Dive deep as we explore the benefits of cryotherapy, from pain relief to a metabolism boost.

Ever wondered about the science behind this cold treatment? We've got you covered.

Discover traditional methods, tips for beginners, and some personal experiences that might just surprise you.

But, as with all things, there are risks. Stay tuned as we delve into the potential dangers and how to navigate them safely.

Let's embark on this chilly journey together.

Turn yourself into a modern-day ninja with the Survival Fitness Plan. Take the challenge today! https://www.survivalfitnessplan.com/challenge

This podcast is available from most major podcast hosts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:59:16 R.I.C.E

02:00:70 Benefits of cryotherapy

02:24:46 Pain relief

02:42:22 Improved muscle recovery

03:04:92 Improved recovery time

03:31:26 Improved skin appearance

03:48:63 Boosts metabolism

04:53:59 How cryotherapy works

06:22:03 Ways to do it

08:01:95 Traditional options

09:45:10 Working your way up

10:43:29 What I used to do

11:27:70 Advice from someone

12:17:49 Limit to cold immersion sessions

13:50:62 Cold War depression

14:24:52 Cold shock response

15:50:43 Hypothermia

16:44:08 The most DANGEROUS phase

18:32:49 Conclusion

18:49:60 Closing

Hi guys, Sam Fury here with another episode of the Survival Fitness Plan, the only program where you will train yourself to outrun, outfight, and outlive the majority of the world's population. Today, we're going to go deeper into cryotherapy. Because if you listened to the last episode, I went to the cryo place and tried whole-body cryo for the first time.

So now I've done a little bit more research and I'm getting a bit more into body hacking and this will filter through, through the survival fitness plan as well. Because that's the outlive part, right? You can outrun parkour, swimming, mountain bike riding, right? All the things to outrun someone, outfight, self-defense, obviously, and outlive.

It's all about increasing your longevity and cryotherapy.

Cryotherapy is also good because let's just get into the episode because all this will get explained. Alright, so what is cryotherapy? Cryotherapy is like cold therapy, right?

 When like, it's pretty popular if you heard the acronym R. I. C. E. So when you get an injury, a sporting injury. Rice is like rest, ice, and compression of Eleva elevation, right? So it's kinda like applying ice to an injury, but it's like on steroids. Because you're exposing your body, or a specific part of your body, to extremely low temperatures for a short period of time, right?

And the whole body, so you can do it localized just like on a part of your body, just like rice, right? But with a special machine I guess, that makes it a lot cooler, I've never done that. But I think I'll try it the next time I have a specific injury or, like I said, the next time. Like there's no doubt in my mind that I'm going to get injured or something, anyway, it doesn't matter.

Or you do whole body cryotherapy, which is what I did, right, which involves standing in a chamber that just gets filled with cold, cold, cold air, and yeah, and it sort of lowers the whole temperature of your body.

 All right, so some benefits, why, why are we doing this? Now, just keep in mind that none of these benefits are proven fully, like, well depends on who you talk to, I guess, but I guess if, if you're talking to advocators, they'll be like, yeah, it's proven.

But if you talk to other people who are cynics, they'll be like, well, it hasn't been fully accepted by all scientists or whatever. All right. So just keep that in mind, but I'm a believer.

 So. Here we go. Pain relief, right? So it reduces inflammation and swelling so I guess for chronic things kind of like arthritis, fibromyalgia, I don't know, arthritis and other sports injuries and stuff, right, it's going to reduce inflammation and swelling, which helps with pain relief.

 Improved muscle recovery, which is the reason I initially did it, so after training or if you've got an injury, right It can improve your recovery, just like ice, just like ice, right? And then, of course, you'd have enhanced athletic performance, right? Because of the previous two things, because of reducing inflammation and promoting muscle recovery, it's automatically you've got to improve your athletic performance, right?

 You improve your recovery time, improve your recovery time, and yeah, alright there's some talk that it can reduce anxiety and depression as well. I don't know how that's supposed to work. Maybe the cold shocks your body in, and creates different endorphins or chemicals or whatever in your brain. Who knows? I'm sure that's, that's like one of the ones where they're really up in the air about that.

 Improve skin appearance. If you've got things like psoriasis or eczema maybe acne, right, just because it reduces inflammation and promotes healing. Yeah, that's all these, all these kinds of things just run off the first two, right?

 Boost your metabolism, which is good for promoting weight loss. I think that's probably pretty good. Cold therapy, like, boosts your metabolism. Cause when you expose yourself to super cold temperatures, or even like you go for a morning run in the cold, right? Because your body works harder to keep warm.

