Today’s episode of the Flex Diet Podcast is about cold water immersion and heat via sauna. I talk about how you can set them up as a framework to make them useful. These interventions are two of the key components in the Physiological Flexibility Certification, which is focused on ways to make you a more robust and anti-fragile individual. This podcast is brought to you by the Physiologic Flexibility Certification course. In the course, I talk about the body’s homeostatic regulators and how you can train them. The benefit is enhanced recovery and greater robustness. We cover breathing techniques, CWI, sauna, HIIT, diet, and more. Enrollment closes at midnight on Monday, March 27, 2023.
Phys_Flex-closing_The Barbell Model of Phys Flex
[00:00:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: Hey, welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase your performance, add some muscle and a better body composition, all without destroying your health in the process. And today we're sponsored by the Physiologic Flexibility Cert that I've created.
[00:00:24] Our lesson today is gonna deal with cold water Immersion. And also heat via Sauna. How do you set these up as a framework in order to make them useful? And those are two of the key components in the Physiologic Flexibility Cert, which is all focused around ways to make you a more robust and anti-fragile individual.
[00:00:51] So once you have gotten pretty good at nutrition, and training your sleep is pretty decent. What are the next advanced things that you would want to target to be more robust, anti-fragile, and even help your longevity, quality of life? And this can be done by targeting things in your body called homeostatic regulators.
[00:01:16] These are processes that your body has to hold constant, otherwise you are dead. The main one is temperature, which is what we're gonna talk about here today. Body has to maintain about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It's actually a little bit below that. However, we can go into warmer environments for periods of time.
[00:01:39] We can go into colder environments because we have adaptation processes that allow us to deal with those temperature changes, those processes kick in order to try to hold our tempera. As close to 98.6 as we can. So temperature is a homeostatic regulator in your physiology. The other ones briefly are your fuel systems.
[00:02:04] This is primarily blood glucose and the backup system of using ketones or a ketogenic type of diet. The other components are pH your body has to hold pH very. However you can do crazy things like getting on a concept two rower doing. I just had a client do this the other day and she loved it. A three minute test where you go as hard as you can for three minutes.
[00:02:34] It is really brutal. You spin off a lot of lactate plus hydrogen ions. Sometimes you may hear this called lactic acid in my little air. But it's primarily lactate, which gets used as a fuel, and then these pesky hydrogen ions that make your muscles and everything burn and it feels quite horrible. Your body can then buffer those so that your main pH doesn't drift too high or too low.
[00:03:00] You can also do different breathing techniques. Everything from breath hold through, a whim. Hoff style, venation. So pH would be, the second temperature would be first fuel systems would be third, and number four would be oxygen and co2. These can be affected also by breathing techniques, exercise, and if you want to employ some fancy technology maybe some other ways.
[00:03:31] So all those things are covered in the physiologic flexibility cert. We break down the interventions, the theory, what is the actual research on it? When should you consider doing cold water immersion? When should you not really do it? Same thing with heat. And the same for all the other. And then at the end, we've got five specific action items for each one.
[00:03:55] So we tell you in order how to do 'em and where to actually start. This is put into a whole entire system that you can use with yourself or clients for your kind of semi customized journey through the homeostatic regulators to be more robust, anti-fragile. And there's some very interesting data that to me, If you're really looking to maximize quality of life and longevity this would be the direction that I would go.
[00:04:26] And that's based off of data in humans. It is a little bit limited, but to me that has much better data than a lot of the crazy stuff we see online.
[00:04:36] Mike T Nelson: The Physiologic Flexibility Certification is open until midnight, Monday march 27th. Go to www.physiologicflexibility.com to enroll now.
[00:04:48] Dr Mike T Nelson: As I mentioned, today's topic is a model for how to consider adaptations to both cold water and heat. So heat could be exercise in the heat, or we'll use an example of a sauna just because it's a little bit more controlled.
