5 Steps of Cold Exposure & How Your Body Adapts to the Cold

The winter months bring ample opportunity to venture into the cold. whether you expereince the cold regularly or if you are yet to experience its power. Below is a guide that can serve as a phased introduction to advanced cold practise or a cheat sheet to help you vary your exposure and keep your body responding. Remember if you regularly practise in the same way, your body will get used to it, these steps below may seem easy but they offer a chance to vary your input and can help elevate your results in the long term. In addition to this we have gathered some of the most up to date information on exactly why the cold is good for you at all and what benefits have been recorded in the latest sceintific literature.

Practising short controlled cold exposure is a deliberate stress on the body, make sure you are healthy enough to accept this stress before any exposure, if you have cardiovascular issues, are underage or pregnant there may be serious risks to this practise. Always check with a medical professional before starting any cold practise.

1. Go outside in shorts and a t-shirt when it is cold

a. Start in the street around where you live. Stay close to warmth or take a coat with you.

b. Relax your breathing, notice parts of you that are contracted or tense, encourage them to relax. Imagine you are in a warm place.

c. Calm your breathing and notice as your body starts to feel "ok"

d. Start short and small, build up in safely in duration.

2. Put your hands into cold water

a. Start by preparing yourself, slow your exhales, relax your breath.

b. Slowly lower your hands into the water while maintaining your slow relaxed breathing.

c. Focus on surrendering your body and relaxing your muscles while maintaining your breath.

d. Start with 10 seconds and over the months build up to 2 minutes with both hands.

3. Cold shower

a. Finish off your shower session with a cold shower (increase time day-by-day)

b. Do contrast showers alternating warm and cold showers (30s / 30s)

c. Start your day with a cold shower only from time to time.

d. Do not overdo, especially if sleep-deprived and waking up stressed

4. Ice bath

a. Calm your breath, exhale like a humm.

b. slowly and safely enter the water, keeping your head above the water level.

c. consciously invite your muscles to relax as your breathing settles.

d. when you feel a level of peace return or you feel yourself letting go come out. Don't wait until you are cold, shivering is not the marker of a benificial ice bath. You should come out on your terms in peace, before you are cold.

5. Coldwater swim

a. Start slowly and take safety percautions, using floats and swimming with lifeguards present.

b. Increase your time and frequency as you progress, over months not days.

c. Use gloves, special shoes and a cap if the weather is very cold.

How your body adapts to the cold

Our bodies are always changing. Every day. We want our bodies to be as flexible as possible on the inside to be able to deal with anything life throws at us on the outside.

Next time you are at Scenic Sauna look up at the trees by the fire pit, they move in the wind. The top of the tree flows one way and the other. If it were inflexible, without strong roots, it could only take so much wind before it snapped or fell. But its strong foundation, (in this case its roots), and its flexibility, (in this case its trunk), allow it to move one way and the other and always find balance again.

For us this is called Homeostasis, or balance. Balance in your hormones, balance in your heart beat and circulation, balance in your immune system, balance to stress. Our body is designed to maintain balance in all different systems, all the time. Our foundation allows us to do this and we can grow that foundation!

The cold is a powerful stressor that knocks us off homeostasis. But by using controlled exposure to the cold we can mobilise the natural ways our body rebalances itself. Repeated small exposure trains those systems to find balance quicker the next time it is exposed to the same stress. Short regular exposure to the cold at certain temperatures allows our body to practise rebalancing itself and it gets better and better at it the more consistent we are. But it doesn't just train us to cope with cold stress, we are training our bodies in a host of different ways, (see the benefits of cold exposure section below), that reach far beyond the ice.

Winter is a perfect time for this training, we can start our cold exposure by just walking outside! When we are exposed to temperatures under 18c in air and under 16c in water we more rapidly produces two specific catagories of response to bring us back into balance.

• Insulative actions (redirection of blood

flow away from extremities)

• Metabolic actions (increased metabolic

rate to produce heat)

And our body is amazing, if one reaction isn't large enough, for example you are not shivering, then the other will compensate for it. Insulative reactions include things like goose-bumps, shivering, seeking warmth, and decreased blood flow to your legs, arms hands and feet, keeping warm blood pumping around your chest where it is needed to maintain your body temperature.

Once insulative reactions are exhausted, the body recruits something called non-shivering adaptive thermogenesis (NST), raising your metabolism to generate heat from the inside out. Metabolism can go up as much as 300% in an ice bath! That is a lot.

In addition to this when your cells experience stress related to cold, they activate somthing called cold shock proteins (CSP), which begin to regulate gene expression. This is how deep this goes.

Benefits of cold exposure seen in studies

• Immersion in 14 °C water for 1 hour increases metabolic rate by 350 %, norepinephrine by 530%, and dopamine by 250 %. When the water is ice bath temperature, (4 - 6°C) these changes can happen in as little as 2 minutes. This all promotes focus, vigilance, attention, and mood stabilisation. Feel amazing after and ice bath? This is part of the reason why.

Šrámek, P. & Šimečková, M. & Janský, L. & Šavlíková, J. & Vybíral, S. (2000). Human physiological responses to immersion into water of different temperatures. European Journal

of Applied Physiology 81 (5): 436-442.

• Decreasing inflammation seen in arthritis. (Patients with arthritis report significant reductions in pain by just taking a 2-minute cold shower every day for a week.)

Hirvonen, H. & Mikkelsson, M. & Kautiainen, H. & Pohjolainen, T. & Leirisalo-Repo, M. (2006). Effectiveness of different cryotherapies on pain and disease activity in active rheu-

matoid arthritis. A randomised single blinded controlled trial. Clinical and Experimental Rheumatology 24 (3): 295.

• Helping with neurodegenerative diseases by suppressing neuronal apoptosis and inflammation.

Aihara, T. & Tsuruta, F. (2016). Cold Shock as a Possible Remedy for Neurodegenerative Disease. International Journal of Neurology & Neurotherapy 3 (053): 1–3.

• Increasing adiponectin, which is a protein that helps with blood sugar regulation. It also promotes glucose uptake similar to GLUT4 and can be used to prevent type-2 diabetes.

Schrauwen, P. & van Marken Lichtenbelt, W. (2016). Combating type 2 diabetes by turning up the heat. Diabetologia 59 (11): 2269–2279.

• Activating brown adipose tissue, (brown fat), which improves mitochondrial functioning, metabolism, and thermoregulation.

an Marken Lichtenbelt, W. et al. (2009). Cold-activated brown adipose tissue in healthy men. New England Journal of Medicine 360 (15): 1500–1508.

• Cold exposure activates the immune system similar to exercise and can strengthen

immunity. (A daily hot to cold shower for 30 days resulted in a 29 % lower self-reported absence from work due to sickness in healthy adults.)

Janský, L. et al. (1996). Immune system of cold-exposed and cold-adapted humans. European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology 72 (5-6): 445–450.