This is just my theory, I don't know if it's true. If, because your body works harder to keep warm, it's burning more energy, it's burning more calories, so it's promoting weight loss, right? That's my theory. I was recently told by my friend that I should stop stating facts as if they were facts. But I do tell, I told her, I was like, I say these things, right?

But I always, I always say afterward. Or before that. Like I, it's just my, it's just my theory, right? But I, when I say stuff, I tend to state it like it's, it's a fact anyway. If it's a fact, it's a fact. And if it's not a fact, I'll tell you that. It's just me thinking about it. Alright. Or it's my theory and it's my, to be fair, not to toot my own horn, but a good 50-plus percent of my theories are pretty accurate.

I'll find that out later. Years later. Alright.

 So how it works, cryotherapy. Well, like I said before, you're just exposing your body, your whole body, or a specific part of your body to extremely low temperatures. So it's typically between 110 to 140, or negative, sorry, negative 110 to negative 140. Celsius, which is 166 and 220 Fahrenheit if you're an American, degrees Fahrenheit negative that is.

Right? So for a short period of time. So when we went in there, he said, because it's your first time, just go for like two minutes. Right? And you can come out whenever you want. Some people come out after one minute or whatever. But he said for people that go in there often, they, they work their way up to like three minutes.

And to be honest, I reckon I could have done three minutes in there. My friend, maybe not, came in with me and she seemed to want to get out of there. But she probably could have done it if that was the thing if it was strange. I think one of the things is when you're going to be in there for two minutes, you've got your mind set on that, on two minutes, right?

But if they say, you're going to be in there for three minutes, then you've got your mind set on that. So, yeah. And then once you do it a few times, you get used to it and you, you, it's like people that get tattoos, right? They get it and it hurts or whatever and then they're like, oh, but they, they get the rush from it or whatever.

I don't get a rush from tattoos. I don't like the pain. Or whatever. Alright. So apparently, the exposure to the cold triggers like psychological responses in the body. And that's why, how you get, so all these responses that you, that gives your body, and that's how you get them and probably some chemical responses as well. And that's why you get the benefits that I described earlier, right?

 So, how can you do it? So, the first way to do it is the way that I did it, is you go to a professional, which is highly recommended because it can be dangerous, right? If you try to do it yourself and you mess it up, it can be dangerous, right?

You could, and I've only heard of one person, I'm sure there are a few like all these body hackers that are, like Dave Asprey Russell Brunson, he's not a body hacker, he's a, but he's into body hacking as well, but his field of study is Internet marketing. It doesn't matter. Dave Asprey, whose course is the invention of bulletproof coffee.

And he's written a bunch of good books about body hacking and then some others, right? They probably buy, they've probably bought their own chamber and they do it at home. I had a quick look and a used one cost around 50 grand. So if you want a new one, it's probably about a hundred grand. And that's probably not even like top-of-the-line.

For example, like the one that we used in the place. It was like a full chamber and that probably cost them like 150 grand or whatever because it was like a, like a big room, right? Which is, I can understand, totally understand why it costs that much because it's a massive piece of machine. But even the personal ones where it's just like a little like a coffin one and you go in there.

They probably cost about a hundred grand, because it's the technology, isn't it? And then, and then, yeah, anyway. Alright, so but, local, so how can you do it at home though? Because most people aren't going to flesh out fifty grand, for one. Well, they might, depending on what your income level is.

I probably will one day. But there you go. But if you want to start now, and you don't have very much money, or you don't want to shell it out, or you want to give it a go, any of those, right?

 Of course, you can do the traditional things, like if it's localized. You can use ice packs, and cold compressors, like, just for your injuries.

That's like, pretty standard. People have been using bags of frozen peas to take down swelling and inflammation when they get a rolled ankle or whatever for as long as I can remember. So you could do that, right? But if you want full body immersion, which is, which will give you all the benefits that I was talking about before not just for injuries, you could try filling a bathtub or...

Fill a bathtub, fill your bathtub with cold water, and maybe chuck some ice in it, right? But you want to, you want to have a temperature gauge in there. You want to need to do this stuff safely, right? And I'll get into that in a minute. The other, other option is to get, is to go out and buy a cold water plunge tank, right?

Which is cheaper than buying a cryotherapy thing. It's and you can get the water pretty good. And this is a pretty common thing. There's one that I looked at quickly from a company called Renu Therapy. And you can buy a brand new one for about 10 grand. USD, or there's a traveling model and it's only about a thousand dollars.

