I don't know about you, but it seems like Iceman's are all the rage, whether you're a Wim Hof person, or you don't know who Wim Hof is, and by the way, I talked him like 11 years ago, that was a very entertaining conversation. But anyway, point being, you know, maybe Iceman is a perfect thing for you. Maybe it's the worst thing you could possibly do. And this is true about a lot of different things that impact training and your goals, whether you're walking, hiking, doing whatever else.
And that's what we're going to explore on today's episode of the movement movement. The podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, typically starting feet first because those are your foundation, but we're going to talk about some other things today as well. And we break down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes the straight out lies you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or to yoga or cross-fitter, play dance, revolution or ease in racing or anything, myriad things that you do with your body. And to do this enjoyably and effectively and efficiently, but I say enjoyably trick question.
I know I did because look, if you're not having fun, you're not going to keep it up anyway. So find a thing that you like to do that's enjoyable. I'm Stephen Sashan, your host on the movement podcast from zero shoes.com. And we call it the movement movement because we, all of us, are creating a movement, more about that in a second, about natural movement, letting your body do what it's made to do.
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Yeah, well, thank you, Stephen, for having me over here. My name is Jordan Abbicastas. I'm a far-noted engineer, but I'm a strength and conditioning coach for about eight years. I've been investing most of my time into mobility and stability and strength training.
And having a good move a little bit better, a little bit easier, helping them get back to things that they want to do most. You know, first of all, thank you. Secondly, just remind me, one of my favorite things is the gap between what people know or hear or even believe and what they do. And we say strength training, you know, there's a lot of people who are involved in what we do, who are runners of varying kinds.
And there's no question at all. The research could not be more clear that some strength training would make them better, would make them healthier, would make them less prone to injury. There's actually research from Dr. Isabel Sacco, where she had people who ran in regular shoes doing eight, some of them, half of them did an eight-week foot strengthening exercise program.
And over the course of a year, that group had 250% fewer injuries than the group who didn't do the exercise program. And it was a simple program, really easy foot strengthening thing, but it's amazing how people would do that. So before we even get into what I tease at the beginning of this, having to do with ice baths and other training, can we just talk about, you know, as a strength and conditioning professional, what you bump into, because we're going to be giving people ideas of things to do, but what do you bump into to get people to actually implement, to actually do the things that you know will be helpful? Most of the restrictions that I see come around a fear of pain or a limitation in their own personal movements that they've almost curated in our minds or someone had implanted this kind of seed that they need to restrict movement in order to stay healthy, because they may cause some type of further damage to whether it be a joint or muscle or of some type of sword.
And that's a lot of pain science, which, you know, that's not necessarily my expertise as a whole science on its own to kind of get to dive into that. But it's learning how to be comfortable within your body and then you can progress from there and to further advance movements that actually build and facilitate muscle growth to help overall increase performance throughout their life. Would it be incorrect to say that, to reframe what you said in one way, that many people are very willing just to argue for their limitations? Absolutely.
I mean, if you can find some type of excuse to get out of progressing, I'm sure some people will find some type of way to hinder themselves. You know, self-sabotage is definitely something that we see very common. I'm not a fan of the phrase self-sabotage because if you really dive in, you'll find that the person had a good reason for doing what they did. It's just not consistent with what they're saying, but it's consistent with what they think or believe.
Yeah, it's definitely a line of UC individuals holding themselves back for good reasons. Like, you know, pain is a good reason. Pain is, our bodies are in tune. If we're in pain, the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to stop doing whatever we're doing.
So that's natural. But slowly coming out now the last five years of research has really been incredible in seeing how we're progressing the field of physical rehabilitation and getting people moving much faster. I mean, just 10 years ago, I don't know if you have 20 years to go if you've got a cast on, but they would keep the cast on for triple, sometimes quadruple the length of what they're doing now. So they're getting people out of the cast very much earlier on, getting them moving much quicker because we know that movement is key here to facilitating health.
It's funny, and we don't have to dive into feet per se, but what's so interesting to me is that everyone believes that that getting moving as much as possible as pain free as possible is the best thing to do, except when it comes to feet, everyone's just ready to have their feet immobilized and not moving no matter what the problem is, even if it has nothing with your feet, it's like you go into broken wrists. It's like, we're going to give you orthotics because clearly your posture is affecting how you're using your wrist and therefore it's like, whoa, slow down. So in fact, Dr. Irene Davis, that was her kind of, you know, wake up moment when she was teaching physical therapists all about getting people moving as much as possible.
But then it was going on, well, then why are we posting their feet with an orthotic that doesn't let their foot move, even if they have a foot injury. And so that was, I got to look into this. Now she's the number one researcher about natural movement. Yeah, it's, I mean, you said it's about on it.
