Thomas Seagar

Cameron: [00:00:00] Flow unleashed, unleashed, unleashed.
As you age, do you ever feel like your body is working against you? Have you ever taken the time to understand how your metabolic rates and mitochondria affects most of what you do and how you feel? Do you know how to optimize these biological systems? Well, stay tuned as we unpack how ice baths and cold plunge therapy affects our psychophysiology.
Welcome to Flow Unleashed. I'm Cameron Norsworthy, and this is your podcast for human performance.
Welcome to today's episode where we [00:01:00] dive into the fascinating world of cold water immersion. It's a practice you've probably seen growing in popularity among athletes, fitness enthusiasts, and weakened warriors alike. But cold plunges aren't just a fitness trend, often cold, cold water immersion, cryotherapy, or cold plunge therapy.
It's the seemingly simple act of taking a dip in cold water. However, the water typically ranges between zero and 15 degrees Celsius, and you typically stay in for up to one to 15 minutes while it's been around for ages. Cold water immersion has reemerged as a hot topic in the world of human performance.
Historically, athletes have used ice baths primarily for physical recovery, particularly to reduce pain and inflammation. The science behind it suggests that cold water immersion may aid the recovery process by constricting blood vessels, reducing swelling, and flushing out metabolic waste like lactic acid from the muscles.[00:02:00]
Additionally, the cooling effect slows down metabolic processes and mitigates tissue breakdown. Despite these proposed mechanisms, the research remains inconclusive. Some studies find supportive evidence for pain and information reduction and its role in the central nervous system regulation, while others argue that the data often based on small sample sizes for sure of definite proof.
Even so, countless professional athletes and professionals in general swear by US baths as a cornerstone of their recovery and performance enhancement routines beyond physical benefits. Cold water therapy has recently gained momentum as a tool for mental health and overall wellbeing. Advocates claim that cold water immersion boosts mental health by increasing levels of endorphins and rine build resilience to stress by lowering cortisol levels, [00:03:00] enhance mood regulation and better and better.
Equip ourselves to handle significant stresses such as injuries or illnesses. And while research is still young, some early studies offering intriguing insights. For instance, a randomized controlled trial involving over 3000 office workers revealed that adding 30 to 90 seconds of cold water to morning showers led to a 29% reduction in sick days and heightened energy levels.
Just do that last one and go again in case that beep came in. While research is still young. There are some early studies offering intriguing insights. For instance, a randomized controlled trial involving over 3000 office workers revealed that adding 30 to 90 seconds of cold water to a morning shower led to a [00:04:00] 29% reduction in sick days and heightened energy levels overall.
One person who has plunged into the subject, both personally and professionally is today's guest, Dr. Thomas Cigar. Thomas is an associate professor at Arizona State University. He's also the author of the book, uncommon Cold, the Science and Experience of Cold Plunge Therapy, Thomas's Work examines How Cold Water Immersion Can Heal Metabolic and Autoimmune Disorders, inhibit tuba growth, balance hormones, boost testosterone, cortisol regulation, and influence heart rate variability and resilience.
Personally, I can't wait to dive into this conversation. As someone who regularly incorporates ice baths into my routine, I've experienced firsthand how they enhance my athletic recovery and ability, improve my mental clarity, and to be honest, just leaves me feeling fantastic. [00:05:00] So let's plunge into the conversation.
Excuse my reel of puns, and speak with Dr. Thomas Seger,
Thomas: flow Unleashed.
Cameron: Unleashed. Welcome to the show, Tom.
Thomas: It's my pleasure to be here.
Cameron: So why is cold therapy so good for us?
Thomas: Cold therapy is the best way to stimulate MIT biogenesis. So this is the generation of new mitochondria, particularly in your brown fat.
There's two types of fat, the white fat that store lipids for energy, and then the brown fat that is principally responsible for cold thermogenesis. And until about 15 years ago, medical doctors thought there was no such thing as brown fat in adult human beings. They, the babies have it, but they thought, well, you know, grownups, they just grow out of it.
And then a team in Sweden was pretty sure that they were seeing brown fat on their PET scans. So you, you inject a [00:06:00] radioactive tracer of glucose into the body. You're looking for cancer, you know that the tumors will take up the glucose, concentrate the radioactivity, and you could do a PET scan to image the tumor.
But the Swedish team, on a few of the scans, they were noticing symmetrical images and tumors are not symmetrical. And they said, Hey, we think this is brown fat. They sent their findings out to peer reviewed journal articles, and someone at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City said, well, maybe we have some brown fat on our PET scans.
And they went through thousands of them. 95% of adult Americans have zero detectable brown fat, but 5% do these instrument rooms. They're a little cold because the, the power, you know, machine uses so much power and you have to cool it. And so some of the people would get in there and that brown fat would be activated.
So the [00:07:00] scientists started studying brown fat and in particular the effect of cold on the mitochondria. Now, Ben Bickman just came out with a book here in the United States. He's a BYU professor, and he specializes in fat and insulin and metabolism. And he correctly pointed out that every single leading cause of death in the United States from chronic illness originates in metabolic disorder.
And what governs the metabolism? The mitochondria. So this gets you into the mindset where you say, geez, what are we doing for our mitochondria? If we're not getting cold, there are a few foods that will activate brown fat. There's some other lifestyle things you can do for brown fat, but nothing is better than cold exposure.
And brown fat is not just a nice to have thing. It is also an essential secretory organ. It helps modulate thyroid [00:08:00] function. The brown fat and a thyroid are in constant communication with one another, and brown fat is more effective for converting inactive thyroid hormone into active thyroid hormone. So if you don't have any brown fat, your thyroid becomes dysregulated.
There's nothing to modulate it. If you don't have any brown fat, then it's not making the FGF 21 and the brain derived neuroprotective factors that brown fat is associated with that keep your brain healthy and delay dementia, or can even reverse cognitive decline, or in extreme cases, heal traumatic brain injury.
So why is cold so good for you? A lot of people will say, oh, well, you know, I work out and I run, and then the cold is good for my knees. It takes the inflammation out of my muscles. And there's something to be said for that. But the principle benefit of starting a cold plunge therapy practice is to restore your dysregulated metabolism to [00:09:00] the state at which nature intended.
And that is one that is packed with healthy mitochondria, that has the brown fat depots that will keep you warm in the cold, but also protect your brain and regulate your
Cameron: thyroid. And for those not familiar with mitochondria, why is mitochondria important?
Thomas: What a great question, because mitochondria, you, you know, you get a microscope, you can identify the mitochondria in a cell.
They are called organelles. That is, they're not organs like your liver or your kidney because they exist in the subcellular scale, organelles inside the cell walls, and almost all of the cells in your body have mitochondria. The exception, most notable red blood cells do not. But all the other cells as a first approximation, they've got mitochondria.
The ones that use a lot of energy are packed with mitochondria because it is mitochondria that convert the food that you [00:10:00] eat. The glucose in your bloodstream, the lipids in your bloodstream that convert that into forms of energy that you can use, whether that's for growth or wound healing or synthesizing hormones like testosterone or vitamin D.
It is the mitochondria that power all of these essential processes inside your body. And they're fascinating because although, you know, Watson and Crick, they get a lot of credit for discovering the structure of DNA. Nobody told me when I was in, you know, high school biology class that mitochondria have their own DNA.