I didn't look deeply into what the difference is, but I assume that the 10 grand one is much better. But for the traveling model, a thousand bucks let's say a traveling model, but it comes with a big ass motor or whatever I think. So or it's like an inflatable thing. You could blow it up and then fill up the sides with ice, which is not a, I mean, if you're super into it, yeah, or you could just set that little one up at home.

Or, like, if you're gonna do that if you're gonna set it up at home, you might as well just get a bathtub and fill it up with water. I have seen, like, TikToks or Instagrams or whatever, and the biohackers, what they do, they've got like a drum, like an old keg drum, like those wooden barrels, and I guess they fill that up with ice or whatever and then plunge themselves in there, right?

 Alright, and if you don't want to do that or you're not up to that yet, or if you want to work your way up to it, which is important, you can just do cold showers, right? Or cold water swimming. So they're good ways to acclimate, acclimate, acclimate, sorry, to acclimatize your body to the next stage, which is of course the cold bath or the ice plunge or whatever.

So. They reckon, like on that website of the people that were, that were selling the cold plunge tanks, Renu Therapy, they said to take cold showers for at least 30 days. So my mate who I used to work in China with, teaching English, he he's, I don't know if he still does it, but he did it for a couple of years, at least.

And if he still does it, he's been doing it for, like, several years, is he just takes a cold shower every morning. And yeah. He did it for mental fortitude, to increase his mental fortitude, but I'm sure it had a bunch of other benefits. And I actually used to do it as well. I haven't done it for years, but I used to take a cold shower.

What I used to do is just get in the shower, normal shower, and do my normal shower stuff, right? And then turn on, turn off the hot water, and just have cold water blast me for at least 10 seconds. And then, and I, to be honest, I don't think that's enough now that there's more research. This was years and years and years ago before all this biohacking stuff came out.

Like more biohacking has been around for a while, but before it became a lot more popular. And so the idea is you want to lower your core temperature and to do that without going into a cryo thing, it takes a bit more time. So I would only do it for like a minute, like 10 seconds or 30 seconds.

Right. And then turn the hot water back on. Because the research back then was, you don't want to get sick. So you have to warm your body back up or whatever, but I don't know what the new research is now on that. Kind of stuff, but taking a cold shower.

 I also met this other dude and he rec he told me that he hasn't been sick in seven years and all he does is just take cold showers in the morning He doesn't bother with hot water and my friend didn't bother with hot water either so I guess that's I guess if nothing less it is good for your mental fortitude because if you can like to Imagine jumping in an ice bath every morning no matter how cold it is you just jump in a bath full of ice and stay in there for like 5 minutes, right?

Or 3 minutes. And then if you psych yourself up to do that every day without fail, then your men your mental fortitude is better than like a good majority of the world's population, like most of the world's population. So it's something to think about. Even if you don't believe in all the other benefits, just that alone might be worth it, right, for you?

 Alright so they also say to limit your cold immersion sessions to 10 minutes max, right? So I would start off slow. You do your, you do your ice, your showers, your cold showers, obviously, you can do that for a while because it's not going to hurt you, right? You're not going to go, well, unless your shower is super cold, but usually not, right?

But for cold water or immersion, certainly, you want to limit the time and you want to work your way up to it. Make sure you consult your doctor, all that sort of stuff. If you've got a heart issue or if you're pregnant or whatever, obviously don't do it. So make sure you consult your doctor. Establish a breath control practice.

I'll get into that later. Breath, breathwork, that's going to be another whole episode. So I'll get into that on another episode because breathwork is good for longevity as well. I don't know much about it, but I will definitely research it before I do the before I do the episode. So establish breath and breath control.

Well, it's been for years, right? Where It's been known for a long, long, long centuries probably that if, like, you know, when you go through, but have you ever seen the fight club and he pours acid on his hand, right? And then he goes into his meditative state to try to, to try to release the pain or whatever.

He, so that's kind of like breathwork. I use proper breath work and you can control it, you can definitely do it as simple as box breathing. Like if you've got your flight and fight response kicks in, if you're in debt, you use box breathing and it'll, like calm your nerves or whatever. So you can think.

And make the correct decisions, right? It's all breathwork. And, and there's, apparently there's breath work for longevity and stuff like that as well, which I do want to look into when I get, like, before the next episode or whatever.

 Yeah. The last thing that they say is to make sure you know the four phases of the Cold War depression.

And be mindful of safe limits. So I think just knowing the phases helps you understand why going for longer than 10 minutes is not a good idea I'll quickly go through and they're pretty similar, to the four phases of well actually no. So these four phases of cold water immersion if you've ever read Survival Swimming, which is a book that I wrote a while ago and it goes into like how to escape from ice cold water and it goes over these four phases as well, but I'll just quickly run through them.