So our feet are definitely one of the most underutilized systems and modern technology. And I'm not sure why it took so long to progress towards, you know, individuals like yourself who have done such great progress in the field and have advanced in our footwear and our mobility and helping individuals understand that the structure of the foot is so critical for balance, stability, pain, movement, and just overall bodily health altogether posture, even shoulder, shoulder movements. I mean, it's all connected throughout this kinetic chain that we move. And what are we doing the most for most people is walking, you know, standing or walking?
Well, here I can resolve that conundrum for you really quickly. Where's the money? The money is not in telling people to use their feet into a simple exercise program. The money is making someone buy a $500 orthotic every year or more.
I mean, you know, it's a comment I make about modern running shoes. I go, clearly, they don't really care about you. Because if they did, they would try to undermine the multi-billion dollar market for products that you need to add to your shoes to make them work better. It's like the shoe companies know what a doctor's sole's insult does.
They know what a superfeed orthotic does. They know all these things. They could make money if they just sort of built that into the shoe in some way. And yet they don't.
So that's an interesting thing. I heard you mentioned that on a separate podcast. You're like, either they have completely ignored the research altogether, or they haven't been smart enough to utilize this and to actually curate something correctly. Well, there's actually another option.
The other option is that they don't believe those things actually work in the way that people think, which I could make that argument. But more, they don't have another option to make their products work, which would require them to make stuff that looks like what we do. So there's a lot of what we're looking for. There's a lot of conflicting goals that if your primary goal is to make your shareholders happy, then that's the way to place your people.
So let's back up to what I teased at the beginning because I find this really interesting. I'm going to start with just the thing that I mentioned, and then I'd love you to paint the bigger context of how we got to from there. And that's the magic and question of ice baths. Now I will confess that we have a little gazebo outside of our house with a hot tub in it, and it also has a cold plunge.
It's basically just a rubber tub that's about 24 inches in diameter and 30 inches high. And it's used for people who don't have a bathtub. You put this in the shower, fill it up with water, and you get in. I just have it filled with water, especially now that it's getting to be in the teens every night in the morning.
I have to chip away the ice to use it. Now I don't use it for the reasons that people think you're supposed to use it. I don't use it because I have ideas about inflammation or recovery or whatever. I use it because I just get a kick out of how, after I'm in there for a little while and I get out, I'm just way more alert and it's very entertaining.
There's something about, especially now with the water's 32 degrees, I get in there and I'm just curious how many seconds is it going to take until I want to get the hell out of here, and then how many times am I going to resist getting out before I go? And we're done. And in fact, sorry, I got to say this way. I never even have the thought.
I've got to get out. I have the thought like, let me see if I can stay. And then the next thing I know I'm getting out. So let's talk to IceBaz and the confusion about those in the bigger context that you framed that in when we were chatting before this recording is so I found and there's so much research now that has come out about crowd therapy and ice bath work and utilizing this as a recovery tool.
And there's definitely a misconception here if you were to be utilizing an ice bath as a form of recovery in the sense of muscle growth, you will be blending your effects dramatically. And it's just the, it's, I was just listening to Dr. Hebermann the other day about this. And it was actually, and it makes sense if you were to set your body inside of something very cold and your whole entire system is going to clamp down, your blood flow is going to be restricted, the nutrient sources are going to be restricted, the metabolism is going to be restricted.
So you're blending a lot of these, these stress effects facilitate muscle growth as long as that's only if you do it too close to your training session stuff. Right. So it's not necessarily something that if you, you know, percise yourself, I love the mental benefits and I love, you know, feeling the adrenaline that kicks on when I set myself in ice cold water because that's exactly what's happening. Your body's going to get into an adrenaline epinephrine, fight or flight mode, holy cow, I'm freezing, you know, and it's, and you're battling this game and then you get out and you feel great, right?
Absolutely. There's no doubt about it. It's just when you want to talk about muscle growth and you want to facilitate actually building as or developing as much hypertrophy in this actual muscle cell itself, you want to tell out how to go through these natural cycles and facilitate as much of a cascade and animal cascade as you can without blending that effect. I mean, there are a number of things similarly that just get in the way of what we think is helpful, I mean, because they feel good or it's a good story, like just antioxidants in general, similar story is that antioxidants get in the way of letting your body do what it's supposed to do, which is because of the oxidative stress, because of the free radicals that you're generated from whatever you've done, that's initiating the super compensation, healing response, that is going to make you better.
But if you get in the way of that, then you've just, you know, rude it. And by the way, for anyone who's not looking, if they don't, if you don't think you're looking for muscle growth or hypertrophy, you may be mistaken, especially if you're getting older, because then, you know, what you're doing is combating the fact that you're just going to be losing muscle mass in general. Do you want, can you, I mean, I just jumped into that, do you want to add anything to that mix? Yeah, I mean, I think that ice baths are great.