[00:05:07] Now the sauna could be, near infrared, far infrared type version, or could be old school. Just standard. I think they both have their benefits based on the literature that I've seen. If I had a choice, I would go with just the standard sauna because the temperatures you can get are a little higher.
[00:05:27] Although some of the new far infrared type versions can get quite a bit warmer. The heat appears to be the main factor. At least that's what's mostly been research. As I said, temperature is a homeostatic regulator, but we can play with it in terms of getting warmer or getting colder. The mistake that I typically see people do is they get really excited about this and then they start going both two extreme and trying to do both at the same.
[00:06:00] To me, one, you don't need to be more extreme. You're not gonna get a higher quality adaptation from it. And your risk also escalates. I was listening to a podcast from Joe Rogan the other day, and I actually love listening to his podcast. Always some really great stuff on there.
[00:06:16] But he was talking about how I think he did 20 minutes and a cold water immersion just above freezing . He was complaining how he's yeah, I think I may have overdone it a little bit too much. And as of the recording of the podcast he did right after it's summer in Austin, granted they're inside. And he still had a sweater or sweatshirt on, so you do not need to go that extreme.
[00:06:44] Which he admitted was was probably a little much you're not really gonna get any better adaptations from that to start, and your risk also escalates. It'd be like, ah, I've never really squatted before. Let's just load 400 pounds on it and see what happens.
[00:06:57] The good part is there isn't that much risk with cold exposure, but there is more and then a lot of people get into doing contrast therapy right away switching from hot to cold back and forth. Now, if you're in a very controlled environment, let's say you're a American football player in the NFL and you've got people that oversee all your recovery aspects, yeah, that might be useful.
[00:07:20] And for an advanced athlete with someone monitoring everything, it may be okay. But my bias is to pick which one you want to start. work on that first and then put that on maintenance and work on the next one. The example I like using, which I stole from Naim eb, author of the book, anti-Fragile, is the Model of a barbell.
[00:07:45] Also, because it fits well with everything else we're talking about. You can imagine a barbell, let's say you've got 405 on the bar, so you've got four plates on each end, so there's a lot of mass on the left. Not much mass in the middle cuz it's the bar and a lot of mass on the right hand side. This serves as a very good visual marker for what we're trying to do.
[00:08:08] So if we take an example that's different and then I'll apply this to cold water and heat. To, you've got someone who, let's say, is a CrossFit type athlete or someone who wants to add as much muscle as they can, but they still wanna maximize cardiovascular performance to some degree for health and having their brain function and all the other longevity aspects that come with it.
[00:08:35] We would want to increase the both of them, but we know that if we do both of. back to back, and at a very high level, we'll have something called an interference effect. If you look at top marathon runners, they don't look like bodybuilders and power lifters, right? They're gonna be smaller in stature.
[00:09:00] They are going to be geared at using oxygen at a very high rate over, a couple hours. If we look at, say, power lifting or Olympic weightlifting, your goal is to lift a super heavy weight one time, and that's probably only gonna last a few seconds. So those are extreme adaptations on opposite ends of the spectrum.
[00:09:26] And if you are a marathon runner, you're probably not gonna train like a power lifter. If you're a power lifter, you're probably not gonna train like a marathon runner. So we know at one. There are very specific adaptations that you will get. Now again, those examples are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, and they're also for very advanced level athletes.
[00:09:52] It gets a little bit more messy when we look at stuff in the middle. So for example, if you look at the progression of CrossFit, . I started following CrossFit, maybe it was like 10 years ago. I've worked with a fair amount of CrossFit athletes of different capabilities up through regionals, and I'm still pretty surprised at the hybrid capacity of the top level CrossFit athletes now, meaning they have really good endurance and they're pretty damn strong.
[00:10:24] Both males and female. So I've been surprised at the levels that they can obtain. It's much higher than I would've guessed, even from eight years ago. Now, if we pull any one of them out and we compare them to a power lifter or Olympic weightlifter, they're not gonna be as strong. Or we compare them to a athlete that does only endurance events, whether it be biking or.