Mitochondria, according to Lin Margolis theory that she hypothesized in the early seventies, mitochondria existed as separate organisms in some primordial soup long before we had complex multicellular organisms, [00:11:00] and they were absorbed into the more complex cell, the cell that had DNA in its nucleus. And instead of just being eaten, they became part of this other more complex cell with the DNA in its nucleus and all life, plant life, animal life, all multicellular life on earth now depends upon that weird symbiotic mutualistic accident in the primordial soup.
So for a long time people kind of laughed at Lin Margoles and said, well, that's a crazy theory. And now it's accepted as the best explanation for how mitochondria came to be inside our human cells and the role that they play. The interesting thing about mitochondrial DNA is you get it exclusively from your mother, so it's not a sexual reproduction, you know, like they taught me, [00:12:00] you know, when I was in middle school, you get chromosomes from your dad and chromosomes from your mom, and then you come out and you're a completely different person from them.
The mitochondria reproduce a sexually because their DNA is not in a nucleus like all the other cells of the body. They have their own DNA, so they can synthesize their own proteins and enzymes and respond very quickly to metabolic demands, but they reproduce as identical clones of themselves, at least under ordinary circumstances.
There are mutations, there are irregularities, but the ordinary set of circumstances is your mitochondria are identical to your mothers, and hers are identical to her mothers and all the way back to eve. And what this means is that the rate of change in mitochondria is slower than it is in the nucleic DNA, you, me, all the other homo sapiens on this planet can be divided into a few, what are called haplotypes, [00:13:00] different variations of mitochondria that have emerged over the generations.
But they can all be traced back to those people that survived the ice Age. Like you gotta go back maybe 75,000 years, which is the blink of an eye, and there's an enormous volcano, and it plunges the earth into a multi-year winter. How did our ancient ancestors survived? They survived at the edge of the water.
They fished, they foraged, they were aquatic. They were in the cold water. Even those ancient human beings who were living at the equator. We're in the cold water. There are four glaciers, mountaintop glaciers at the equator in East Africa where the oldest human fossils have been discovered. So we are descendant from the ancient grandmothers who adapted to that cold, and we have the same mitochondria that they do.
So because of mitochondria, cold [00:14:00] exposure is not like a, a hobby that you do because you enjoy it. Is it an essential expectation of your body? If you don't get enough cold, you become dysregulated metabolically, just like if you don't get enough sleep or you don't get enough exercise, you don't get enough sunshine.
Your body. Becomes maladaptive because it's the wrong environment for which we as a species have evolved. We expect cold. It is in our DNA, our mitochondrial, DNA. And so there's, I don't wanna call it a misconception because most people have never thought about it twice, that we're not taught this kind of thing in high school.
And it's very recently that science is beginning to catch up with the way our metabolism really works. And so most of the medical doctors. They went to medical school long before any of this was revealed in journal articles, and they don't have enough time to read and keep up on these things. They're [00:15:00] just wondering what kind of pill they should sub prescribe for you.
They're not thinking, oh, maybe you should get more sleep, a little sunshine in an ice bath because they never had a class in when to prescribe an ice bath. And the answer is almost all the time. If you, if you work out doors and you sort in a four season climate and you get some cold that way, you're probably fine.
But most of us, you know, I live in Phoenix, Arizona. It's the hottest city in North America. And even on those few chilly days, most of my, you know, fellow citizens, they've got their heated leather seats and their beanies, and they're all wrapped up in their scarves. They don't get cold, and as a consequence, they don't have any brown fat and they become thyroid and metabolically dysregulated.
We must have some cold to stay healthy.
Cameron: Is there a way for the average person to test their brown fat count?
Thomas: The [00:16:00] PET scan is the best way to do it. Susanna Solberg has become famous because she's been on the Huberman Lab podcast a couple of times. You can now do a dissertation in something that medical doctors 15 years ago thought didn't even exist because she did her dissertation at the University of Copenhagen on brown fat, and she used PET scanning to find it in these Danish winter swimmers.
You know, they hop in the fjord and that kind of thing. But a PET scan is not sort of a routine average person. You can't just go down to your urgent care we have in the United States or your general practitioner and say, Hey, I'd like a PET scan. I'm pretty curious. And so people are working on infrared thermography.
That is, could they detect the action of the brown fat with an infrared camera? But I'm skeptical. I haven't seen any reliable work. No. Brown fat isn't something that the average person [00:17:00] can sort of have assay for themselves. What you can do is get into the ice bath. You will know when people start out, they might start, um, trying to think, let's say it's 15 degrees C and if they get a gasp at that temperature, it's because they're not cold trained or they're not.
Cold acclimated. If they start shivering in three or four minutes, it's because their muscles have to do the work of thermogenesis. They don't have the brown fat to keep them warm, but give 'em about two weeks. If you do that every day, you can gradually lower the temperature until I'm in my Morocco at one degree.
C, there's ice chunks floating in the water. You've probably seen it on Instagram, and that still gives me a gas reflex, but I hardly shiver. And the reason I don't shiver is because brown fat is non shivering thermogenesis. So there are physiological [00:18:00] characteristics of brown fat that you can experience and have some confidence in how well you're cold adapted.
But no, it's not the kind of thing that most people can get in a routine test.
Cameron: Hmm. And what are the advantages of shivering? I've often heard, oh, stay in a nice bath until you shiver, you know, growth hormones, and what's your take on that?
Thomas: If, if you're just starting out, A good rule of thumb is go cold enough to gasp and long enough to shiver.
But if you are cold trained, you know, if you've been at this for a few weeks and you're going in there every day and you're getting the temperature down to four or five degrees, C you don't have to shiver. You've got the brown fat. You might stay in there three or four minutes. You don't have to, you know, go to eight or nine or 10 minutes at freezing temperatures because somebody told you you have to shiver.
Let the brown fat do the work of thermal regulation. As long as it's [00:19:00] activated, then you are getting the metabolic benefits and some psychological benefits too. Brown fat is highly innervated and you can say, well, what are all these nerves doing in fat cells? White fat doesn't have all those nerves in it, but brown fat does because it is connected directly to the brain.
It is activated not by the thermal receptors on your skin, but by the hypothalamus in your brain. So it's sort of an indirect thing. Skin communicates to the brain and then brain to the brown fat. That's how you get your brown fab moving. You will know when you have the gasp reflex that your brown fat is getting busy because that gas reflex is your sympathetic, your fight or flight, uh, division of your central nervous system.
There's no need to shiver after you're acclimated, but there still might be a good reason. Remember that brown fat is highly inated and it's connected. To the central nervous system that the mammalian dive reflex will take over [00:20:00] if you're doing whole body and strengthen your vagal tone or your parasympathetic division.
So there's a lot going on in your nerves and your brown fat. Heart rate variability is probably the best physiological measure of psychological resistance. It is the heart's ability to adjust to the stressors and the needs of the body, and it's measured in microseconds. And I have some good case studies of people who've started doing cold exposure, short, acute, very cold, and watch their heart rate variability as measured by their whoop strap or their aura ring, or any one of these sort of biofeedback devices, watch their heart rate variability more than triple or quadruple.