And I think that difference between hot and cold frequencies is definitely beneficial for the body overall for long term longevity and health, mental health. I mean, there's a slew of research that benefits that but anybody who's actually done something like this will tell you that firsthand themselves, it's how great they feel when they when they go ahead and go through these routines. In regard to an older, after we'll say 65, 70 plus, right, if you're looking to, you're really looking to maintain as much as you have and to increase overall health span at that point, right, you're not in this developmental stage in your 20s and 30s like you were, and as a progressive athlete who needs the ability to get prepared to gear towards either professional sports or even higher level athletic trainings, right? So it's definitely very subjective and personalized based off of what your true goals are and how you view and what you want to be at least your outcomes to be.
And I'll caveat back to that is that if you aren't going to necessarily want to stop doing these things that want to make you feel good, but you should have the understanding that the research shows that you need to delay this time response by some head blue training sets and possibly by about a day before you go ahead and progress into a heavy ice bath cold plunge, because the metabolic has started by that time, right? You've already got the signal, you've got that, you've got the growth and it's not going to, for the average individual who's doing average to even moderate intensity exercise, it's going to be a minimal difference, minimal effect, as long as you're separating it away from your exercise trainings. It's a good idea. I am flashing back to the times where we'd finish track work out and then jump in Boulder Creek because it felt really good in part because we were all toasty and warm, but we definitely were not helping ourselves in terms of just maximizing the impact of what that workout did to eventually get, again, muscle growth is going to be highly genetically determined as well.
If you produce a lot of myostatin, you will not grow muscles no matter how much it worked. If you produce none, you will not be able to avoid growing. We had a guy in our gymnastics team in high school who had, I can't really name the disease where you don't produce myostatin, and the guy just kept getting bigger every day, just a little bit of work and he's kept getting bigger. We used to tease him.
It's like, what'd you do for your biceps today, you guys? Cheerios. The most mild stimulus would just make him get bigger. It was amazing and sad because that disease has a lot of other implications when you died, there's 20s.
But suffice it to say, it's like anything you're doing, there's going to be some growth component to it. And I guess maybe it does make sense if you want to balance it with just your lifestyle if you don't care, not yourself out. And you give me a flashback when you said how to call it alternating. We were in Finland 15, let's say 14 years ago, for the world masters track and field championships.
And we were staying with some friends, actually this is the year before that maybe, so it's like 15 years ago, staying with some friends who had a house on a lake in Finland, and it's been in their family for like 400 years. And so they had a finished sauna, or for those who've been to Finland, a finished sauna that was in ATP. And it was on the lake that had just unfrozen like four days earlier. So anyway, I'm getting the sauna jumping in the lake, getting the sauna jumping in the lake, and the father of the people were staying with came by and said, how many times you were jumping in the lake?
I said, I don't know, seven eighties. Oh, apparently that's like a big match up. But if not, no. So I got instant street cred for jumping in the just previously frozen lake seven or eight times.
And they mentioned over in Sweden and Finland and those parts of Europe. I mean, it being in the doing sauna routines is normal custom work, almost like taking a shower over there. I mean, Finland more saunas than people. Wow.
Yeah, that's awesome. Any people. Any decent office building has a communal sauna to use. It's very civilized.
I want to bring you back a little bit to when you were track training, when you were younger, and you were jumping into Boulder Creek, where you want to point where you were primarily developing scale or was this more of a growth phase for you? That's a question. And that's very kind of to say younger. It was 15 years ago.
But and I think I probably still did it until about 12 years ago. I think I was really doing both because I was definitely trying to get stronger because there's a definite correlation between certain kinds of strength and speed. And I was definitely working on forming technique because I never really had any training in that before. And frankly, it's something I'm still working on 15 years later.
I'm always trying to improve my form because I'm just getting more efficient. But the magic question, of course, is why do you ask? Because when you get to that level of training, your skill is not is will be improved by doing these recovery routines. But even though you're necessarily bluntings muscle growth effects, because you're recovering at a faster rate by going through these types of ice batting or swimming rituals that you were doing and freezing cold water and the grief, you should have seen a benefit.
I would have imagined you had seen a benefit in your training styles overall. It's hard to tell because I'm an old guy, so I'm 60 now. And frankly, the hardest lesson for me to learn in the early days when I got back to springing when I was 45 is how to do less, is how to have more time to recover in general, and how to, any time I had the thought, maybe I'll just do one more 100 meter run. That's the time to stop.
So when there's that, maybe, so I don't know, because it would have been certainly would have been easy for me to wait for a day and do it a day later, because I'm not training every day. And I found that I really only have two decent speed days in me in a given week. I need that much or maybe even a little more recovery. Maybe I get three good workouts in every two weeks if I get arranged that way.
