Hey everyone, welcome to a sneak peek. Ask me, anything or am a episode of the drive podcast? I'm your host Peter attea. At the end of this short episode. I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full along with a ton of other membership benefits. We've created or you can learn more now by going to Peter Atia, m.com.
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anything episode 47. I'm once again joined by Nick Stenson. In today's episode we dive into all things related to cold therapy. For those of you who are regular listeners of the podcast or maybe follow me on social media, you probably notice. I spend quite a bit of time talking about the benefits of heat exposure in particular around saunas.
But we do receive just as many questions about cold exposure and the benefits thereof. So, we decided to do a dedicated. Am a around the topic where we incorporated all of those questions for the same? A focus on what we do and don't know around cold therapy, including the different types of cold therapies, this would be showers, cold plunges and cryotherapy is the three main types of can cold therapy affect mood, or even be a treatment for depression, talk about claims that cold therapy can help activate Brown adipose tissue or bat for metabolic health.
Talk about what happens if you exercise in the cold any potential, downsides around cold therapy, talk about potential gyro protective benefits around cold therapy that is to say does cold therapy provide any benefit in terms of slowing aging and or delaying death living longer and then we talked about the consensus or lack thereof around what an effective cold therapy protocol should look like. One thing to note is this is an audio only am a, there's no video for it. However, the show notes,
Will display anything I reference and more.
So without further delay I hope you enjoy. Am a 47.
I Peter. Welcome to another am a, how you doing? I'm doing very well. So, Peter for today's am a, we're really focusing on One Core topic that we get asked about a lot, which is everything around cold therapy. And so for people who listen to the podcast, follow you on social
Tia, we've spent some time recently talking about the benefits of sauna and heat and way back in the day. I think it was on a May 16. You and Bob talked about hot and cold and we've kind of updated your thoughts on hot therapy but we haven't touched on cold. And so what we did is we just compiled All Those Questions around, cold exposure, cold therapy and if that has potential similar benefits to sauna and so we'll hopefully cover them all today including really what we know and don't know about
Hold it therapy, how it can affect mood, or be a treatment for depression. What we know about the claims that it helps activation of brown, adipose tissue for metabolic Health. Any potential cons around cold therapy are there possible, gr protective benefits, exercising, the cold. And ultimately do we know anything around a consensus for an effective, cold therapy protocol. So if all goes according to plan, that's what we'll cover today. Anything you want to add before we
Start jumping into that. Only that I am exceptionally happy that the F1 season as of our recording is finally back. It's a very difficult time for me. When F1 is not happening so they will leave it at that for those listening at the time of this recording, it's Friday before F1 starts on Sunday. So practice is just finished fp1 and fp2, for the first race. So how many episodes of drive to survive?
I've have you watched, I'm trying to nurse it along. I've only watched five of ten so far and I will say that of the first five. Number four is my favorite so far. Okay. And how are you thinking about this season any early predictions knowing again that by the time this comes out a lot more will be known but we're recording this completely brand-new to the season certainly. Going by what?
We saw in the testing week Red Bull looked incredibly strong. The top three look, predictably strong and Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari. I think the two biggest surprises were the strengths of Aston Martin, which were horrible last year. And the not only the continued weakness of McLaren, but it looks like McLaren took a step back again, that could all be untrue by the time, the season unfolds, but that's really interesting.
Current, of course, have a new rookie driver Oscar, piastre who and I think seems like the real deal, you know? Just because you win F 3, and f 2, doesn't mean you're going to succeed in F1, but and I don't know oscar. But I know people who do know him and they the way they speak about him, suggest he will have a great future in F1. So, if that's true, then it's always great to see someone like that in the rookie season. Obviously Ferrari have a new team principle, which I think will help them a lot. As you know, I was never a fan of their previous.
In principle. I thought he was a clown so I like I hope it's a better season than last season from a competitive standpoint. I believe it will be last season ended quite competitively, but began. Well, it sort of began competitively between Red Bull and Ferrari and ended more competitively between Red Bull and Mercedes. I would like it to be just more competitive. If it were a for horse race this year, that would be amazing. Yeah, will be, will be fun to see how these first few races unfold.