This is the psychological resilience aspect that part of you that says, I can overcome any challenge because I just defied death, you know, in my ice bath and it's not. A real death. It's a nervous system. You know, it's a, it's an [00:21:00] imagined death that your body is responding to automatically, and you've overcome it, you've conquered it.
It's a hormetic stressor for your nervous system at those very cold temperatures that causes you to come back stronger than the stress that puts you into that state in the first place.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. I'm just wondering how different this podcast would be if we were both in ice baths doing this.
Thomas: It would be a lot shorter.
I can tell you that because the longest ice bath I ever took, I think was 22 minutes, and it was a lecture on mitochondria with a friend of mine, Brian call, he's a chiropractor in Oregon. And I said, oh yeah, let's get the cameras going. You can tell me all about the electron transport chain. And Brian call won't shut up like you.
You can't get a word in edgewise with this man. And it's terrific because he's so knowledgeable. But as my teeth began to chatter, I said, Brian, I'm [00:22:00] gonna summarize everything right up here because we're at the 21 minute mark and I need to get out. You know,
Cameron: I just wanted to pick up on a lot of what you said in terms of how that brown fat is created in terms of the journey.
Reminded me of similar journeys of. Exposure to other extremities, be it life-threatening incidences where we overcome that fight, flight, freeze response, or heat. How is exposure to cold different?
Thomas: Well, let's go into this a little bit deeper. Peter Levine has written, he's a psychologist. He's practicing, but he's got a lot of books, and one of them, I think it's Waking the Tiger.
He talks about an experience he had when he was hit by a car. He didn't lose consciousness, but he splayed out on the pavement. And he's not really sure what's broken or what's injured. An [00:23:00] off-duty paramedic rushed over to him and tried to immobilize him. His limbs began shaking, trembling, and he told the paramedic to back off because his brain, you know how sometimes when these stressful situations, we have the most lucid thoughts and his brain recalled that the trembling his limbs were doing would protect him from PTSD studies of in particular children who are strapped down for surgery.
It could just be a root canal or something. It could just be dental surgery. But the worst is brain surgery. And when they're immobilized and they come out of the surgery, they often begin to shiver or tremble. Those children who are allowed to tremble, release the stress of the trauma of the surgery. And those children who are not that, where for some reason the medical staff thinks that the trembling is bad and it should be prohibited or something.
Those are the ones that experience a trauma, an unresolved stress. So [00:24:00] A-A-P-T-S-D experience, Levine wrote about this and he said on purpose, he allowed the trembling to take place. Then they put him in the ambulance, and again, conscious, he's talking to the nurse in the ambulance and he says, so what are my vital signs?
And she says, I'm not allowed to tell you that kind of thing, you know? And he says, oh, it's okay. I'm a doctor. And he was fibbing a little bit because the psychologist doesn't go to medical school. You know, they have a doctor of philosophy. But it convinced her to say, well, your pulse is this, you know, your blood pressure.
Is that just the basic stuff? And you wouldn't even know he was in a car crash because he said, oh, thank goodness, now I know I won't be getting PTSD. And he sort of explained the whole thing to the nurse. He wrote about this and that kept him busy. Now, Peter Levine is fine, but what he realized is that many of his patience in talk therapy would relive whatever the psychological trauma, not the physical trauma, but the [00:25:00] psychological trauma was.
And it's very dangerous because a patient that relives it in talk therapy without resolving it is just sort of re deepening the trauma with no resolution. But his patients sometimes would go into this trembling state, like a, a quaking. Those were the patients that got better right away. So one of the reasons you might want to shiver, I've experienced this myself.
I get into the ice bath, and even though I'm highly cold trained, sometimes 15 seconds in, I feel the shiver come on. And it's usually because I have an email from my, you know, department director at a SU saying, meet me at 11 o'clock. You've done something else wrong. Or maybe I had an argument with my girlfriend, or I'm worried about the finances at Morocco.
There's any number of anxieties that go through my head, Cameron. And when I carry those into the ice bath and I feel that urge to shiver, I know it's not thermodynamic dynamic, it is psychological. And so now I'm like, okay, bring [00:26:00] that shivering, let that come Tom, because there's some stress in your nervous system that's stored and it needs to go out into the water.
The, the should you shiver or should you nod is a big question. And my answer is, it depends on what you're working on. If what you're trying to do is recruit new brown fat, maybe you wanna try and relax through the muscle shivering response to, to see if your metabolism can do it without the muscles. And that's okay.
But if what you're really working on is some anxiety, some fear in your imagination, some stress that you're reliving in your mind, let the shivering come, it will help release that into the water.
Cameron: Hmm. So interesting. So much trauma can be healed through that embodied place without the talk therapy, so to speak, and allowing that, you know, the body never lies and we often store [00:27:00] emotions in the body.
And being able to release that and, and playing with that edge of comfort is a really nice way to actually unpick it or expose or allow things to rise if we have the patience and the safety. It sounds
Thomas: like you and I have been reading some of the same books. Okay.
Cameron: Or having some of the same experiences, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And take away those, I guess the more psychological component for a second. Otherwise, we might be here for a whole nother podcast. Can we create brown fat through other means?
Thomas: Yeah, but they're not as good. Berberine is now a popular supplement, and I've read that it will activate brown fat hot chili peppers.
Hot spicy foods will activate brown fat. Brown fat is so metabolically active that the pharmaceutical industry in the United States has several research projects going on, looking for a [00:28:00] patentable drug that you can take to activate your brown fat and recruit more of it. And of course I think this is ludicrous because I'm like, Hey, how about maybe you just put a T-shirt and shorts on and go outside in the wintertime?
Now at Phoenix, that's not all that effective because it's still, it never gets below freezing where I live, but I have an ice bath for that. There are some other ways to activate your brown fat. They're just not as effective as cold.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. And what about heat and saunas? How is that
Thomas: different? Heat is not my specialty, but here's what I can contribute.
The best epidemiological studies on sauna are coming out of Finland. Of course, Sona is the only word in the Finnish language that you know has been incorporated into the English dictionary, and there's something like three and a half million sauna or something in Finland. You know, it's [00:29:00] extremely popular.
But what people in America forget is that in Finland, Sona means hot and cold, not just hot. In Finland, they're always going, it's a winter for goodness sakes. They hop in the lake or they jump in the snow. They're going back and forth between the heat and the cold. And this is a very good thing because a dry heat like you get in a traditional Finnish sauna, causes vasodilation.
So this is a relaxation of the blood vessels. It opens them up and improves the circulation to your extremities. Whereas when you get into the Cold Lake, or you hop in the snow, or you're in the cold air, that causes vaso. Constriction. This is when the smooth muscle tissue around your blood vessels contracts and it shuts off the blood flow to the extremities, keeping it in the core so that you lose less heat to your environment.
When you do thermal contrast therapy back and forth, you get the benefits of vasodilation and [00:30:00] vasoconstriction. A lot of people in the United States will quote these finished studies and they'll say, oh, you know, it's a 30% reduction in mortality rate if you spend 45 minutes a week in the sauna, whatever the, I'm sort of making these numbers up, but they're not wrong.