But to your point, you're just working on the skill part, that's a neurological thing, less than a metabolic thing. So that makes sense, that's clever. Right. And that's where a lot of the research shows, and you'll see all the higher level athletes, whether they're baseball players who are under tremendous muscle stress, or even the MMA fighters who are going in through these fighter flights, they just, but once they get to the professional level, they're all of their routines are based around recovery solely.
They're not looking, and that's why they have weight classes for these things. They don't differentiate, they don't want to build muscle and put on a way to escalate to the weight class. Right. So for them, for their sport specific training styles, and ice map to help speed up recovery, whether it be before, after a workout, read them day after, is always going to benefit them.
Right. So once you've reached that level of skill, once you build that foundation, that's an interesting irony or an interesting sort of contradiction that since recovery is really important, and we know that certain performance enhancing drugs accelerate recovery, but they will also accelerate muscle growth. And if you're trying to stay in a lower weight class, where you have a better strength to weight ratio, that would be, I imagine, for those people who are engaged at that level, that would be a challenging thing to balance. Yeah.
Of course, they've got a slew of teams and coaches and members who are all helping them balance these type of training style and their recovery sessions. And we'll go, you can still build density, or you can build muscle or density without necessarily building muscular size. And yeah, you'll put on some way, but it's not going to be anywhere near the point where, for say, a bodybuilder who's focusing on hypertrophy and volume will put on if they're doing a separate type of routine. Well, that again, another interesting point, because if you're getting bigger, a lot of the weight is going to be just the intracellular water fluids that so if you're building density, are you doing that?
What's happening at the cellular level that's allowing you to do that? Well, the process is still similar, but it's going to be different in the way of the way that the actual metabolic stress is perceived on the system. And of course, the ice is going to dampen that overall, regardless. Right.
So they will have, of course, some anabolic effect. They're not going to be like zero, but the in regard to actual size, facilitation, and the way that because you have different ways that the musculature can grow, it can swell. Right. The muscles can swell.
And then they can also, but through any type of adaptation training, you're going to go through those micro tears. It's just how, what level are you actually facilitating that type of micro trauma? And is your recovery period allowing you to rebuild on top of that micro trauma as efficiently as possible? Or are we optimizing more before it's getting you back into shape to go back into the next round of the following day?
Well, this gives us back to what I hinted at before, and what we talked about briefly before we started, which was the difference between optimization and adaptation. And so just to make it easier for people to make the jump from where we just were to that part of the conversation, can you use the ice bath situation to highlight the difference between those two and then dive into optimization versus adaptation a little more specifically? Yeah. So optimization is going to be more geared towards, we'll consider it towards the athletes that have already found their niche and have built the foundation of their body almost entirely.
They're going to be over the age of at least 25, right? 26. And just for that primary reason, that's when you really see the big escalation in skill level, right? Because you've built a very, very solid enough where there are young people, I mean, LeBron James, he was very young, very skilled and very, very powerful at a young age.
But you'll see as he got older, he didn't grow much more in size wise, but his skill continued to level. And that's the optimization piece. The adaptation would have been from his age of 18 to 25, and then his optimization would have been would have been further on, right? So when we talk about optimization for skill or lifestyle-based trainings, we don't necessarily, someone may not necessarily want to be sore for two days in a certain group for certain reasons.
Maybe it will hinder their lifestyle effects. Maybe they're a physical labor job and they have to go back to work and they can't be, they can't have their legs differently sore. Yeah, it's going to have some effect on overall growth, but that's going to be the decision that they're going to make. Well, let's also cut to the chase.
You do a leg workout that really kills you that much, and you don't want to be that sore because you want to be able to sit on a toilet. I have a lot of work on occasion, had to help myself down or walk downstairs backwards because I overdid a leg day. Yeah, and of course, there's several things that plan to this and nutrition and sleep are also incredibly critical in creating a balanced recovery optimization routine as well as an adaptation based formula. Really adaptation in a sense of musculature or muscular health is primarily driven or at least regarded to with hypertrophy, right?
That's going to be the hypertrophy is going to be our biggest indication for the muscular adaptation. You can make a claim to say that performance overall is an adaptation, but performance also leads in through their muscular stabilization and our CNS and KNS systems, as you mentioned earlier. So there's a little bit more to performance than there is necessarily to just strictly growth. Growth is a little bit easier to attain than optimization itself.
My undergraduate research when I was at Duke was on cognitive aspects of motor scale acquisition, and people really don't appreciate how much time it takes to lay down neural pathways and get something way back in your brainstem so you don't need to think about it and you can't do it wrong anymore. And it's different for different people based on neuroplastic events and that's genetically determined to a significant amount. But suffice it to say, they also don't appreciate that the process of learning those new skills is what we call frustrating. And that's just the feeling laying down in your pathways.
