there were planes,
there was a rainstorm right before I went in the tub
I had to make the ice bath myself.
Did I waste money on a garbage can?
So if the thing that I love about ice baths
isn't the sitting in ice part,
who would've thought, then what is?
So I started doing some research.
Now beyond athletes using this for muscle recovery,
people are doing ice baths
for a bunch of different health reasons.
These are all from sites that sell cold plunges,
improve circulation, stronger immune systems,
chronic pain, boost resilience, energy recovery,
mood, reduce anxiety, improves your performance.
Clearly there are a lot of claims,
but how many of them are true?
I started looking into the science
and research behind these claims
and it got confusing pretty quickly.
So I asked for some help.
- I would definitely warn against all the claims you see
in the kind of popular media.
My name's Rohin, I'm a cardiologist from the UK
and I've been interested
in what ice baths can potentially achieve
for the last few years.
Some of the claims have been,
that it can be protective against heart disease, diabetes,
can be used to treat depression and can improve your libido,
boost your immune system,
but also treat autoimmune disease
which seems a little bit contradictory.
So yeah, I think there have been pretty much claims
that it can do anything and I would take them
with a, you know, dose of of skepticism.
- All of these health benefits
and claims around ice baths sound incredible
and some of them are really promising.
Then we came across this review paper from 2022.
So they looked at 104 studies on cold therapy
and basically concluded
that the science around ice baths is still inconclusive.
One because of who they're studying.
- These are small groups of people,
they're often not particularly representative
of the wider population.
So you have groups of say 10 men.
- [Melissa] This specific study was looking at
whether cold water swimming
had any effect on your metabolism.
And when you look at the group that was being studied,
everybody in the group was a young healthy male.
- There's no control group.
The gold standard is to have a blinded group,
you can't do that in cold water exposure.
- And aside, if you've looked into any sort of cold exposure
or ice plunging online, you've probably come across Wim Hof.
- I'm the iceman.
- One of these claims around cold plunging
is the ability to increase your brown fat.
- [Speaker] What the?
- In today's Health Watch fat that makes you thin.
Researchers say it burns calories like a furnace.
- Wim Hof obviously does a lot of cold exposure
and he so happens to have a twin brother
who doesn't do cold exposure.
When they compared the brown fat contents
of both of these individuals,
they found no significant differences between the two.
So maybe it's not the cold plunge,
it could be something else.
So besides the sample group
you also need to look at the water conditions.
Some studies are referring to cold water immersion
which is an ice bath.
Some are referring to a cold shower.
There's a lot of different variables
to consider when it comes to the water,
temperature, water composition,
whether you're getting pelted with cold water,
whether you're swimming out in nature in cold water
or whether you're sitting in a tub or a garbage can.
- You know, there is slight difficulty
comparing between trials.
But I think there, it's clear
that there are some physiological responses
which are quite interesting.
And Susanna Søberg, who who you mentioned,
you know, some of her work
is to do with these immediate effects,
where I would disagree with a lot of the things
she said on that podcast are extrapolating these
to the longer term data.
- You're gonna build your adaptation,
which happens on a metabolic level,
which is gonna be the brown fat.
- And this is where I think the other main problem comes in
which is something called confounding.
You can't compare two groups
because there are fundamental differences between them.
So a lot of the long-term information
about cold water exposure,
which has been used to claim
that it's protective against cardiovascular disease
and improves your adipose tissue long term
is comparing people who habitually do these kinds of things.
So people who are regularly going for a swim in icy water.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out
that people who are doing that on a regular basis
probably are different to the average person
who's not doing that on a regular basis
in some other major fundamental ways.
You know, they may be just generally fitter,
they may be more affluent, who knows.
So by all means, you know, look at, use observational data,
but you cannot then say for definite
that cold water exposure is the cause of this.
There are maybe many other factors at play.
- So I know that there isn't any conclusive science
telling me that ice baths are gonna help me live longer,
get skinnier, prevent diseases or anything like that.
But I didn't start doing ice baths for any of those reasons.
I started to because a friend asked me to
and I had fun doing it.
And this kind of made me realize
that this whole ice baths trend may be using science
to justify something that's a lot simpler.
What is the thing
that makes you keep coming back to ice baths?
I talked to a lot of people.
- All right, what's up?
- [Melissa] And I found a lot of similar answers.
- I am in love with ice baths.
You know that feeling when you work a lot
and you get kind of groggy and kind of tired.
For me, an ice bath in that scenario,
just gets me going again and I'm ready to go.
- I remember getting in and just freaking out.
I was like, this is insane, my mind just went into shock.
On the drive home, I was like,
that was the most exhilarating experience ever.
I want to do that again.
- I think, using like an ice bath
as kind of like a kick starter, you'll see a lot of people
really do it at like early in the morning.
- No amount of espresso can make you as awake
as like a 30 seconds in a cold shower or in a cold plunge.
- You're just forced to be in the moment.
- Because you're uncomfortable,
it puts you in this sense of vulnerability
that our day-to-day don't bring.
I'll be in that cold tub
and I'll be laughing to myself out pure giddy joy.
- It definitely builds this sense of emotional resilience
and like self-confidence
that I just really never had before.
- And it makes me feel
very just like ready to take things on.
Right, if I can do an ice bath, I can take anything on.
- For social events, like on a Friday night
I would invite friends to come with me to the gym,
and we would just go cold plunge and sauna together.
- Yeah, I started doing them
just kind of like a joke with my friends,
like right here, Lake Ontario,
in the wintertime we decided to go at night to just jump in.
This is still when the snow was on the ground
and everything like that.
But then we actually like made it
kind of like a more consistent basis.
Like we were like, this is actually
kind of something we should do like on a weekly basis.
- There's a huge social aspect of it.
And the beautiful thing,
is though I keep meeting these people
and expanding this community.
- It's like this really interesting vessel
to bring people together
through some form of weird suffering.
- And it's like when you ride a rollercoaster,
you just get this like ecstatic energy
and I think I get that same feeling from an ice bath.
- It just feels really, really good.
- My own experience is mostly with cold showers
and that's what I still do.
I do it because it makes me feel good,
and I don't really feel
like I need scientific justification for that.
I sometimes feel like it's a bit reductive
to try to shoehorn science into everything that feels nice.
And I feel like if you get value
and you find that cold water immersion,
or a cold shower improves your mood, that's great.
I don't think we really need to do loads of studies
to look into that any further.
We know that it is associated with dopamine release,
which of course is a feel good neurotransmitter,
but you know eating ice cream
is associated with dopamine release,
and I don't think we are sort of trying to sciencify that.
It's just fine to say that it feels good,
you know, if you get benefit
and if you found that it's fun, that's really good.
- I thought it'd be fitting to finish this video off
sitting in a park.
This whole video I've spent trying to research
why people do ice baths
and I think I may have overcomplicated it along the way.
I said this jokingly at the beginning of the video
that ice baths just feel good,
and turns out that was enough.
They're definitely not the most accessible
and affordable way to feel good.
And the more that I think about it,
maybe it's not even about the ice baths
but the opportunity that they give you.
A moment to connect with yourself
and connect to other people.
Not an exact science,
but if it does help you, that's amazing.
But there's other less expensive things
that we can do to feel good,
like being outside in lovely nature.
I'm gonna read a book after I finish recording this video.
Things like listening to a good playlist
also feel really good or hanging out with friends.
This video really ended up being ice baths
were just about the friends that we made along the way.
I hope you liked this video.
I hope you learned something.
Okay, time to read my book.