 So the first one is a cold shock response, right? So you, as soon as you jump into the cold water. Within the first couple of minutes, three to five minutes, I reckon you'll, you'll get into cold shock and that usually represents itself in like gasping, like hyperventilation, maybe vertigo all that sort of stuff.

You know what it's like. It's like, you see if you ever jumped into like cold water and then like at the initial like, but then after a couple of minutes, like if you stay in that cold water, you might go into cold shock, right?

 Alright, after that is cold incapacitation, right, cold incapacitation, bleh, bleh, bleh, sorry.

So, this happens like anywhere between 3 and 30 minutes after you've jumped into the cold water, right, and this is where it starts to get really dangerous. So, if you start going into cold shock response, that's your sign to get out. If you start going into cold incapacitated, incapacitated, fuck, why can't I say this word, incapacitation, right?

Yeah. Incapacitation, incapacitation, I know this word, I'm just saying it wrong, sorry, my mind's going into a, into a, it doesn't matter, alright, so but if you go into this, the second thing, right, the short term swim failure, they refer to it as this is where it's getting dangerous, right, because you're losing your strength, you're losing your manual dexterity, you're losing your ability to swim yourself to safety yeah, alright.

 After that, you go into hypothermia, and almost everyone probably has heard of hypothermia. So you got hypothermia and hyperthermia. Hyperthermia is when you're overheating. Hypothermia is when your body starts to lose heat faster than it produces it, and this is really dangerous. This can lead to unconsciousness and eventually death if you're not, if you're not worried if you don't take care of it.

This usually happens after about 30 minutes, but it can of course happen sooner. It just depends on the person. I've seen people go into hypothermia and they, like, kind of go super pale, clammy. It's it's not good. You gotta warm people up, like, pretty rapidly. Yeah, so you can read more about what to do for hypothermia.

Just online just Google it and it'll tell you but yeah, it's it's super dangerous I'm not gonna give you advice on it because I'm not a medical doctor, but whatever.

 All right And then and then this last there's this other stage right which a lot of people don't think about it's not like those first three Stages you might like most people might not know them by name or whatever or the exact same disorder But they kind of logical right first.

You're gonna like Get super cold and you're gonna like gas or air or whatever and the next you're gonna go And your motor skills are gonna start to lose and then you're gonna go into hypothermia And even if you don't know exactly what those are, that's pretty like people can probably didn't even need me to tell ya It's just me telling you makes you aware of it But you probably knew it instinctively like if you see it in action, you'd probably know Alright, but these fourth one people don't think about and it's circum rescue.

So that's like after a circum rescue collapse It's called so like after people get rescued They think they're safe so they relax and then but then like that's where bad stuff happens as well, right? So this can happen before, during, or after the rescue, right? So, why, while you're, you're fighting, flight, and fight response, you start to fight, stay alive in the water all these hormones surge through your body, right?

To help you survive. Which is a mechanism, a survival mechanism of your body, but once that first threat, it minimizes so like somebody starts a rescue or you see rescue coming or whatever and your mind starts to relax, it decreases those hormones, like it doesn't release as many of those hormones and as a result, your blood pressure drops, your muscles lose their function and it can lead to like heart failure, right, cardiac arrest while the person is still in the water.

So you've got to really watch out for that. So you've done. Essentially, it means that even once a person is out of water, they can still die. Because they, if their mind relaxes too much and they and the body stops producing what it needs to do to fight the bad effects, then they, they'll, they'll stop.

So, yeah, so they're the four stages.

 And I think the whole point of that is just to know that you don't really want to go past cold shock response. So if you get into the water, it says up to 10 minutes, right? Go, go in no more than 10 minutes. And then people are, oh, go for 10 minutes. But you might start going into a cold shock response after three minutes.

So as soon as you notice that, I would I will get out.

 All right, that is it for today, guys. I hope you've learned about cryotherapy and cold water immersion. And give it a try. Make sure you do it safely. Yeah, that's it for today, don't forget to, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, don't forget to go, go get the app, 1, 30 days, it's getting there, turn yourself into a modern-day ninja with the Survival Fitness Plan app, get 30 days access for 1, www.survivalfitnessplan.com/app don't forget to like, subscribe and share, take a screenshot post it on social media, tag Survival Fitness, hashtag Survival Fitness Plan, and yeah, thanks for tuning in and I'll speak to you again next time. Bye.

Don’t just get fit, get survival fit. Take the challenge today! https://www.survivalfitnessplan.com/challenge