And it always takes longer than you would like, which at the same time, I don't know if I just refrained it, but I love like last night, I was every night I take my dog out for a little walk to go pee before we go to bed. And then we run home and I just use that as a time to play with just like 20 meters just to play with my form. And I'm always finding a little something where it's never going to be locked in or maybe at well at some point. I remember watching, sorry, I'm renting for a sec.
I remember watching a video of Ben Johnson and he's about my age. And someone just went on the track and just decided to run with him. And the guy's, you know, weighs 50 pounds more than he did when he was competing, not nearly as muscular as when he was competing. But my God, his form was perfect.
I mean, just could not have been better. It was beautiful to watch. I don't wear him back. I know, I know, I know, and also, I mean, just to revert back to your form.
And I know you've been dealing with some back issues as well that you've been, you've been mediating as well. And of course, that's going to play a role in how you move, especially towards the end of the night. I'm sure you're busy guy and running towards the end of the night, you're going to always find some critiques as you're not, you know, it's going to be perfect. Well, that's true.
But I mean, dog before, and we got this guy, he's probably got three, we got him seven months ago, he's a rescue. And what I learned from having a dog is that I can run all out full speed, no warmup at 6am, because he can't. What happened is like, haven't had a problem yet. And sometimes not in the mood, but he's always in the mood.
So that's good. So it's a great training partner. He really is, well, he's great for over speed, because he's faster than I am. So I try to have him keep up with or stay with me for a little while, but then I'll let him go and I'll do over speed training because I'm just trying to keep up with him.
And he's pulling me along. It's really entertaining. And he has some problems doing that. So, but so backing up again, like in the context of optimization and adaptation to look back in our our cold therapy or our cold plunge or cold water, how do we want to do it our cryotherapy?
So do you want to say something a little more concrete about when in this two phases optimization versus adaptation? And I know we're being a little redundant when I ask this, say more about how you apply that intervention in those two different phases you might be in. And also one of the things you would for people who aren't just trying to get to a high level, but they're continuing to just do what they do to their warrior athletes. You know, let's talk about optimization and adaptation as a sort of periodic thing as well.
I'm imagining that there's an application there. Yeah. And it's not something that has, you know, of course, report and everyone's individual training and their personal skill level is definitely going to be somewhat involved in this. But I will I will have you up to this the when we are gearing towards optimization, we're not going to necessarily care about blending blood flow for a certain time period as because that's it will help systemic recovery overall.
Now, if we're going to be gearing towards actual muscular hypertrophy and full adaptation of the musculature system itself, you're not going to want to go ahead and do and jump into a cold bath after your workouts. And you'll see a lot of the athletes go ahead and it's becoming a wave, you know, we'll just go with all this all jumping a cold bath. Well, then it's not necessarily going to be beneficial for everyone's goals. Now, to the degree that it actually is, it's going to be on the individual level is and what you prefer.
If you are going to accept the fact that the data shows that, Hey, this is almost like taking Advil and you're basically creating an anti inflammatory system by jumping a cold bath, right? That is going to slow down muscular growth. That inflammatory cascade is what is driving hypertrophy. That is the metabolic cascade that you actually want to go ahead and continue through to build and to adapt the muscles to get larger and stronger over over the course of time.
So as we, if you are gearing towards adaptation and you would assume that most individuals who are into the gym are gearing towards adaptation, right? Because they're still building that foundation. For the most part, we're, I believe it's what 73% of individuals are under exercising in the United States right now, right? According to WHO and that's that's quite a big amount.
So even if they were doing two days a week, you know, we're still going to maximize that type of effect for your body. You're not going to necessarily want to be jumping into a whole plunge every single day because you're not really placing the stress on your body to see the benefits of it. So we want to go ahead and gear towards optimizing or adapting our muscular tricks to get stronger, bigger and allow us to progress in our lifestyle habits without necessarily impeding on this type of growth. And there's several things that we can do.
And it's, right? So we've got an interesting, we have to hit our protein levels, right? Whether it be plant based or animal based, you have to hit your protein levels. And you want to go ahead and then optimize for sleep and somewhat of a recovery routine where you are not over stiffening yourself where you're not going to move the following day.
And so you've got to find this healthy balance as to what works for you when you start getting into further into optimization and optimizing for specific motor patterns like a pitcher, right? Hypertrophy is not the game for a pitcher to build. You don't want hypertrophy at the right to your cuff. You don't necessarily want large hypertrophy of a muscle that's going to inhibit mobility, right?
So our goal is to optimize our ability to go ahead and have this for specific movement be greater and more skillful over time. And that's when we're going to start implementing more of a recovery based routine rather than an adaptation based routine. So for people who are not aspiring to be to master, some skill will be a professional athlete again are sort of, I hate the phrase we can't worry or it's not that, but people who are trying to be fit, trying to be healthy, et cetera, what would you recommend, if anything, for them, about how to frame what they're doing in this context? But if you have the opportunity to jump into a cold, cold, go through, and cold, and cold, it's definitely going to be a benefit to separate that into its own individual day.