You'd have to, I don't know, watch Rhonda Patrick's podcast or something, if you want the numbers. What they forget to say is that the epidemiological studies, they're citing. Say sauna is hot and cold, and they lead the Americans to believe all they have to do is get in the sauna. Now, vasodilation is a wonderful thing, and you're probably getting some good benefits from sauna alone, but you are not getting the statistic that has been quoted from the Finnish study because there is no popular population in Finland that you can study that isn't doing both hot and cold.
So here's the, the, the stack that I really like. Do some cold, do some [00:31:00] exercise, and then use the sauna to recover from the exercise. Mike Mutzel taught me this. He says, Sona is more effective than ice bath for recovery from a workout. Most people are doing it in entirely the wrong order. And so when you see things on social media, somebody says, oh, ice baths don't work.
They're talking about the ice bath after your workout, but an ice bath before the workout. Totally different thing if you do ice bath exercise and then Sona, you're getting everything in the right order for your mitochondria, for your circulation, for your psychology. And it might only take you 45 minutes depending upon how strenuous your workout is.
And I hardly work out at all, Cameron. So when it comes to Sona, I'm only looking at Sona in its relationship to cold. Other people are probably more [00:32:00] expert on, you know, what temperature is best. What I find is that the infrared doesn't do a thing for me. You know, I'll get in there and maybe that thing will be, I don't know, 50 degrees C and it sounds hot, right?
But because I just got outta my Morocco, I don't even break a sweat. I wind up bored sitting in the sauna. I'm on my fricking phone until it overheats and it shuts down, and I'm saying, great, maybe another half an hour. I might have some sweat dripping to it. Just, it's not hot enough. Mutzel though, he's got a wood stove and he cranks that thing up to like 2 20, 2 25.
When he goes back and forth, he doesn't have the problem of sitting in his sauna and not feeling warm. So when you're doing thermal contrast, an infrared sauna is not likely to put you in that thermal stress state in the amount of time that someone like me anyway is willing to sit in there.
Cameron: [00:33:00] Hmm. I laughed when you said that.
'cause I have the same opinion of infrared saunas. I know there's lots of research and benefits of it, but I often, the last time I was in there I ended up putting two extra electric heaters.
It's this feel the heat, right? You're like, is this thing on? Yeah.
Give me the the dry stones any day. All right, so let's get prac. You've moved on to a bit more practical, so let's get practical before we jump back a little bit later. I love ice baths myself, right? I, but I have multiple agendas and I'm sure people listening to this will have multiple agendas. There's that, there's the mental strength you talked about earlier.
If I can deal with this, life's problems, life's conflicts are a breeze, right? They help us embrace life as a whole. Then there's the physical recovery and the inflammation and I, I think most. Physiotherapists and [00:34:00] sports academics would suggest within two hours of doing your activity, cold and ice is an advantage to reduce inflammation.
But then again, inflammation's also quite good. And actually we need inflammation in order to heal. So we don't want to be reducing inflammation unnecessary. And then after that two hour period for recovery, the, the benefits are less obvious. And then there's the mental illness side of things of depression and where we're stagnant.
Right. And we need a, like a psychophysiological shift in our system to get new perspectives and to, and then there's also the metabolic reasons and a lot of physiological reasons you mentioned earlier for people. Having one of those agendas or maybe multiple agendas, how would you suggest practically they jump in?
What temperatures [00:35:00] are ideal for those that are more mental versus physical versus physiological benefit?
Thomas: So I'm glad you brought up the mental health aspects because there are so many well-documented case studies of people diagnosed with major depression. They fail to respond to SSRIs or other medications.
Talk therapy isn't doing a damn thing for them. And then they'll join a winter swimming club or they'll start a regular ice bath practice and their major depression resolves. So it's important to understand the mechanisms of how that happens. And I'm gonna get back to that, but you were asking what's the right temperature?
There is no optimal ice bath. I think it is probably the pharmaceutical industry that has trained us to think, oh, you should take these two pills this many times a day or something, as if there were an optical optimal protocol for all [00:36:00] patients. But an ice bath practice is more like weight training. You wouldn't go into the gym and ask your trainer, okay, so what's the optimal number of what amount of weight and the optimal number of reps for everybody, because it doesn't exist.
It depends upon your degree of training when you're starting a new program, and cold is the same way. If you start gasping at 20 degrees sea water, then that's a good temperature for you to start. And as you become acclimated and your thermal regulatory response in your body becomes stronger and stronger, 20 degrees is gonna be boring.
I mean, for me, if it's not below about seven, I feel like I could stay in there all day. I really need those ice chunks floating around to give me what Viktor Frankl called anticipatory anxiety, where my brain starts playing tricks on me and says, you could probably skip a day, Tom. You know, nobody's [00:37:00] watching.
What? What would it Har Joe Rogan talks about this. He says, every morning I get up and I go outside of my underwear and there's no negotiation. I get right into that ice bath. 'cause otherwise I feel like I gave into my inner bitch. 'cause Joe kind of has a way with words, you know, and I can relate to what he's talking about for me.
I need it cold enough and I need that visual. I wrote at this article, set your ice bath to a temperature that frightens you. And that's how you're gonna get that sympathetic nervous system activation and those psychological resilience benefits. But I can't tell you what that temperature is. It's gonna be different for everyone.
We have a lot of customers and they'll say, well, where should I start? And I need to ask 'em, what's your practice like? And if they're naive to cold, we start 'em in Fahrenheit. Maybe it's 50 degrees. It, it might be, I don't know, we, you could start in the upper teens if you're [00:38:00] naive Celsius and just go down one degree a day.
What I tell my customers, if you start at 50, you can do 49, the next day you can do 48. The next day it's just one tiny little degree Fahrenheit. And they, they, they know that cognitively. But I got a co couple of calls two weeks later and they'll say, look, I'm at 38 degrees. It's not getting any easier.
When is it ever gonna get easier? And I say. You've been going down a degree a day and they say, yeah, then why would it get easier? You're ch, I mean, take it down to 36, leave it there for a while. You're gonna feel the difference because it's like adding weight onto your bar. And if you're there going, I don't know why I am not getting stronger every day I had one pound and it never gets any easier.
Well, you would know you're getting stronger. It cold training is the same way. You're trying to create a hormetic stress that temporarily weakens [00:39:00] your body, and over the long term, your body is stimulated to become stronger to that stress. So let's talk about the mental health aspects. There are several aspects to this.
Um, I'm gonna focus on two. The first one are the neurochemistry. That is the neurotransmitters that are produced when you get into the cold, and it is a whole array of them. Huberman talks about the dopamine and the noradrenaline, and there are huge boosts, and we're talking about a factor of two, where three times the prec cold level of dopamine in your bloodstream.
This is coming out of a study in Poland that drew blood to see what happens when people get into a cold plunge. And there's a certain state of euphoria that comes when you've got that much adrenaline, noradrenaline, dopamine, cosing through your blood. But there are some lesser known and equally important [00:40:00] transmitters.
One of them is oxytocin. And oxytocin is the bonding hormone. It is the, A breastfeeding woman will get a rush of oxytocin when her infant comes out and begins to suckle on her breast. This is the bonding. Another is vasopressin. Vasopressin is a neurotransmitter of commitment. There are animal models in which they suppress vasopressin, and these rats or these voles or whatever they are, don't want to have anything to do with one another.