[00:10:49] They're still not gonna be as good, but as a combination of both of those, they're really good, which is the definition of the sport of CrossFit. So I'm talking about the sport of CrossFit here, competition at the CrossFit games. So you can end up being very high somewhere in the middle, such as a CrossFit athlete.
[00:11:11] So my point of all of this is that if you want to be really good at one thing, there's going to be some trade offs and your training is gonna have to be specific. If you want to have a little bit more of a mix somewhere in the middle you can still do that. However, I would argue that as you get better and better, You're training on a day by day basis, or even from one, let's say week or month, progression to the next will still only prioritize one main thing.
[00:11:47] This gets into a concept of like Russian block periodization and a bunch of other methods. We're not gonna go too far down that rabbit hole. So I've worked with a couple CrossFit athletes in the. who were pretty strong for where they needed to be at their competition. Grant, you can always be stronger, but their main number one limiter was their ability to do cardiovascular work.
[00:12:08] Resting heart rate was on a little bit on the higher side. So one guy in particular pretty strong resting heart rate was in the low sixties, which for an average population is really. For the athletes that he was gonna be competing against, it was probably 15 points higher than some of those other athletes.
[00:12:26] When we did his VO2 max, it was okay, but not amazing. So it was definitely lower compared to the other athletes he was competing against. He did pretty good on the short metcons, but when anything got to the 10, 15, or 20 minute range or longer ones he was just really, And that was because his aerobic system wasn't as developed as it needed to be, and so he had been working really hard, doing a lot of metcons and not getting much better.
[00:12:59] So we put his strength on maintenance. He did mostly lower rep stuff, a little bit of volume, and then we worked really hard for several months on his aerobic capacity. using the rower, running different methods. And then we transitioned back got him back into sort of Metcon shape, which took about four to six weeks, and he did a lot better.
[00:13:22] Now that process was about nine months, but in order for him to bring up his weak point, we had to put the other things on maintenance. So he didn't get any weaker. He actually got a little bit strong. But we've mainly worked on his aerobic levels, cardiovascular, to get them up to where they needed to be, where in the past he kept trying to work on both simultaneously, and you only have enough resources and you're pulling the body in two different directions at the same time.
[00:13:52] So if we go all the way back to our barbell model, The barbell would be cardiovascular fitness, aerobic fitness on one end, long duration. And then on the other end would be higher intensity, short duration, heavy loads, and you can transition back and forth to those such as a CrossFit athlete. But if one is lower, you need to spend a dedicated amount of time to work on that.
[00:14:19] This gets you out of the interference. Now again, this becomes only an issue as you become a higher level athlete. If your butt looks like a couch cushion and you don't really run, you don't lift. Don't worry about any of that. Just do a little bit of running, do some biking. Do some rowing. I'm a big fan of the rower cause it's less impact, less risk of injury, lift.
[00:14:43] Some weights just go move and I'm not even worried about sequencing or anything. I think there probably are better ways to do it, but you're gonna get the most benefit from just doing the thing by far, no questions asked. After you've been doing it for quite a while and you are at a higher level, then those things become more important.
[00:15:05] So there's been a couple studies now looking at lifting one study from a couple years ago in female athletes where they had a group lift. They did some more ballistic movements like vertical jump, and then they did 40 minutes of moderate intensity cardiovascular immediately after training.
[00:15:25] Another group did the exact same lifting program, did not do any cardio after they didn't do any cardio. , what they saw was in the group that did the cardiovascular at a moderate level immediately after their weight training. Markers of speed and power, such as vertical jump were statistically significantly less Now.
[00:15:46] Again, it wasn't a massive effect. But again, if you're a higher level athlete it is something to pay attention to. And it's normally your speed and power metrics that get the biggest hit.
