YouTube video by Ben Greenfield introducing cold therapy practices (cold thermogenesis, cryotherapy, cold showers, cold tubs) and practical ways to start without expensive equipment. He describes DIY and commercial cold tub options, emphasizes hot-cold contrast (alternating sauna and cold plunge) and shares his personal routine and home setup for regular cold plunges.
Cold's good for you. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a biohacker, celebrity trainer, nutritionist, New York Times best selling author and world renowned speaker. I'm on a constant quest to uncover powerful and practical health hacks to awaken, unlock and unleash the full potential of the human body, mind and spirit.
You may have heard about the idea of cold thermogenesis, of cryotherapy and its effects on blood sugar regulation, on fat loss, on the nervous system, on feeling good, and on introducing more cellular resilience. And I think that some people will guilt trip themselves into thinking that to get started with something like this, they gotta get some kind of a fancy full body cryotherapy chamber like Han Solo in Star wars where you gotta get a giant cold plunge or cold tub. And the fact is, the air, the ambient air, is something that I, for the longest time before I had a cold tub, would use to get the effects of cold therapy. Because I thought, well, gosh, my friends are paying, you know, 70, 100, 150 bucks for a cryotherapy membership. I can just walk outside cold and get the same thing. I didn't have to get in the car and drive anywhere. Well, there's also the concept of cold showers. I realize that the shower water may not get quite as cold as you would like wherever you happen to be in the world. But even when that happens, one trick that I use when I'm at hotels is I'll walk down the hallway, I'll fill up the little bucket in the hotel room with ice, and I'll hang that bucket from the shower head, and I can literally have a cheap super cold hack cold shower with doing something like that. Now, there are other options as well. Why don't you follow me as I do my little cold air walk here and I'll show you something else.
You may have heard about. All the fancy cold tubs that you can get. There are cold tubs that use what's called a chiller system. If you read my book Boundless, I actually show you how to create your own chiller system, cold tube. But the fact is that there's some great companies now that are making done for you cold tub chiller systems that you can jump into. For example, even though it's the dead of the winter right now, and I wouldn't necessarily have to break through the ice on it. This is a Marozco forge. This bad boy will maintain about 33 degrees break through the ice temperature even when it's 110 degrees. Outside. So having something like a cold tub that you can regularly get into, this is kind of like an up. It's a great option. But top of the totem pole is hot, cold contrast.
Now, what I mean by hot, cold contrast is that you have a situation in which you've got, say, an infrared sauna or a dry sauna, and then you have a cold tub or a cold pool or a cryotherapy chamber that you're using to alternate back and forth between the cold tube or the cryotherapy unit and the sauna. So, for example, one of the top sessions that I do to feel like a million bucks to do this once a week is I'll go 5 minutes hot, 5 minutes cold, 4 minutes hot, 4 minutes cold, 3, 3, 2, 2, and 1, 1. And I'll sometimes even have a friend or two or my sons do this along with me. You could be chatting, you can be getting the blood flowing, you can be getting all the benefits of hot, cold contrast. And this is just top of the totem pole for doing hot and cold and getting the benefits of both. So now I want to show you a sample of the way that I have that set up in my own home. This is what's called an aqua fitness pool. Now, I keep this pool at around 40 degrees, and I keep it right next to a heating system. Now, inside, near my office, I also have an infrared sauna. It's a clearlight infrared sauna. And that sauna is right next to a cold plunge called a cold tour. So both next to my office, I've got hot and cold. And then out here in the yard, I have hot and cold. Now, this allows me to do my cold, go into the heat and go back and forth. And that, again, is the best way to get the benefits of both cold and heat. So I'll show you how this looks. It's gonna feel incredible. It's hard not to feel good once you get out of the cold plunge. Just dip in, get the head wet, because that's what activates the mammalian dive reflex and the vagus nerve, which takes your whole body, innervates all the organs. So once you get in, control your heart rate, control your breath rate, don't freak out, and then try and get the head under and duck it a few times.
Feels fantastic. And as for dessert.
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