All right. So, all right might actually
hear you have much to your
sadness. We're going to move away from F1. So I think with cold, I think it'd be helpful just to start with what are even the most common cold, exposure therapies when people hear other people talk about. Yeah, I'm doing cold therapy. This is how I use cold. I think it'd be helpful just to understand what that even means. Yeah, there are many ways I think about this. I think the two most common ways to think about it and the ways that we'll talk about it are
Coldwater immersion which will kind of abbreviate CWI if I get lazy and then whole body cryotherapy, which is usually abbreviated WBC. Of course, I'm not referring to the world boxing Council for those boxing fans out there. So Coldwater immersion is it suggest is you are immersed in cold water. The most common protocols you'll see could be as cold frankly as I squatter so that's 32 degrees but typically
In research studies, you're kind of seeing more sort of 40 degrees Fahrenheit up into the 60s and the variability. You see in temperatures comes down to the duration of immersion. So once you're in sort of the 30s and 40s were talking about two to three minutes, and once you're talking about these 30-minute protocols, you're typically up at slightly higher temperatures, okay? So a couple other terms, right? So head out immersion refers to as see,
Version basically to the sternum or neck but there are some protocols that will be submersion to waste only. So we'll when that is relevant, will try to comment on that. Now, the problem with this subject matter and I'll just sort of preface this all up front is, we rely heavily on meta-analyses, but as you've probably heard me say five hundred times. Now, on this podcast, 1000 sows ears makes not a pearl necklace. So a meta-analysis can only be as good as the sum of its parts and if
its parts are very heterogeneous, which they often are but not heterogeneous in the right way, then your analyses are somewhat limited. So one of the challenges here is you're trying to ascertain information from highly variable studies. Talking about WBC whole body cryo these are things. You wouldn't do this at home unless you're insanely wealthy and you would have your own chamber and your own nitrogen tank. So these are things that you typically go and do some place else. So
Go to these cryogenic Chambers. You see these places all over the place and you basically stand in a tube that blasts liquid nitrogen inside and these temperatures are pretty cold, right? So this will be anywhere from - 162 - 260 °F and again that's at that point it's hard to understand what those temperatures mean. Most of us have no sense of what that really means for what it's worth. That's kind of like - 110 to minus 160 °C.
Dias and you might say, well gosh how can a person tolerate that? Well again you have to remember there's a totally different conductivity of gas versus liquid so because it's a gas that's coming at you. It's not going to be nearly as capable of extracting heat from your body. Nevertheless, you tend to sit in these things for about 3 minutes. I've done a bunch of whole body. Cryovac, in the day. I, my daughter used to take drum lessons next to a place that had a whole body cryo thing. And this is back when I was training a
W. So I would, every time I took her to drum lessons, I would go and get a three minute session, where I'd stand in the tube for three minutes. You put little booties on, so your feet, don't freeze, but otherwise, you're standing there in your in your Niche and, you know, it's cold, but truthfully, anybody who's done? Both will tell you that. Coldwater immersion is much subjectively colder and whole body cry. Anyway, it's a long-winded answer but just so folks have a sense of what we're talking about and within those it seems although you do
You see cryotherapy and you see a lot of stuff around that, like you said, that's one where you have to go to a place where things like an ice bath or cold plunge is much more accessible to people. And I think, because of that, we receive a lot more questions around those two things in particular, ice bath, cold plunge. And so, what do we know about some of the benefits of cold exposure therapies like those two things? Yeah, so to build on that, we're going to spend much more time talking
About Coldwater immersion for two reasons, maybe three reasons one, we're getting more questions about it too. It's more accessible. All you need is a tub to do it. I mean, you know, when I started doing it, I just would go out and buy ice at the grocery store and stick it into my bathtub. So I put cold water in the bathtub and then just dump ice into it and then sit in it and then of course you can have cold plungers which cost a fraction of what I pull body crowd device. Looks like the other reason we're going to spend more time talking about cold water.
Immersion is, there's simply much more literature on it.
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