[00:15:59] And if you think about what's going on, those athletes were working quite a bit longer and putting in a lot more time to see less benefit on speed and power because they were sandwiched right back to back next to each other. There's been some other data that shows if you split them apart, you don't see as much of an interference effect. And again, this all depends upon what you're looking at. The farther away you get on the ends of the spectrum, the more you see a potential for an interference.
[00:16:33] So in this study, that's what they saw. So speed and power, the ability to do high amount of work over a very short period of time. That's the far end of the spectrum. You contrast that and sandwich it next to moderate aerobic training, we see less speed and power. However, you could still probably do moderate aerobic training in the morning, which is my preference.
[00:16:57] If you need someone who needs to work on that and do their weight training, even speed and power later in the afternoon, that's typically how I would sequence it. If I have to sequence them on the same day, if we go all the way back to hot and cold, same idea. So we've got hot on say, the right end of the barbell and then we've got cold on the other end of the barbell.
[00:17:20] So they're going in two different directions. Granted, the parameter, which is temperature is the same. So some of the molecular mechanisms that get upregulated, like heat shock proteins are similar. But some of the other mechanisms are quite. My bias is then to train the hot or heat end of the spectrum.
[00:17:41] The first, again, the assumption here is that you have equal access to a sauca and you have equal access to cold. This would then change, obviously, if you don't, so in my case right now, I currently don't have a sauna, but I've got a 15.6 cubic inch freezer filled with water in my garage. So doing cold water immersion is much easier for me to do.
[00:18:05] To get access to a sauna, I have to go to the local gym. And all honesty, the sauna there just doesn't get real hot. So because of that, because I have a constraint in my environ. . I actually started with coal, but if you've got equal access to both, I would actually start with heat. The main reason is that there is almost no interference effect that I've seen between heat and aerobic training and weight training.
[00:18:34] If anything, the mechanisms that are targeted with being an asana may overlap with aerobic mechanisms. If you have a group that is untrained. And you have them do sauna exposure, you actually see a slight uptick in cardiovascular aerobic performance. Now, again, that is for a group that is untrained and you think about what happens when you're in a sauna.
[00:19:00] We have elevated heart rate. We're obviously trying to dissipate more heat. You have other changes that occur such as expansion of plasma volume and things that result in an increase in aerobic perform. On a high level, I talked about this in the fis flex course because the underlying mechanisms are a little bit different with heat and aerobic adaptation.
[00:19:26] I think there may be an additive effect of doing both of them together, even if you're a more advanced athlete. Now, again, I can't point to a randomized control trial that's really looked at that a couple studies have hinted at one study was very underpowered though. But there's not much of a downside to adding it in.
[00:19:44] So I would look at adding hot or heat first just because if anything, it may help the adaptations that you're trying to. I have not seen any data showing that there is an interference effect or that it may potentially harm the positive adaptations that you would see from both weight training or aerobic, endurance based events cold.
[00:20:05] However, if you do cold immediately after training for hypertrophy, if you're in the water of 50 degrees for at least 10 minutes or longer. , there is about four to five studies now to show that it does blunt hypertrophy to some degree. Again, I go through all those studies and the caveats and the physiologic flexibility asserts.
[00:20:28] So I'm not gonna bore you to tears with all of them here. But there is a potential interference effect there. So cold. If you're doing it at a time point outside or after, that might be okay if your goal is repeated, perform. , you probably don't care then if you're an in-season athlete and you've gotta perform on Monday and you've got another game Tuesday, or again, like the American football example, you've got training all week and you've been beat up from having these other massive sides of beef with eyes running into you at full speed, then yeah, if you feel better doing cold water immersion, then go for it, right?
[00:21:08] Because your goal is a little bit different. So again, we always need to keep the context in. There's some data related to mitochondrial biogenesis that cold water immersion after aerobic training may benefit it. This is also related to different downstream molecular markers, PGC one alpha, et cetera.
[00:21:27] So cold water may help aerobic performance if done immediately. So again, going back to our barbell example, I would work on hot exposure first. Because there is more potential benefit. Again, that may be just because we have more research on it and there is less interference effect. So I would block a period of time, maybe six to eight weeks, and then I would work on sauna exposure.