And if they augment vasopressin, they become bonded and they raise their little litter as if they were lifelong soulmates. Vasopressin is the bonding, and so there are these social relational neurotransmitters that also happen when you get into the cold. One of the best things for a person who is suffering from depression or trying to recover from addiction or has some other mental health disorder [00:41:00] is to do this socially, to go into the water at the beach, into the cold with a club.
I. To hold hands, to breathe together because it is impossible for them to stay in a bad mood when all the neurochemicals of love are flooding their brain and they feel attached to their companions in this cold plunge. So that's one aspect. The other aspect that I gotta talk about is metabolic. There is a psychiatrist.
So psychiatrists do go to medical school and they are medical doctors. There's a psychiatrist at Harvard University. His name is Chris Palmer. When he was a kid, his mother suffered from schizophrenia and he spent portions of his childhood homeless. Then he gets an education, then he goes to medical school.
Now, if you'd been through that experience as a child and you watched your mother die of mental illness, would you dedicate your entire scholarly [00:42:00] life to psychiatry and figuring out what might heal schizophrenia? 'cause that's what Chris Palmer did. And none of his patients were getting any better until he put one on a ketogenic diet and all of his self-reported mood markers improved and he lost weight.
And Palmer said, well, this has nothing to do with the drugs that I prescribe, or the talk therapy that we do. I just put 'em on a ketogenic diet because you know he had a weight problem and I heard maybe that would help. And now all of a sudden he's getting better. He now has accumulated case studies of patients who have suffered from schizophrenia for decades, gone on a keto diet, managed their schizophrenia, and lived for decades more.
He wrote a book called Brain Energy, and it was about the association between the metabolism and mental health. The brain is the most metabolically demanding of all the organs, so maybe 25% of your total caloric [00:43:00] expenditure. It's all done between your ears, Cameron, if you don't have the, the mitochondria.
In the brain to do the right energy conversion, then how are you gonna tell yourself, you know, to buck up to try again? That it's all gonna be fine. That this discouraging moment in which you're going through is not gonna last forever. Like you don't have the energy to recover from all the little setbacks, the ordinary things that can happen throughout the day.
And so Chris Palmer is getting all of his patients schizophrenia, epilepsy, all sorts of mental disorders onto diets that support their mitochondria. The keto diet and intermittent fasting will do that. It gives the mitochondria a break from the constant onslaught of carbohydrates. That is the, the standard American.
You get three meals, plus you get all the snacks and all the ultra processed food. It never gives the mitochondria a chance [00:44:00] to recover. Intermittent fasting and keto does that. And when your mitochondria recover, they take out the old mitochondria that's called MIT phasia, and they synthesize new mitochondria in MIT biogenesis.
That helps the brain get the energy that it needs to reframe the experiences that you have and heal the mental disorder. Now, Chris Palmer, as far as I know, has never been in a Morocco, never been in an ice bath, and he might not be aware that an ice bath is the fastest way to stimulate endogenous ketone production.
So even if you're not on a ketogenic diet, you get into the ice bath and you will start lipid metabolism right away. This results in ketone production and your brain prefers ketones. Ben Bickman, again, he's really good on this, and he cites the research that shows if there's any ketones in your bloodstream, your brain is gonna use 'em first [00:45:00] because your brain runs better on ketones than it does on glucose.
So these are the two aspects by which cold plunge therapy can help lift mood in the short term, strengthen relational bonds, and in the longer term, re help you recover from metabolic disorders that are associated with mental health disorders. Mike Tipton, university of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom is one of the people who's documented the case studies of people who recovered from major depression using winter swimming, and I wish more people knew about it.
Cameron: And that preference for ketos is that. Essentially insulin resistance?
Thomas: I don't think so because there's, I think even in metabolically healthy individuals who have high insulin sensitivity, the brain will [00:46:00] preferentially metabolize ketones. I don't know the mechanisms why, and I've never heard anybody explain it to me.
I've never read a paper that say, ah, this is why the brain prefers ketones. But ketones have a bad reputation, and so maybe the research hasn't been done because of the bad reputation. I'm gonna tell you where that comes from. My son was six years old when he was diagnosed with Type one diabetes. As a father, I felt.
So much shame because I thought he had the flu. You know, I was giving him orange juice 'cause that's what my mother gave me when I was sick and I lived this misconception that that was healthy for him. It was the worst thing I ever could have done for him. The poor kid, when we finally got him to the emergency room, his blood glucose was over 900.
The pH of his blood had dropped a little bit because of all the ketones that he was producing, and it's a condition called [00:47:00] ketoacidosis. His pediatrician told me he was a couple hours away from a coma. Instead, he was admitted to the pediatric ICO and they put him on an insulin trip. The pediatrician came up to me.
He was a friend, John. He was a neighbor, and he handed me an orange and an insulin syringe. He said, nobody leaves this hospital until you figure these things out. Because now my son's life depends upon my ability to draw up his insulin, measures blood sugar, dose him correctly. And so I had to learn all this thing, and I did that all night while I watched him sort of reinflate as the insulin did.
What appeared to me like magic in that moment because of ketoacidosis in newly diagnosed or or otherwise dysregulated type one diabetics ketosis is associated with this life-threatening condition, and this is why it has a bad reputation. If I had walked outta that [00:48:00] hospital thinking that ketosis was bad and unhealthy because of the experience that my type one diabetic son had, I would be laboring under an extraordinary misconception.
Ketosis is a healthy, normal metabolic state for you and I for people who make their own insulin. We cannot accidentally slip into ketoacidosis. The only reason my son was there is because his pancreas wasn't making insulin anymore, and I didn't know. Ketosis can be dangerous for type one diabetics and for type two diabetics, it can resolve their diabetes entirely.
And so it's confusing. People get different messages. And, and I should have asked you, Cameron, I I, I just assumed you weren't type one diabetic. If you were, then you would know a lot about metabolism and you'd be monitoring these things. You can get a continuous ketone monitor if you like, to measure your, the ketone levels in your blood, which is probably the [00:49:00] best way to do it.
And people are finally coming around to the realization that for, for those with healthy pancreas, healthy eyelet cells that make the insulin ketosis is a wonderful metabolic state.
Cameron: Are you looking to improve your performance stress less and flow more? Do you want to improve the human performance in your organization or team?
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Imagine people listening to this. Their curiosity will be peaked for sure, [00:50:00] but they'll also be thinking, okay, practically what is my practice? How do I know when I'm at a good place? Like how frequently should be I be doing ice baths? Like if I'm living in a hot place, I, from what I'm hearing, I should be doing more.
If I'm living in a cold and exposing myself to cold temperatures, I can maybe get away with less. How do I know my metabolism is in a good place?
Thomas: That's a great question. You've reminded me that tomorrow in the United States is Thanksgiving day. And so, you know, we just finished Halloween. Halloween is like the last day of October, and that's the holiday where we go around to our neighbors and we get all the candy, right?
And so less than a month later we have the holiday where we gorge ourselves on Turkey and pumpkin pie. And then a month after that we have the holiday where we have the presents and the sweets and the cookies. And then just a week after that, we're all supposed to get drunk on New Year's Eve. [00:51:00] It's like the, in the United States, this period of a little more than maybe than two months is a metabolic disaster waiting to happen.