And if you may even consider some low intensity study state cardio on that type of day, if you are a fitness freak, but you definitely don't want to do a heavy lift and do a ton of volume on, especially like for your legs, which is an incredibly large portion of your muscular group, you're not going to want to go into the gym and blast your legs and then go straight into a cold, one bath. It's not going to be a beneficial for you. And actually, I would recommend even furthering that out from a day to even two days before to allow that that growth to continue to facilitate, rather than jumping right in and gearing towards, because for the most part, while you may feel good in the moment, if you're restricting blood flow to the area, you're just going to dampen your recovery and your overall muscular adaptation and at home. So it will be beneficial overall for.
No, I'll jump in. And by the way, you're having some connectivity issues. That really is an interesting question then, is what's your thought on heat therapy? Heat therapy is great.
So heat therapy and sound use is great because we're going to be facilitating protoblyclo, right? And when we talk about adaptation wise, that will increase phase of violation. It will increase blood flow systemically. We're going to increase the metabolic nutrient cascade that we want towards the muscles.
And there's really no evidence showing that it will dampen any of the effects whatsoever, compared to cold therapy, where you are immediately constricting and restricting blood flow upon, upon some version. Do you know if there's any data on, I'll do cold then warm on what temperature you need to, if you're going to do cold therapy, what temperature is good, what temperature is bad? Same idea on the heat part, whether there's a difference between getting a hot tub, getting a regular soft finish on it or infrared sauna. So just one of the options for hot and cold.
So with cold, it's definitely a titration effect because it's going to be subjective. And somebody who's never been in a cold punch might not want to jump into 30 degree, cold or Greek water. I don't think I ever got him when it was anything below mid 40s, but my little cold plunge where I got to chip away the ice, that's a whole lot of story. Well, the, and you definitely want to ease into this because you can be very cold and it can be detrimental.
Over on you, you definitely don't want to jump into ice cold water for your first time alone. And you don't want to prolong that. I'm laughing because I'm also a 17 times member of the polar bear club. So in January 1st, heading out to the Boulder reservoir where they did just chip away the ice or maybe the water temperature somewhere between 32 and 34.
And then they would have a thing where you could either jump in and jump out or jump in and it's going to swim from Doc Doc, which of course I had to do that. And I'll never forget I went with a friend once who there's two funny parts about this one is they said, who wants to jump in naked? And my friend, she raises her hand and says, I do. And then after she kind of commits that she looks at me, she goes, oh my God, I haven't shaved my legs.
And I said, trust me, no, it's going to be looking at your legs. And so we do the thing where we swim across. And this is a person who was a collegiate athlete and just very intense. And so we swim across from Dr.
Doc. I jump out and I turn around. She's right behind me. And she gets to the dock and she puts her hands up and then has this look on her face that's a combination of confusion and terror as she starts to sink back into the water.
And then I grab her and lift her out. And I said, what happens? It's the first time in my life where my body just wouldn't do what I was willing it to do. And so that was the other crazy part.
But then the other thing is you do jump into literal ice cold water like that. And for the next few hours, your body has no idea what to do. It's constantly it's trying to change your temperature. I mean, out on the outside cold and the inside cold and the inside hot.
I mean, it's like, it just can't figure it out for a few hours, which is again, if you're into weird physical experiences, you know, very entertaining. Otherwise, it's annoying and horrifying. And you never want to do it again. But you know, after 17 years, I think I'm done.
I personally never been in water below 50. So yeah, but water below 50. I have an extreme cold sensation thing. And I'm trying to work down trying to work down into it.
I don't think you work your way down. I think you just needed to do it. It's all dose. What I can tell you is this, if you, when you're jumping in or diving into like literally, you know, 33 year water, if you don't, how do I want to say this?
If you try to keep yourself from expecting that it's going to feel cold, if you just kind of go in a little open-minded and say, I wonder what this experience is going to be like, it will be surprising to you. Because I'll tell you what happened for me when I do that. If I really pay attention, I jump in, right dive in, and my brain basically shuts down for a split second. Everything kind of goes white and it's like, what the hell just happened?
My whole nervous system is completely confused. And then you get cold for a moment. But then by the time you're trying to register, you know, what's going on, you're numb. And in fact, that's the most challenging part of your doing this at like a lake or whatever, is just getting out because your feet will get numb really fast and you got to be able to walk.
And then you'll get out and let's say it's, you know, 10 degrees outside, you just jumped in 30 degree water and you walk out of the water and you feel hot. Doesn't matter what the temperature is. It's like you can walk around practically naked and you feel pretty warm for a little while and then I'll help race loops. But if you really just pay attention, that initial diving, it's fascinating.
