- Good morning, motivators.
For the last six weeks, since getting on Vancouver Island,
I've been doing about four or five times a week
for only about five minutes of time cold water swimming.
It's freezing, but it's great.
For years, I've been hearing about all the benefits
with depression, with fat loss, with health,
with hormonal balance, with all of these things.
And I've tried cold showers and I've tried cold baths,
but none of it ever stuck until now.
Also Grace is back there just giving the world the business.
She wouldn't have done that in the shower.
(bright music)
Cold therapy got back on my radar over the last few months.
Somebody who works for us,
shout out to Judah,
she's been doing cold therapy swims
for the past several months
and she's found enormous health benefits.
Her headaches are gone.
Pain is gone.
Just feels better.
Mood is better.
As much as her, there's actually a group in Devon, UK,
that to deal with mental health issues,
I think it's a total of 500 people,
are doing regular cold water ocean swims.
There's a lot of evidence to support this.
But there's also a little bit of mixed evidence.
So let's say you're maybe suffering
from a little bit of weight gain or maybe some mood issues,
or maybe you're just feeling a little bit ill,
perhaps a little bit of pain, things like that.
The theory with cold exposure
is that it might be able to help with all these things
that it ends up affecting quite a number of things.
Let me bust through a few studies to show you what I mean
about the evidence being a little bit mixed
depending on what you're thinking
about using cold water immersion for.
I'll spare you reading out every single title
and just show you the title
and you can Google that exact title
if you want to dive into the study yourself.
This first one found,
"Our data suggests that lower thermal comfort state
in the winter swimmers compared with controls."
They saw exactly what I've been seeing.
By doing cold water immersion, you weren't as cold as often.
Makes total sense because the idea of cold water immersion
is that it teaches your body how to warm itself up
a little bit better.
Also, another theory is that
it gives your body a little bit of stress
and it teaches your body how to deal with stress
in a better state,
which actually transfers over to real life.
So you find real life situations
that might be chronically stressful
a little bit less stressful.
And down here at the end, it says,
"BAT glucose, brown adipose tissue,
brown fat, which is better than like fat fat,
brown fat is filled with mitochondria,
which actually stimulates
the burning of like what we think of as fat fat."
So this did find that there was a higher incidence
of brown fat, which led to more healthy body composition,
a little bit more burning of the bad fat that we don't want.
The study here says that the evidence
for the different claims made
for cold water immersion are varied.
And although in most instances
there seems to be a credible rationale for the benefits
or otherwise of cold water immersion,
in some instances, the supporting data remain
at the level of anecdotal speculation.
So this was a meta analysis showing
that it's not super clear one way or another,
and there seems to be a positive indication
of the effects of cold water immersion.
But it's not like just drop dead, yes, absolutely,
it's gonna be beneficial.
This study here compared cryotherapy,
which is super expensive, to cold water immersion.
And this found that cold water immersion elicited generally
a greater physiological effect
compared with partial body cryotherapy,
while both interventions are more effective
than control in reducing DOMS, muscle soreness.
So this is saying that both cryotherapy
and cold water immersion reduce the likelihood
of sore muscles in the females that they used in this study.
But the cold water immersion was better,
which I think is fantastic news
because cryotherapy tends to be really painful
and really expensive if you're doing it regularly.
That oceans free.
This study here says that cold water application
seems to demonstrate limited recovery.
It benefits when exercise-induced muscle soreness
was induced by single joint
egocentrically-based contractions.
So when you are looking at reducing muscle soreness
from like doing bicep curls or something like that,
cold water immersion didn't really do this.
It went on to say that, in contrast, cold water immersion
seems more effective in ameliorating effects
of exercise-induced muscle damage
induced by whole body prolonged endurance
intermittent-based exercise modalities.
This is great for us endurance athletes,
because it's saying that cold water immersion
has a better effect on more whole body endurance exercise
that we do.
But then there is this issue
where some people are saying,
"No, you absolutely don't want to do cold water therapy
after a workout because you need that inflammatory response
or you're not going to get your gains."
And depending on how close
to your exercise you do the cold water immersion,
you might totally lose your gains.
Well, this study that I pulled up here found out
that regular use of cold water immersion
associated with exercise programs
had a deleterious effect on resistance training adaptations.
So if you're doing cold water immersion close
to your strength training,
you have might not be getting as much benefit,
but does not appear to affect aerobic exercise performance.
