Hot and Cold
‘The Soeberg Principle: When using deliberate cold exposure to increase your metabolism, minimize hot showers & sauna after the last cold exposure. Forcing your body to re-warm on its own is a major component of the metabolism & brown fat (healthy, thermogenic fat) stimulation.’
Dr Andrew Huberman
Many all of us will be aware that there has been a lot of media coverage over the last couple years about the use of cold water exposure to promote health.
This has been a topic of real interest for me for a long time. Ever since I experienced cold water exposure as a young guy learning scuba diving in quarries in England I used to emerge feeling invigorated and would enter a deep sleep like I'd never experienced afterwards.
The research has moved on a lot in the last couple of years about the effects of cold and heat exposure using a sauna on reducing people's all cause mortality (death from any and all natural causes).
I've been playing with deliberate cold exposure for quite some time combining cold showers and the use of cryotherapy chambers to stimulate brown fat and to reduce my resting heart rate and improve my heart rate variability. This has had a massive impact upon my mental well-being, my recovery from injury and overtraining.
So, if I have sold you on the idea that deliberate cold exposure is good for you, the question is how much?
Dr Susanna Soeberg is the leading researcher in the world about this and her team have established this protocol as being the most efficient to gain optimum results:
Cold: total 11 minutes per week. This can be spread over 2-3 visits per week, each lasting 1-2 minutes.
Heat – Sauna: 10-15 minutes at a time, but no more than 30 minutes per session, for a total of 50 minutes per week.
There are hundreds of questions that lead on from this – how cold, how hot, water or cryo chamber…
Like always, I wont answer all of them. Instead, Im going to suggest that if you are interested in living a longer, healthier life, you can either read Dr Soebergs excellent book called “Winter Swimming” or listen to her being extensively interviewed by Dr Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Lab Podcast on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/episode/3YPKYYsqrWZUdZTzF6dZ3F?si=08c8198b6ce3417b
Also, if you’re local to Ipswich, Suffolk - I highly recommend the guys at For You Now (FYN) - I have been visiting their Cryo Chamber for some time and the facilities are incredible!