It's because it's not what you expect if you can put your expectations aside. I've done some of the cryo therapies and of course, the cryo therapies get very cold. But it's a little bit different than the ice plunge. So it's, it's, it's, um, so, but we're going to work towards it.
I'll take a video next time. I'll get it down to about 42 and I'll go over my buddies and I'm a bee pitcher and you know, we'll go, he has one that he says at 42 and we race a little bit for me and then the first couple of times I don't know if I go through. We'll have to get in, get out. So anyway, so we're talking about sort of optimal temperatures for cold and optimal applications in temperature for hot.
Yeah. So for the individual, it's going to be more of a time duration, more so even than the cold because if you can, if you can facilitate one minute, great, you know, if that's comfortable for you, awesome. You will see some type of benefit, neurological benefits from, from, from even the, the immediate dose. If you can get to two, I think recommended dose is always at the five minutes.
I don't think anybody's recommending past, past five minutes of, of seeded full, immersion cold plunge. And, um, I know you brought up a little different factors in this. The benefits are not the same by taking a cold shower, right? So you, you're right.
So, so being an ice bath and being fully submerged is a completely different bodily systemic reaction than just turning your water on cold and having it hit your skin, um, when you're in the shower. So there's really nothing and cryo therapies kind of somewhere in between, right? Cryo therapies, um, a little bit better than necessarily doing a cold shower. And, but not necessarily as systemically benefit or, um, systemically, great.
That's a bad term, but optimal compared to cold punching, right? So a full systemic cold plunge inside of an ice bath is going to be your best way to facilitate that. But if you, if you were someone like me who is very temperature sensitive, start off with a couple of cold showers and work, work, work, play it up. Well, you know, I know that some people, and I know people in one of them says the whole benefit is to get to the point where you're shivering.
But I know that when I was doing baths before I had the cold plunge and I would have the water at about, about 50 degrees and at 50 degrees, it would take me 15 minutes until I would start to shiver. And it's like, that's just way too much effort. I said it, I'm doing it. I'm, you know, I'll be the person saying, you know, like, you know, and I, I will, I will be dumping some ice into it a little bit, to lower the temperature a little bit further.
And then there was some ice, but it's, I'm working towards it. The other problem with doing it slowly, I don't know what the, what the geometric configuration of the cold plunger thinking of is, but with mine, you basically stand in it and then just sit right down. So you kind of go past the nuts and nipples layers pretty quickly, because that's where you know, you won't stop it. You just go down and mostly you, you, you scream curse words as you do it.
And then as soon as you're all the way down that stops, but on the way down, you got to, you know, say things to the parishion mother and, but then it's, and then of course the tricky thing is your body temperature is heating up the water right around you. And so if you're not moving, it's not as bad. If you kind of swirl around, it stays pretty damn cold. And I'm sure you can guess which one I do.
So, but you know if there's anything in the research about whether 50 degrees is better or worse than 40 degrees is better worse than ice cold or anything between. The further you go down, the further the effect is going to be, the sharper the effect is going to be. Right. And that's, you would see that across all scales.
And that's, when I say slowly, I'm at more towards temperature dropping slowly, not necessarily like leaning in slowly, but I've slowly digress down towards 50. And I will continue to go down towards 40 and kind of escalate. Like I said, my buddy has his own little tub system that you can regulate the temperature itself. I'll be curious to see what happens if as you do it, how you adapt.
And what I'm thinking when I say this is when I first we sort of zero series and we were just making sandals. I was curious like, how long I could just stay in sandals throughout the Colorado winter. And the next thing I knew was March. And then the next year same thing.
And what I noticed is that my, it seems that my circulation has changed or I've developed more capillators or something, because now when I go out, my hands and my face and my head can get really cold, but my feet rarely get cold. And it's been years, but it definitely seems like there's been some sort of adaptation. And I'll be curious to see if you have anything similar to that. Yeah, I would assume that the slow progression towards, I mean, and it may not be optimal.
I may just be being a baby about this. And, you know, I somewhat talking about it, I'd be like, Jordan, just jump into local water. And that may be a faster track to it and maybe fine. But this is least for me, I felt a little bit more comfortable jumping into that first before I got into some of the lower temperatures.
In regard to heat, we can, we can handle some pretty high heats overall. And if you were to be using a sauna, of course, the first thing that you want to do is make sure you're hydrated, right? You don't want to dehydrate in the sauna. And if you need to get out, then you need to get out, you should be lightheaded.