Again, great for all of us endurance athletes to know
that we don't have to fuss so much
about having cold water immersion close
to an endurance training effect.
One thing that I will say about this
is my personal take on things
is if you are constantly exposing yourself
to exercise stress, and then just saying,
"Well, I need that inflammation.
I need that big stress response
to happen over and over and over," to actually adapt to it,
you might be overloading your system.
So doing things like delaying having antioxidant-rich foods,
delaying cold water immersion,
because you want to bathe yourself
in this stress to constantly have
as good a training effect as possible,
you might be overloading your body with stress
and actually getting your body into a point
where it can't handle the total amount of stress
dipping into potential signs of overtraining.
So what does this mean about you?
Should you do this?
Well, I can tell you my experience.
I started going in
because I've been having bouts of depression
over the last couple of years.
And I was finding
that when it was 25 degrees, I was so hot.
When it was 17 degrees, I was so cold.
I was feeling tired more often than normal.
Was that due to the depression
or was that due to overtraining?
You don't know.
But you do know that thermogenesis,
your body's ability to regulate its core temperature,
takes a huge amount of energy.
So if it isn't finely tuned
and it isn't really well adapted to it,
you're going to be tired
and you're gonna be cold and hot more often
than the average person.
So I started doing this and went in
for just probably about 40 seconds time number one.
I can tell you that time number one and time number today,
they're equally crappy during the first walkout.
It's not pleasant ever during that first walkout.
But what I've learned going into this
is that if you can get rid of (panting)
that as quickly as possible,
get your body in up to the neck,
get that (panting)
but then just override your body's want to panic
with just going, (exhales sharply)
instantly, the endorphins kick in
and actually becomes quite pleasant,
almost euphoric when you get it.
So that first time was 40 seconds.
Now, I'm up to probably five to seven minutes
and it feels great.
Did I notice any significant benefits
that were like ripping phone books apart in a new human?
Not really.
Did I noticed that I lost a ton of weight?
No, but I'm super busy getting the house set up
and not training a whole lot besides just maintenance mode.
And I haven't actually really put on any weight.
There were some days that I went,
"Damn, I'm actually not looking too bad here."
So is that helping with it? Maybe.
A very significant thing that I've noticed
is I'm not as cold as often.
I'm not as hot as often.
My temperature fluctuations aren't as serious.
And one of the biggest things that I can say for sure
that I've experienced is a euphoric happy feeling
after I get out of the water.
I actually ended up having one day
where I had to get out after two minutes
and I got on shore and went,
"Oh, geez, I wish I had more time
because that was really enjoyable in there."
I was craving going back in the water.
I wasn't thankful for being out of the water.
It felt really good to be in the water.
And I haven't had a depressive state
for any longer than like two seconds,
kind of just like a flashback to depression,
but not even 10, 15 minutes of a depressive moment
since being here.
Is that because we're on the island?
Is that because everything's new and exciting?
Is it because of the cold water immersion?
I don't really know.
What we're seeing in the data is that there seems to be
some very significant anecdotal evidence
and some evidence that it could be a positive thing
for some people.
So my recommendation to you
is find as cold a body of water as you can.
We're looking at roughly 5 to 11 degrees Celsius.
Get in.
Don't expect it to be very pleasant the first few times,
but give it three weeks.
And if you notice that your mood is lifting,
if you notice that any pain feelings or discomfort feelings
that you typically feel day-to-day are dissipating,
keep going.
If you find that it's not really helping you
and the juice is not worth the squeeze
'cause you don't like the cold water
and it's just always painful, then don't bother.
I will say that I have tried cold showers
and the data on that is really, really sketchy.
Personally, I never felt that I got used to it
because it just didn't seem like it was, I don't know,
cold or immersive enough or long enough
to elicit much of a response.
One thing that is definitely beneficial:
vitamins, minerals, nutrients from whole food sources.
That's why every single morning, I use AG1,
which is the new brand name for Athletic Greens.
This video is brought to you by Athletic Greens.
And if you go to athleticgreens.com/taren,
you can get yourself a free year supply of vitamin D
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And I use that as a daily replacement for a multivitamin
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and it's much easier for your body to absorb.
So thanks for watching this video.
Thanks to Athletic Greens for sponsoring the video.
And later, motivators.
Stay chilly, my friends.