Now I'm going to eat mad damn pumpkin pie. I've already eaten. I. You know, it's sitting on my kitchen counter and I couldn't wait until tomorrow. So I had two slices before this podcast, Cameron, but I know I can get into my ice bath and I can, because I ran this experiment last Thanksgiving. I ate the whole damn pie.
It's my favorite part of Thanksgiving. And then I thought, Tom, you really overdid it. You should go do an ice bath. The ice bath will clear the excess glucose from my bloodstream. So what I did was pee on a keto stick because ketos uh, ketones can be eliminated through the urine and also through the breath.
And I had trace ketones. And I'm like, all right, I should maybe wait a couple hours until I'll digest [00:52:00] that glucose in the pie, but I'm hopping in the ice bath. And I did something like five minutes. I came out an hour later and I had higher levels of ketones than when I started. So one of the ways that you can monitor your metabolic flexibility is say, what does it take to push me into ketosis?
Take me out and put me back in. If you are getting a good amount of cold and a good about exercise and you have that metabolic flexibility where you don't have to fast for three days to get yourself into ketosis, you're probably doing really well. You're probably getting enough cold. Your mitochondria are probably in good shape for me.
It, it doesn't, it's less than a day I can switch from glucose metabolism into keto metabolism just by eliminating my carbohydrates. Heavy cream is one of my favorite things. I figured out that coffee is just a way of like enabling my heavy cream habit, you know, and so [00:53:00] I enjoy the fats and I can get myself into ketosis pretty quick, but I'm in my ice bath every single day.
So a continuous glucose monitor can be very helpful if, if you don't want to invest in that or a continuous ketone monitor, then the simplest way to monitor metabolism is get the keto sticks and pee on them. Now, how much cold is too much? Because there's a lot on the internet about how you're gonna burn out your adrenals, and that's a crock of crap.
The relationship, for example, between cold and cortisol, it's complex. Your cortisol is low cold, we'll bring it up. But if your cortisol is already high, the best data that's coming out of the Lithuanian Sports University shows it does not increase your cortisol any further. Your body already knows. And so this idea [00:54:00] that you're gonna burn out your adrenals if you do too much cold, it's not a good idea.
However, there have been some times when I've overdone it and I know because I lose motor control, I lose fine, you know, dexterity. I can't stop shivering. And in those moments, yeah, I've done too much. I'm on the edge of hypothermia. For me, that might be 14 minutes at one degree C. And usually I wrap myself up in a blanket or I'll put myself in the car and I'll turn the heat on all the way to really crank it.
Because in Phoenix that's as good as a sauna. Then 45 minutes later, I'm Rewarmed and I'm recovered. I'm not worried about the people who do a little bit of extreme cold every day. When Susanna Solberg surveyed her winter swimmers, she asked them, how often do you go? How long do you stay in? And then she took all of their [00:55:00] responses, averaged it out.
It was 11 minutes of cold body cold water immersion a week on average. So she published this and she said, well, that's the magic number. 11 minutes. No, it's not. That's just the average of the people that you asked. It might be that a smaller dose still results in brown fat activation. Maybe you don't have to go quite as often, or maybe you don't have to get all the way to 11 minutes.
We don't really know. If you're doing it on a regular basis, then you'll experience something like I did. I went down to Wa Carta Hana, Columbia. So this is in South America, it's on the Caribbean Sea. And NATO was holding this science workshop and the Army asked me to go down there and talk about, 'cause I'm a professor at Arizona State University and I do resilient infrastructure, and they're having this thing on artificial intelligence and synthetic biologists.
A lot of fun. But the Caribbean sea is not [00:56:00] cold, Cameron. And there's no such thing as a cold shower in Carna Columbia. So I went about five days, no cold. And when I came back, talk about an inner bitch, I was a cold wimp. I don't think, you know, I hadn't lost any brown fat metabolically, nothing had really drastically changed.
But psychologically I knew I had lost my edge. So here's my response. 11 minutes a week. Looks like it's enough. Maybe less will work, but according to the data that we have, 11 minutes is a good rule of thumb. But I like to maintain my edge. I don't want to go three days and then look at that ice and be too chicken shit to get in there anymore.
I feel like I need to challenge myself every day. And on the really difficult days, I sometimes say, I'm just gonna do 15 seconds. I'm, I'm just gonna go up to my armpits. I'm j you know, I sort of talk myself in and then 15 seconds later I'm always like, what was I even worried about? Can do another
Cameron: 15?
[00:57:00] Yeah, this is fine. You know? Yeah. Yeah. And the mind games are endless. Oh, that's exactly right. Yeah. I can do it.
Thomas: Yeah.
Cameron: And then I'm normally there calculating, like strategizing how I would. Form my favorite football team, what players I'd play where, or I'd design my keynotes and put structure into my next talk.
And just to kind of get over that hump until you get to that, that place of bliss where you can surrender and equalize with what's happening.
Thomas: Yeah, that's exactly what happens.
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's really important for people to have those strategies, you know, to be able to get over that hump.
'cause a lot of people, they get in. Yep. And they think, why the hell am I? This isn't fun. I don't wanna do this. And just to be able to have a few strategies to get over that initial reaction, you know? What would you suggest [00:58:00] there?
Thomas: Focus on the breath. This has been the key to me. I do a lot of counting. And so I'll give myself a rhythm and it doesn't really matter what it is, just any kind of structure.
It might be, you know, in on five, out on three. And I'll count my way up. I'll say, okay, I'm gonna do 24 of those breaths or something. Or sometimes I'll count my way down, I'll start at 22 or some random number, and then I'll get down to zero. And I say, well now what am I gonna do? Sometimes I'll practice Kegels in the cold, you know, or sometimes I'll just focus on exercising my hands under the water.
'cause I met a guy in Florida who had terrible arthritis. I. And he resolved it entirely by doing this with his whole body in the cold. He was so thrilled to meet me and tell me, yeah, you know, but I had no idea that this could happen. He became a case study for me, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna try his technique.
I give myself these little repetitive actions [00:59:00] to focus on while I'm kind of passing the time in the cold. 'cause that's way better than thinking about how I just got in trouble at the university again, which seems to be a consistent thing. If I could keep myself off of Twitter, I'd probably be further along in my academic career.
But I have a lot to say, Cameron,
Cameron: and when I'm in the ice baths, I often hear people saying, oh, I've got this shard pain in my ankles or in my wrists. Or There's a particular area that kind of is that. Circulation. I'm always a bit confused. Maybe it's circulation, maybe, you know. Yeah, maybe it's departmental.
Thomas: The, okay, so there's, uh, two things about this.
One is the, uh, toes and the fingers. So these, the extreme extremities. Some people will report a sharp pain followed by a persistent numbness, so a numbness that can last either for hours or a whole day. And this [01:00:00] is very concerning. Now, none of these people who have reported this to me gave up on their ice bath practice because of it.
They all persisted through it, and it takes about two weeks to resolve. And what's going on is remodeling of these tiny blood vessels that supply blood to those extreme extremities. It doesn't happen fast. Now, I know somewhere out there, the millions of people, there's gonna be some exception to what's been reported to me.