You shouldn't start feeling dizzy or woozy in any type of capacity. And you should always, and I believe in doing things with buddies all time, right, whether you're exercise training and or doing any type of different type of events that may have some type of reaction for you, you're going to do it during a state manner in a controlled setting. So that way, if something does go wrong and you want to push yourself a little bit further, you have a little bit of help there. But, it's not as you can get all the way up.
I think you're working, you know, famous for this and going all the way up to like 240 degree sauna temperatures and. Well, I'm pretty sure that's like, you know, like a quote, traditional sauna, not an infrared because the infrared stuff, that it's a very different feeling. You don't feel like you're walking into super hot air because you're not. And so that you can have a much lower temperature where you're feeling the effect of it in a very different way.
And I don't know that I have a preference at this point. And I didn't know if there was any research about one being better than the other. I'm actually not too familiar with infrared saunas. I mean, I'm familiar more so with like infrared lighting and like, like companies that like do you've created those large full panel infrared lighting systems that you stand in front of.
And that's more of I've actually haven't seen anything on infrared lighting in regard to the start. It's not infrared lighting for say because it's actually it's not going to be a light frequency. And you don't see anything. You're just basically kind of microwaving yourself.
And the advantage is that there's way less involved in using an infrared sauna. And mine has a couple of panels. They don't feel warm to the very warm to the touch a little bit because there's some fabric on top of it. But you definitely, you know, feel like you're getting toasted.
And it's again, a very different feeling than being like a finish on where there's higher humidity, for example, especially here in Colorado. If you're in a infrared sauna, there's no additional humidity. So it's just what Colorado dryness at a bunch of heat. So like, I don't think I ever take mine about 140 degrees or maybe 145.
But in a traditional sauna, in the, you know, high hundreds 200. And again, just a very different flavor. Yeah, it's definitely really, really hot. When you go into this, I don't have any experience with it with infrared saunas.
I'd be very curious to try one out and to see what at least my own personal perception of the experiences. But I know I do a lot of reading work and a lot of reading work inside of the saunas tends to be very beneficial for at least my mindset and how I feel leaning after a game session is very beneficial for me. So I definitely enjoy it. When I was a kid, I got into competitive diving when I was 10.
And I thought that the sauna was the thing you got in after you got out of the pool to dry off. Because that's what I did. Didn't realize that people use it for any other reason. To dry off, you didn't sweat more after.
No, I was 10, you know, 10 years. So I get in, I dry off, I get out. It's like, that's nice. Yeah.
And just to kind of back to if you are looking for strength and muscular gains, a sauna will not inhibit that or at least there's no current research that's going to show that any type of strength or even conditioning or endurance loss through the sauna whatsoever. And even through the endurance and skill-based performance-based facing, ice baths are still very beneficial. So you just need to titrate it towards your base and personal skill level and where you are and what you're actually expecting to receive out of your body. And it's good to be aware that by cold plunging yourself, you will dampen the overall effect systemically of your blood flow.
And if you understand that more blood flow equals greater adaptation, then that leads you to your answer. You know, maybe should be doing so often. Right. Well, that seems like a perfect place to wrap it up with some great ideas for people to ponder as they consider again, whatever level of activity you engage in.
I'm hoping this is really helpful. So Jordan, if people want to find out more, get in touch with you and for anything that you may be doing, how would they do that? Yeah. So you can go to Adamreabilitation.com, Adam Central, Trans Dynamics for Adaptive Movements, or you can follow us.
So back up and smell things for people because they'll need to smell things. Yeah, it's A-D-A-M just like Adam, rehabilitation. .com or you can go on and find me on Instagram on Adamreabilitation as well. Those are going to be where I'm putting out the most of our content for our ability mobility and strength work, teaching individuals on how to stay healthy and get back to doing the things that they've got most.
Really. Well, thank you so much. I hope people do take you up on that offer to go check out what you're doing and get involved with you in some way. Because, you know, there's a lot of people in this space who are mostly just kind of regurgitating things that they heard and they never really put them to the test.
And one of the things that's very fun, I could have said this and tried to said it earlier, I can just tell from hearing the way you've analyzed this, that you are someone who really likes to know what's for real and not just repeat something that you heard that seemed to work for somebody. And that's a rare and valuable skill in the strength and conditioning world. So kudos to you for that. Again, I hope people take advantage of that pleasure.
And so for everybody else, thanks for being here. A reminder go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com, divine previous episodes, all the different ways you can find us and engage with us, speaking to which if you have anybody that you have any recommendations, criticism, comments, etc, that you want to share with me directly, including finding someone who might want to, you know, talk to me about how they think my head is completely up my butt because I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome. When it comes to things like natural movement, I'm not for the conversation. I'm happy to be proven wrong.
It'll always lead to something better. I don't think I will be when it comes to using your feet naturally, but you know, I'm not for the game. You can drop me an email just send something to move at join the movement movement.com. But most importantly, go out and have fun and live life.
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