[00:21:56] I would start at a very low temperature and a low time point. So I would get out before it gets really hard, and I would track temperature and time, right? Because that's gonna tell you your total dose. I would start quite low and maybe, one to three times. over time. You can play with increasing the total dose by increasing the frequency.
[00:22:21] So I did it for two days a week. I'm gonna go to three days a week, then four, then five, then six. I can play with a little bit higher temperature if I have control over temperature. Sometimes at gym settings you do not, and I can play with time exposure also how long I'm in there. Once, I'm pretty good on that.
[00:22:40] Let's say eight then I would put that on maintenance, so maybe only a couple times a week. And then I would focus on cold exposure. So doing the same thing. So in my case, I've got cold water immersion in my garage gym. I usually start at around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And just go for 30 to 60 seconds and build up time there.
[00:23:06] And then drop the temperature a little bit and start over. Again, in the FIS Flex. Third, I go through, exact protocol and everything that we use for that, but it's the same idea. You're just playing around with a dosage. So my main focus would be more on cold for that period of time. . I tend to go longer on cold exposure cause I do think it takes longer to build that up.
[00:23:29] I'm not sure why. That's just something I've noticed over the past two years from doing this mostly daily. So I would run that for maybe eight to 12 weeks or even longer. Once I've done that, then I would consider playing around with contrast therapy, right? So we've got adaptation to heat, adaptation to cold, and then switching back and.
[00:23:52] So contrast therapy of whatever form is gonna be switching back and forth. So I think that is gonna be a little bit higher stressor to your system. That doesn't mean it's bad, and it is also much harder to quantify. What temperature for heat did you use? How long are you in the heat? What temperature for cold did you use?
[00:24:11] How long were you in the cold? How many cycles did you do? How much time is there in between the hot versus the cold? There's just a lot more variables to try to figure that out on your. . So that's the framework. Using the barbell as a model, we want to increase our adaptation to the right end of the barbell, increase our adaptations to the left end of the barbell, and then to be able to switch back and forth between them.
[00:24:39] You'll notice that this is the exact same framework I use in the Flex Diet certification, right? So Metabolic flexibility. How well can you use, say carbohydrates? That is the right end of the spectrum, so let's work on that. Let's make sure you're really good at using carbohydrates, your blood glucoses, nice and regulated, all that kind of stuff.
[00:24:59] And then let's keep that going. And then work on the other end of the barbell, the fat metabolism side of the barbell. We might do some fasting, maybe a ketogenic diet. And again, there's pros and cons to all of those. We want to up-regulate our body's ability to use. once we're pretty good at doing that, then you can worry about switching back and forth.
[00:25:21] So metabolic flexibility, how well can you use carbohydrates? How well can you use fat? And then how well can you switch back and forth between them? So it turns out that barbell framework works really well for a lot of physiologic systems and in the phys flex that is the model we then use for each of the four homeostatic regulat.
[00:25:44] Temperature pH fuels and then oxygen and co2. So there you go. That's a framework of how to incorporate cold and hot into your training to increase your physiologic flexibility to be more robust than anti-fragile, and in my biased opinion increase the quality of your life and your longevity. There's also another sort of hidden aspect in there that deals.
[00:26:11] Your brain and overriding your limbic system, but I won't talk about that right now. So thank you so much for listening.
[00:26:20] Mike T Nelson: The Physiologic Flexibility Certification is open until midnight, Monday march 27th. Go to www.physiologicflexibility.com to enroll now.
[00:26:33] Again, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. As always, really appreciate it. Please hit subscribe on whatever podcast app you are using. That is the main thing that determines where we rank. As always, comments are super appreciated. Whatever stars you feel is appropriate, if you do leave a lower star, that's totally fine.
[00:26:56] Just give me some more details why that would be beneficial so we can make this a much better show. Thank you so much for listening. Greatly appreciate it. Talk to you next week.