But if you're experiencing a tingling and then a sharp pain and then a numbness in your extremities, then you've got a lot of healthy company, because that's part of the, for most people it's a step towards cold adaptation. But what you mentioned, here's the second thing you said, oh, it's my ankle, or it's my elbow.
I was delivering the, our ice baths to the 49 ERs football team in San Francisco. You know, and they'd just been [01:01:00] to the Super Bowl and they wanted our ice baths before their training camp started in the summer. Well. I had never met the 49 ERs, and so this guy came up to me and he's scraggly and he hasn't shaving, and he's dressed kind of like a bum, and I'm like, I don't know who this is, but he wants to talk about ice baths.
Okay. He says, well, I broke my clavicle in high school and I can only go up to my armpits because if I go any deeper, I feel a sharp pain where my clavicle probably didn't quite heal. Right? We talked about that for a lot of time. The trainer for the 49 ERs, who I knew pretty well, came up later and he said, Tom, that was head coach Mike Shanahan, you know, who was quizzing you about this ice bath thing that you're doing?
And here's the advice that I gave them. Talk to your clavicle. When you get in and the ankle is hurting or the knee is hurting and it's really bitching at you, a lot of [01:02:00] athletes will feel betrayed by the part of their body that is in pain because they can't perform. They're like, God damnit clavicle, or, you know, whatever it is.
Like, get with the program here. We're trying to do something. And it's like they'll be angry at that part of their body that is hurting, but my daughter taught me something different. During the Covid lockdowns, all she did was Kav Maga, you know the, they closed down the dojo or the studio or whatever it's called.
But she got together with her Kav MAGA friends, and they were doing like Kav Maga at home. And she was sparring with these more experienced black belts or whatever they're called. And she went down, I forget her, like her knee gave out. And the black belts were very concerned, like she was less experienced and maybe they hurt.
Oh, are you okay? And she started kissing and stroking her knee. I said, what are you doing? And she said, I'm talking to my knee. I love you knee. It's okay knee. There's this [01:03:00] spot for you on the team. You take your time, knee whenever you're ready. And all these black belts were like, what is what? She told me the story and I said, Emma, that's genius.
How did you think I. To send all that love to your knee to help it heal. And she said, dad, I just talked to my knee. The way you talk to me when you were coaching softball, if I got hurt, you tell me it's okay. There's a spot for me. You take a seat on the bench when you're ready, we'll get you back in the game.
So that's what I say to my knee. That's what I told the people. I tell Mike Shannon, or I tell the athletes, I say, send love to that body part that is hurting, it's still on the team and it needs your support. In that moment, you would be amazed how well that self-talk will resolve the pain.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. Yeah, interesting.
We've come full circle again with the, [01:04:00] with the body. Never lies, you know? That's so true. But I, it is so powerful. You can probably see that picture of the ski jumper up there in the background. This was someone who had six knee surgeries and then we started working together and couldn't get back ski jumping.
And eventually we created a strategy after a few months of working together, of speaking to her knee as if it was a, a friend. And we started with introducing ourselves and then every day she built a relationship with it. She talked to it and she would figure out, okay, so what rehab are you up, up for today?
And how are we gonna do it? And instead of following the precise. Rehab regime that all the experts and the surgeons had told her to do. We had a more intuitive approach of listening to her knee, asking what, where we can go and what we can do. And over time [01:05:00] she was able to get back, she was able to compete, and then she competed in the, the next Winter Olympics.
And that had been a saga that had kind of been a real conflict for her over several years. And I see this sort of time and time again, not only with people getting over injuries, but I have it in the ice bath, right? I get in and there's this like, Ugh, I wanna fight, I wanna resist. I want to like, fuck, and I want to tense up.
And when I kind of, and, and it's unbearable and it's horrible. And then when I flip that and start to really invite, not just embrace, but invite. That kind of, I think these things as complexity now as opposed to pain or as opposed to anything. And I invite that complexity, then we can start to negotiate.
We can start to align, have more coherence and the pain subsides, you know, and the [01:06:00]
Thomas: genius. We've got to clip this and put it out all over the internet so that more people can think about pain like this to, to enter into a conversation with that pain and say, okay, how does that feel? What are you ready for today?
It's completely different way of relating to the parts of your body that you're kind of counting on.
Cameron: Yeah, and I think a, a big one didn't realize this podcast was gonna go down this rabbit hole, but, you know, childbirth where a lot of women see that as a painful experience. But when we flip that switch and see it as pressure and see it as a, a very natural process, then the whole experience changes from one of resistance and difficulty and pain to one of neutralized pressure and a mag magnificent in the beauty of the body, you know, pushing its capacities and extremities and it's, yeah, it is a real important thing.
And I think [01:07:00] the ice. Context is just so perfect for it. Forgetting about all, I don't wanna forget about it, but as all the physiological benefits that you suggested earlier, you know, just be able to use the ice as a form of training to be able to relate to ourself, to relate to our own pain, relate to our own resistance, and the benefits that that can have in day-to-day life.
It just, it just immense.
Thomas: It's great that you bring up childbirth because one of the best things that a pregnant woman can do, especially late in her pregnancy, is some cold punch therapy reduces the inflammation. Increases insulin sensitivity at a time at which she's physiologically insulin resistant.
So much growth hormone going throughout her body, interfering with the action of insulin. And if you're not careful about managing insulin late in pregnancy, it can turn into [01:08:00] preeclampsia or even worse eclampsia or gestational diabetes, these metabolic disorders that result. Casey means wrote about this.
Evidently, when she was born, she was an 11 pound five ounce baby, and that was the first indication that her mother was insulin resistant and headed for type two diabetes, but nobody knew it at the time. It even Casey went through medical school and four years of residency as a surgeon, and it still took her years to figure out what was going on with her mother that resulted in such a heavy baby.
So in the, especially the late stages of pregnancy, a little cold plunge therapy will improve mobility, improve sleep, reduce inflammation, and improve insulin sensitivity. But the real wild card, the real hardcore, is a water birth. There's lots of good research already on water as an analgesic during childbirth, but [01:09:00] nobody does it cold.
I know some women who've tried water birth and they said, oh, the water was too warm, but I only know of one documented case. This is a woman who was a winter swimmer in the United Kingdom. She insisted on a cold water birth. She had great outcomes, but most attending medical professionals, whether it's a midwife or a physician, or a nurse, or even a doula, are unlikely to say, yeah, let's cool this water down for you.
But birthing in the water is probably the way those ancient grandmothers during the Ice age did it. Because the water does take the pain away. It takes some of the anxiety away. Human infants are not born with an instinct to crawl or walk. You know, we've seen like the National Geographic or Discovery Channel and the baby giraffe comes out and then it gets right up on its legs and it's got this instinct to gallop around or something.
[01:10:00] Human infants are born with an instinct to swim. Because we have been birthed in the water since like time immemorial or whatever the expression is forever. Now that we've medicalized, childbirth, we've made it unnatural, and we've taken our mothers and our babies out of the circumstances in which they are biologically wired to thrive.
And when I found all this out, I'm like, well, this is amazing. There's these videos of babies swimming in the water, and it's not just like mammalian dive reflex. It is an instinct to swim. And when it was E, when it is exercised in cold water. They get an immediate activation of their brown fat that makes them more metabolically flexible, like on day two, day three, day four of life.
It's a remarkable thing [01:11:00] that most medical professionals would never have the courage to allow a woman to try.
Cameron: Hmm. Yeah. Interesting you say that. We had two home water births with our children, but we didn't have colds. It didn't, it wasn't warm at the end of it, but I feel like there's also, it's less traumatic for the baby.
I agree. There's a transition between the womb. To the air and, and the difference that that brings. And if they can have that transition moment can be less of a shock and allow them to focus on that connection earlier. And I'm sure there will be people listening that will be having babies in the future.
Thomas: I hope they report back to us.
Cameron: Yeah, well I was gonna say, get in contact with Tom and maybe help science out with a, with a study and um, we'll do more case studies. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, Tom, look, thank you so much. We've gotta finish this part at some stage [01:12:00] and it's been really interesting to hear not only the benefits, but also I found quite refreshing your.
Your more human approach to it. You hear so much stuff around it's gotta be this and it's gotta be three minutes and you gotta shiver and it's gotta be between 12 and 15. It's gotta be between five and seven for this and that. And the reality is we are all individually very different. And what works for each individual is, is gonna be slightly different.
And whilst there's averages, we need to take that individual approach. And what I'm getting a lot from you is if it's, if it scares you, then it's probably a good place to jump in. If it doesn't scare you. If it doesn't scare you, then you know, maybe sort of up the ante a little bit.
We, we typically end the pod with asking you a couple of questions. One a [01:13:00] feel more a book that had a, a huge impact in your life.
Thomas: Okay. Uh, if you're going for huge impact, then I gotta agree with David Goggins. This is the Rocky movie, the original 1, 19 76. He did some podcast interview. He said when he was a kid he would had a VCR and he put in the tape and he would watch what's called Round 14 over and over again.
Now, I don't know how familiar you are with this movie, but movies were a big deal in my house when my kids were little. I made my daughter watch all of my favorite childhood movies. So what is she doing now, Cameron? She lives in New York City and she's making movies. You know, she works for HBO or some movie company.
She's got her union card. And, uh, maybe I made a mistake, but there are so many movies that, um. That I find inspiring or poignant. And that [01:14:00] round 14 scene from Rocky, it's when Apollo Creed knocks him down and Apollo thinks the fight is over. He raises his hands like it's victory. And the trainer played by Burgess Meredith, he's on the side of the ring and he's yelling at Rocky.
He says, stay down, stay down. And Rocky gets back up. So you can probably understand why that's inspirational to David Goggins. And there have been moments in my life where I gotta get back up. Even the people who love you, like your trainer, or it could be a parent, a sibling, a spouse, they might say to you, metaphorically, stay down.
I can't do it. Uh, so sometimes I'll, I'll be like, no, no, no, no. If, and I know Rocky is pretend, right, it's a [01:15:00] movie, but if I find inspiration in it and that works for me, then I will get back up. Now, here's what people forget about Rocky. Do you remember where he used to train? Like of course he went to the boxing gym, but he also went to the meat freezer where Pauly, you know, uh, his girlfriend's brother worked and he used to beat on the sides of beef and break the ribs and train in the cold.
And I think now at this stage of my life that I'm like a cold exposure guy, the Rocky movie becomes all the more important to me.
Cameron: What a movie, even the soundtrack is, uh, I, I have a get pumped soundtrack. I'm back in playing competitive tennis again, and I have a sort of get pumped. Soundtrack that I listened to before, before I go on court and the, the Eye of the Tiger and a few of them are, are in there.
Yeah, yeah. Yep.
Thomas: Bill Conti is the composer who did [01:16:00] the original Rocky, you know, classical score. And I agree with you, it wouldn't be the Rocky movie without that music. It's incredible. We used to play it, you know, in orchestra in middle school when I was a kid and it was everybody's favorite time to flip the mic.
Tell me about a book I should read.
Cameron: Okay. A book that I found really helpful and impactful was just a bit of a wow moment was Timothy Galloway's, the inner games for me at the time, it was the inner game of tennis, but he went on to write the inner game of golf, the inner game of business, the inner game of other things. And, and he ended up having a whole practice called the in the game.
And, and it. It actually, he talked about it from a more philosophical approach of following our intuition. We have self one and we have self two, and we have this sort of intuitive self. And then we have this [01:17:00] inner critic, self self two, and there's this sort of place of knowing and then there's this place of thinking and analysis.
And they often compete. And you know, nowadays modern cognitive neuroscience can back that up with the explicit implicit system, or I call them the being brain and the thinking brain. And there's a lot of sort of modern science that now I guess, aligns itself with what he was talking about in a very simplistic way.
But how to kind of overcome that, that inner, we call it different things. The inner monkey, the inner chimp, or the just the inner critic or the part of ourself that won't trust. And how to just let that go and how important that is to hitting a tennis serve or hitting a golf swing or running a business.
And it, it's a, it's a really thin book. You can read it probably overnight and, but it's i'll, he, he was a Buddhist and turned psychologist and, and [01:18:00] yeah, it was, it was at that, uh, my younger years, it was quite pivotal in terms of how I approached human performance and how I approached the psychology. And for anyone who's specifically into tennis golf, it's a context is really relevant and really, really helpful.
Thomas: Thanks for that. I'll check it out.
Cameron: Sounds good. All right. Well, Thomas, thank you so much for your time and I look forward to, uh. Hearing, hearing more stories and the next time, we'll, uh, we'll do it in the ice. I'll call you up from the ice man. That sounds great. It won't take long. No. We can have a short one, see where we get to, and then pop out and continue.
I like it.
Tom paints a compelling picture of how cold water immersion taps into both our biology and evolutionary [01:19:00] roots. He helped unravel the myths that have clouded understanding around ice baths, explaining how they support metabolic activity and enhance mitochondrial function, the powerhouse of ourselves.
Tom also shared a fascinating argument rooted in ancestral and evolutionary science. I. Humans evolve with a natural degree of cold exposure and regaining that adaptation is essential for maintaining optimal health in today's modern, often temperature controlled world for athletes. Cold therapy has clear benefits, helping to alleviate pain and soreness after rigorous training or competition, and perhaps to use prior to training to increase athletic capacity.
However, we still need to be somewhat cautionary against using it daily throughout a season, especially if muscle strength or growth is a key focus as research into long-term adaptation is still [01:20:00] emerging. The mental health benefits of cold water immersion also stood out. It's hard to deny the anecdotal reports of improved mood, greater resilience distress, and a boost in energy and focus.
Cold immersion, it seems, can be a mental and emotional game changer. If you're unsure how to start, start with a 32nd cold shower or place your hands or face in a sink field with ice and cold water. Take your time to build your exposure and enjoy the benefits that await. If you want to find out more about Thomas Cigar, please see the show notes.
Thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed. If you enjoyed listening, please subscribe to get notified when our next episode drops. The more people that [01:21:00] subscribe, the better I can make the show for you. Equally, please leave a review. Your review will go a long way to helping others find this pot. Until the next time, thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed.