The Giant Cold Thermogenesis Episode: Everything You Need To Know About Ice Baths, Cold Therapy, How Cold, How Long & Much More With Morozko Forge Cold Bath Experts!

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, endocrinologists will tell patients, you must take this synthetic hormone once a day for the rest of your life. If you stop, you might die. And something about that just didn't sit right with me.

The more my mindset changed. Instead of feeling like a victim of my illness and a victim of my circumstances, I was now feeling empowered.

Bring that water temp down, ice blocks around the evaporators, and there it is. I had my ugly prototype, my backyard engineering project. We had an all the time ice bath.

Help. Performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. All right, this is the moment of truth. Everything that you have been wanting to know about cold baths and cold thermogenesis and cold therapy. I unpack in today's episode with a couple of real cold ninjas. These, these, this couple who I interview. And we conducted this interview while walking by my house along the beautiful Spokane river. And we actually jumped into the river afterwards and recorded that for you too. Anyways, these folks design cold tubs. They research cold thermogenesis. They just live the cold. And we had a great, great chat. So you're gonna dig this one. So, million dollar question, after last night's steak fest, are you guys, are you guys fasters? Are you fasting this morning?

Yeah, we typically do one meal a day. That's our general regimen. It might average out to a meal.

And a half a day if you were cool. You call that omad, right?

Omad, for those who are down with the acronyms. But when you're on the road and we're traveling, sometimes we'll indulge a little bit, have a second meal of the. Especially when we're in some place like Spokane where there's so much good food around and we're only here for a couple of days.

So when you do omad and I'll introduce. I'm being super rude and not even introducing my guests, but that was Jason, by the way. I'll give Jason a better intro later. Jason Stouffer.

Yeah, Stauffer.

Stauffer. When you say that you guys do omad, are you doing dinner as your main meal of the day?

Yeah, dinner is the main meal of the day, usually on the earlier side. So by the time we're actually ready to eat, it might be 4 or 5pm and then we're usually pretty high fat, low carb. But we're not puritans about it. We definitely have our cheat meals and our carb load volatility, which I think just kind of goes into that stress response in the system. You get something in there that maybe isn't the best for you, but then you go back to that regimen.

Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of times if you're following like a high fat, low carb version of an omad diet, just like pretty much any high fat, low carb diet, doing, depending on your level of physical activity, doing some type of carbohydrate refeed like every weekend, or in the case of a pro athlete, sometimes it's like every night or every other day. Seems to stave off a lot of some of the metabolic downregulation that you tend to see occur with long term carbohydrate restriction, like the thyroid downregulation, testosterone, for example. We had carrot cake last night.

Yeah, we did.

What did you think of the carrot cake, Adrienne?

That was so delicious. I was thinking about it when I woke up this morning.

Oh, yeah, okay. And that was Adrian. But what's your last name, Adrian? Jessic Jesuk. Okay, so the carrot cake, that's my wife's recipe. She knows how much I love carrot cake. And like I was telling you guys at dinner last night, three years ago, I told her that I would love to figure out how to just like make a carrot cake at home because I can't find the perfect carrot cake at restaurants. And she came up with this like gluten free, dairy free, coconut cream carrot cake recipe. And I tell her not to make it very much because it's like one of the few foods that I will not stop eating. Like, after you guys left last night, I had another slice of cake. I'm totally not kidding you. But the thing was back to the carbohydrate thing. I did a workout this morning. I had a deadlift workout this morning and just crushed it in the gym. Because you feel like you're on steroids once you get. Because I mean, the carrot cake's healthy, but let's face it, it's also like a total carb bomb. So you wake up and your muscles are all swole and you're ready to go work out. You're like, oh, yeah. This is why I occasionally need to put the carbs into the system. So let's do a little bit more of a. More of a formal introduction. Oh, and I'm fasting, by the way, too. So we're all, we're all fasting this morning. So you know, when I. When I ate a slice of carrot cake at 10pm I won't eat again till 1 or 2 or so. And I will, by the way, publish that steak recipe that I made for you guys last night with the beet and the honey and the butter and the smoke with the reverse sear. I'm going to publish all that as an Instagram post and a link to that in the show notes for everybody listening. In the show notes for. Of course, I know you're all all of are only here for the steak recipe. But just in case you want to hear about all the other cold crap that Jason, Adrian and I talk about, the show notes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com ColdPodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Cold Podcast. Okay, so first of all, so that people know who the heck you guys are, I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you all got into this concept of cold so intensively that you actually now have a company that makes these cold tubs that I soak in daily. But what got you started on that path? And as is the case with three way interviews, you guys get to fight over who goes first. So Adrian just pointed at Jason. All right, Jason, so how'd you get into all this, man?

So I like telling the story from the point of Adrienne got sick in her early 30s. She hit about 32 years old. And it was very sudden and it was very strange. How long was this? That's going to be about nine, eight, nine years ago.

We all know your age now.

And so it was very strange. All of a sudden, foods that she'd eaten for her entire life were now giving her allergic reactions. There was some very rapid weight gain of about £50. There was inflammation. Even though she'd lived in the Phoenix area for 15 years. All of a sudden, all of the indigenous botanicals were giving her breathing and thro. She ended up getting a couple diagnoses. One was Hashimoto's hypothyroidism. Another was eosinophilic esophagitis, which is the allergic reactions of the esophagus to foods and botanicals in the air. Artificial fragrances were another big one. They would actually give her hives in her throat that would burst.

Oh my gosh. She definitely couldn't walk through Macy's. No, not at all.

And the other one was urticaria, which is like a flushing of the skin. This is again, allergic. And all these are autoimmune conditions. And so there was diagnoses there's pharmaceuticals, synthetic hormone, pill every day, live antibody shots twice a month. And then there were side effects to those. And so there were supplements to manage the side effects that had their own side effects and supplements to manage those side effects. One of the things that really just didn't sit right with me was the story that the physicians were telling her that this was, there's nothing you can do about this. You are a chronically sick person. You have autoimmune conditions. You will always have these. We can manage the symptoms, but this is never going away. And in the case of the endocrinologists, endocrinologists will tell patients, you know, you must take this synthetic hormone once a day for the rest of your life. If you stop, you might die. And something about that just didn't sit right with me. I couldn't really accept that there was nothing that could be done.

Right. And also, in a case like that, you know, you feel like you're a prisoner to some type of external thing in order to be normal. I mean, I don't know how you feel about that, Adrian, but it's like everybody who I've worked with, or even myself in some cases, when I've been on something that seems to be fixing an issue, you're like, yeah, this seems to be helping. But, man, this is gonna suck to have to, like, be a prisoner of this for the rest of my life, you know?

You're absolutely a prisoner of it. Because there was even a point in time where I was between insurances, so I couldn't get my medication without paying out of pocket and out of pocket. It was absolutely. It was astronomical price. And so the doctor gave me a certain amount of samples to get me through till my new insurance kicked in. And in the meantime, she's saying, well, this is all I can give you, and you'll die if you don't take it. But there's no way for you to take it if you're not paying out of pocket. And if you go through these samples too quickly. So talk about being a prisoner of medication. I really believed that if I wasn't taking these pills, I was going to die. So you become a victim of the illness, you become a victim of the system, and you become reliant on these things that you think are keeping you alive but never actually make you feel any better.

Wow.

Okay. So you guys were dealing with all this. Then what happens, Jason?

Another part that I noticed is that just as Adrienne was just discussing, there's that identification that a person adopts as a chronically sick person. So there was depression, there was anxiety, there was stress and she just wasn't getting better. No matter what pills or medications or supplements she was taking, she just wasn't getting better. So I just started reading, started reading everything I could on psychology, physiology, biology on. I was even digging into old fiction.

Your background is in medicine, right?

Engineering. But I was working in pharmaceuticals as a pharmaceutical business analyst. So I also had that kind of cultural understanding, that macro level data understanding of disease states, of how medications are developed, marketed, how really everybody is seeking the chronic symptom management over any sort of cure or attacking the root issue. So I had that background as well. It led me to a couple of things. First of all was the extended and intermittent fasting.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. I want, I want to throw in one thing right when I interrupt. You said you, you looked at fiction.

Yeah, I was even digging into old novels like seeing what kind of, what kind of old folk wisdom I could get out of Steinbeck novels. I was, I was reading old Stoic philosophy.

That's an interesting.

Yeah, I was reading about the Stoics and how they, even the ancient Stoics and how they would expose themselves, they would go through hardships intentionally.

Fasting was medicine in the good old Greek days. Was it Hippocrates who said that it was one of the best medicines?

Oh absolutely. And it was standard really until the industrial revolution and our current food abundance kind of sprung up and there was a marketing effort to get us to eat more. And that's kind of when the fasting kind of went away.

It's very slash slash the rise of physical culture in gyms, which is part of this that a lot of people don't talk about. Once we figured out how to burn calories really, really well, we actually were able to get by fasting a little bit less to manage the chronic diseases related to caloric over consumption. But then you know, then, then you get the whole like physical therapy, exercise overuse, you know, over training industry that pops up around that. So kind of like you squeeze the putty in your fist and it's kind of stops coming out one knuckle and starts coming out the other. But so, so anyways, you're reading these, these novels to get clues novels and non fiction.

I have new non fiction. Old fiction is kind of my, my reading, my reading regimen. And one book I read was Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. Nassim Taleb is a Lebanese American mathematician, stock trader and linguist. And he Outlines in this book his concept of antifragility. And this is like the hormetic stress response. He applies it a lot to economic and social systems, but there's a biological aspect to it as well. This kind of really changed the way I thought about how I was relating to the world around me, where I was no longer trying to hide from stressors. I was looking for the stressors that could make me better, could make me healthier. And that's what led me to take my first ice bath in October of 2017.

Wait, you didn't make Adrian do it first? What's up, Adrian?

He's so wonderful.

Oh, my gosh.

The hard things first. Now you try the hard things first.

I'll do the sauna, Then I'll get irradiated under sunlight, Then I'll fast, Then I'll go deadlift, take a cold bath.

You want to join this party? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I do.

So you sit in a cold bath?

Yeah. So I took an ice bath. And, you know, like an old school.

I get the ice from the gas station up in the bathtub.

Yeah. A yoga instructor in Phoenix named Gordon Ogden was doing Wim Hof amateur Wim Hof classes out of his house. And so you would just get a text message on Thursday night, says, hey, we're doing Wim HOF tomorrow. Bring two bags of ice if you're in. And so I did a couple of those, and the first one, I didn't know, like, the. Yeah, BYOI. I didn't know really any of the science behind it yet. But the visceral experience of that first ice bath was like, here it is. Here's one of these things I'm looking for. Here's one of these things that's uncomfortable, it's stressful, It's a shock to my system. But there was just something about it that just, like, all of my systems got rebooted and, like, came back online in this really interesting way. And so, yeah, we just started digging in on that, Doing ice baths in our own house on the weekends, digging into the literature, scientific literature that's out there, and really coming to understand that this isn't some cool party trick, like, you know, where, you know, Johnny can sit in an ice bath, and everybody's like, oh, Johnny's crazy. Like, there was a lot of. Of data points to connect that we're really saying, like, this is something very helpful for the body in so many different ways, in physiological ways, psychological ways, circulatory system, hormone regulation, psychology, nervous System, Metabolic system.

Yeah. And we're definitely going to unpack some of those as well. But up until I. I guess probably the past, I'd say decades, and the advent of guys like Wim Hof making the concept of using cold for a variety of physiological benefits more popular. You know, my perception is that for the most part, cold and cold thermogenesis was relegated to like, the athletic training room, where the football players will go get in the ice after the game, or the track and field athletes, you know, after practice each day, will go sit in the ice tub for recovery. But nobody was talking about the immune system benefits or guys like Wim Hof injecting himself with E. Coli and using breathwork and cold to fight off infections. And what we know about the vagus nerve and icing your balls for better testosterone, all that stuff was pretty fringe, but has become quite popular of late, which is interesting. Very epicurean esque culture kind of adopting some of these stoic practices. Now that you were talking about, Jason. All right, so you did the ice bath and when did you pull Adrienne in?

So I guess I'll have Adrienne talk about her first ice bath. It's probably a few weeks after my first one, maybe a month or so.

What happens, Adrienne?

So It's November of 2017, and Jason has this idea that we're gonna try this in our backyard. And I was reading the same books he was. I was understanding that there were benefits to this and that people were getting some success off of deliberate cold exposure as a healing modality. My very first ice bath lasted nine seconds. I hovered. Thank you. I hovered over the tub. I put one foot on each side. I put one hand on each side. I dropped myself into the water. I held my breath, jumped out, freaked out, and then felt amazing. So in nine seconds, getting out of that ice bath, I felt a sense of empowerment that I don't think I had experienced in my entire life. And I am a warm weather girl. I grew up in Florida, I lived in Hawaii. Phoenix. Summers are my favorite time of year. I still prefer the heat to the.

Cold, by the way. I have a lot of. A lot of clients in, like, Florida and some of these hot spots. And that's the trickiest part is finding water that's cold enough in the showers and stuff. But then once they actually do get it, cold, you know, 55 degrees or so is kind of the freakout temperature, it seems, for a lot of the people in the warmer states. Whereas I have, like a client in Minnesota. I tell them to start taking ice baths. They're like, oh, I do every day. You know, it's for me walking out to get the. To get the mail from the mailbox.

Exactly. And so anything below 70 degrees would just make me emotionally dysregulated. I was like, I can't function. It's cold. And after this ice bath, the first thing I noticed was there was this pain that I would have in my legs prior to deliberate cold exposure that sometimes hurt so bad I couldn't push a gas pedal in my car. And after this nine seconds in the ice, that pain was gone. For the first time in years, that pain disappeared. And I was alarmed. I was shocked. I said, anything that can help me with even one layer of pain or one layer of illness that I'm going through is going to be a benefit. So even though I wanted to do it again, I did not do it again that day. I waited till the next week when we hosted another session with some friends. It changed my life. It changed my life from that first nine seconds. And then the more I did it, the more symptom relief I had, the more empowered I felt, the more my mindset changed. Instead of feeling like a victim my illness and a victim of my circumstances, I was now feeling empowered. I felt like there was something I could do because I'm a doer, I'm a fixer, I'm a tell me what to do, I'll follow the instructions, I'll get it done. Everything will be better. But when it comes to chronic illness, if you're only seeking out specialists that are in the medical, you know, the standard medical field, they're going to say, take this pill, take this pill, take this pill. That's not doing anything. That's just a band aid. So as I was going through this practice, I was learning these band aids are not fixing anything. They're stopping the flow of the water, and the water is behind it, ready to just push forward. The illness was still there. They weren't curing me of anything. And most of the time, they weren't even getting rid of symptoms. The deliberate cold exposure, the ice baths, that's what I call it.

Yeah, that's actually the name for it, is. That's an actual term. Deliberate cold exposure. Sounds fancy. Sounds way fancier than we call it DCE get our asses cold. DCE OMAD byoi Okay, so you start incorporating deliberate cold exposure pretty much on the daily.

No, because we were still in Arizona, and even though it was technically wintertime, the faucet water is not cold. And so we had to buy ice. So Jason, bless him, we had this outdoor freezer, and he would spend about an hour, hour and a half each night filling up these, like, empty Costco salsa containers and pretzel containers to make our own ice. But he would have to do that four or five days a week just to get enough for one ice bath on a Sunday. So in the first couple of months, we were only doing them about once a week, if that.

Okay.

And then obviously, you guys kind of figured out how to. How to hack and engineer a cold tub that's now become like a commercial tub, the Marozco. But I want to get into that in a little bit. But we're walking just so all of you listening in, know, along a path along the Spokane River. You guys see that river off to our left? That's. That's all the runoff from Lake Coeur d', Alene, which, you know, has some glacial feed into it, and it actually gets remarkably cold. But a lot of my own experience with cold thermogenesis, if you want to call it that, originated from all my days in triathlon, where, come hell or high water, I'd usually be in that river right beside. Because my house used to be, like, 10 minutes from here, and I'd come down to the river every day and swim, and I would basically swim until I felt like I couldn't lift my arms anymore because they were so sluggish and heavy from being cold. And then I get. I didn't know it at the time. I thought I was just making myself tough for races. But, you know, for. For me, all of my experience with. With cold baths was basically just swimming in open water and cold water a lot. Just because that's when you're doing triathlon, if you do all your training in the pool, you know, despite it being, you know, you know, a nice, you know, anywhere from 70 to, you know, 76 degrees, you're not getting all the open water sighting and learning how to deal with waves and learning how to practice your. Your visibility and. And your gear in the open water. So for me, I'd pretty much just be in the cold from about, gosh, like, late March until sometimes as late as early November, just swimming in open water. So that. That was how I kind of got into, I guess, embracing cold or being comfortable around it. So anyways, though, a little. Little anecdote for folks listening in. We're walking along the Spokane river right now. Okay. And we may even go jump in afterwards. We'll see. Okay, so basically, you guys have started to understand the power of cold. And at that point, how long did it take you to start designing your own cold bath?

Getting Tom, our business partner, he's a professor of engineering at asu. He's a research scientist. Research is his jam. He was getting into the literature behind this. And this is when we were discovering that, you know, there really is a lot of mechanisms, a lot of systems that the therapy is working on. And we decided we wanted to be able to do this every day. You know, what would it take? There's got to be some sort of mechanical way to do this. And the first thing we do is we look online, we say, you know, we didn't invent cold exposure. Wim Hof didn't invent it. Sports teams have been doing it for forever. Physical rehabilitation centers have been doing it forever. Maybe there's a product out there that we can buy that is a mechanical cold bath. And there were. There were a couple of products on the market, but they were very expensive, and they were marketed for that old market. The sports teams, the rehab centers.

Right. The huge stainless steel tubs, the fancy. I mean, I would imagine the ones I've seen the most athletic training facilities would probably be like in the, what, 30 to 40k price range?

About that. I think we found one that was about 20, and then some chiller units that didn't even have a tub. They were just a chiller box. About five or six thousand.

Yeah. My friend and I actually give two diagrams. This is before I met you guys. I think in my book Boundless, kind of like the fancy rich guys version of a cold tub setup, which was inspired by another guy who's been on the podcast before, he's super into cold, by the way, and used it to, like slim down from 400 plus pounds to a lot less. Rick Rubin, the music producer, and he has this fancy chiller system set up, or he had it set up at his home in Malibu. He has it at his home in Kauai. And he sent me all the diagrams, and I included them all in Boundless. But it was very fancy setup that I think all in was around 20k. And then I also have, kind of the opposite end of the spectrum, another guy who. You guys know Luke's story. He sent me all the diagrams again from my book for his, you know, buy a freezer from, you know, Lowe's or whatever. And then he's. He's basically just filling that with ice and cleaning with a little hydrogen peroxide and Just using, like, the poor man's freezer. I'm not calling Luke poor, but what I'm saying is he used. I guess he hacked. He used the biohacker approach. And so, like, those are. Were really the predominant two forms of ice bathing that I'd seen out there, aside from the ones in, like, the professional sports training rooms.

Yeah, absolutely. And Luke's got a forge, by the way, now.

An upgrade.

Yeah, he's got an upgrade. Yeah. So when we realized that there was really nothing out there that was going to suit us, our price point, our needs, Tom and I kind of looked at each other and, like, we're engineers. Like, what would it take for us to build our own? Like, Tom's PhD is in thermodynamics. I've got my degree in civil, environmental, and sustainable engineering. So we have a lot of that background physics knowledge. We just needed to figure out if we can apply it in a way that made our own all the time. Ice bath. And so I just started tearing apart refrigerators in my backyard. Tom would drop off a dorm fridge and be like, jason, figure out how. Figure out how it makes coal.

Get a few extra beers out of it.

I thought he was gonna blow the house up. And Jason goes, adrian, that's not how thermodynamics work.

So the first proof of concept was I tore apart a small dorm fridge. I figured out which part of it makes the cold. I understood intuitively that cold doesn't actually exist. Cold is the absence of heat. And so what a refrigerator does is it draws thermal energy out of an enclosed space and pushes it out to the environment. And so I.

That's why it kind of gets hot behind your fridge sometimes.

Yeah, absolutely. It's that thermal transfer. And so I pulled out what I would later absorb, learn, is called an evaporator. And I stuck it in a small styrofoam ice chest of water, put the lid on it, plugged it in, and came back the next day to see what happened. And turns out, yeah, I turned the whole thing. It was a small body of water, but I turned it into an ice block. I'm like, okay, this works this way. How can I scale this up? And so tearing apart some more refrigerators. We even bought one from Home Depot just to tear it apart. It didn't survive three hours. And I took our galvanized steel tub, put it on a bed of sand. I built a pine box around it. I closed in the gaps with, like, $400 worth of spray foam insulation. I took the mechanics. I Draped it over the side into the water. I took a big door from one of the freezers, the large freezer that I destroyed, same freezer that I was using to make ice blocks, put it on top. And it's. By this time, it's probably getting to be early summer of 2018, late spring, early summer, 2018. So getting pretty warm. And I just wanted to say, can't. Can I make myself a backyard engineering all the time ice bath? I think it took like two or three days to bring that water temp down and to actually build a couple of big ice blocks around the evaporators. And there it is. I had my ugly prototype, my backyard engineering project. We had an all the time ice bath.

Must be fun hanging out with a MacGyver like that.

It is so fantastic. Anytime I'm like, how do I make this work?

He's like, here we just make this barbecue grill out of an old car engine.

Jason's like, here, let me put my hands on it. That's what he says. Let me put my hands on it. Hands on it. Then I know I can walk away and I'll come back to some sort of magical masterpiece.

Oh, my gosh. Wow. Okay, so, so you've got this basically done ice tub that's actually working from an old refrigerator.

Yep, absolutely. It was actually two old refrigerators. We had them both, like, draped over, and there it is. We had our solution, and it worked. It was very functional. And at the same time, we were starting to. We're starting to look online, we're following hashtags, we're getting. We're looking at who else out there is getting into this kind of backyard personal cold exposure practice that doesn't have a product that was facing that market. And I kept seeing the same Costco salsa and pretzel containers and people trying to make ice blocks that I was using. And so this is kind of where we came to the realization that we weren't just solving a problem for ourselves. We were solving a problem that a lot of people were out there trying to solve. It was just an epiphany that this is a company and this is a product. And let's see how we can iterate this design forward, stop tearing apart refrigerators, learn how to build our own refrigeration systems and integrate it all into a product that we can put in the market and meet this unmet need.

There's really a few, like, subtle nuances of this, though, that I think are kind of important. Like, for example, when I talked to Luke Story he was putting hydrogen peroxide in his tub. You know, some people use chlorine or other filtration mechanisms. And when you guys came to me and you started telling me about the Marozco, I did ask you a few things. One of the first things I asked you was because I don't, you know, skin is a mouth, and I'm super careful with what I'm soaking in on the daily. So the cleaning actually doesn't require, from what I understand, the addition of chemicals. So how do you actually keep the water clean?

Sure. And what's interesting to note is the ozone disinfection system wasn't a part of the original concept. We were kind of happy with a refrigeration system that the water needed to be changed once or twice a month, depending on use. We were using a little bit of chlorine bleach to extend that. It wasn't till a couple of local Phoenix WIM HOF instructors named Michael Roviello and Jesse Mering approached us with wanting something for a commercial business they were working on. They were working on opening a center called Optimize. And they have, like, two locations now in the Phoenix area. And this is like a biohacking salon. They've got the IR saunas. They wanted cold plunges, a hot bath. They wanted compression therapy, doing some other things like that. And so now we were faced with, okay, how do we take this out of the backyard and put it in a commercial setting and not have the wrath of the county health inspector come down on us? We looked into the regulations, and there are absolutely none on cold baths. So we kind of used hot baths as the design criteria. We thought about ozone versus uv. We decided on ozone. And so Tom dug in on the science and the engineering and helped us design an ozone disinfection system that is designed well enough that it doesn't require any additional chemicals. Long story short, the. The magic is in the contact time between the ozone and the water. And if you have that sufficiently designed, the ozone is a beautiful disinfectant. It's beautiful in that it keeps up with the disinfection of the water, and it doesn't stay in the water. Once those ozone bubbles pop to the environment, the disinfection is gone, which leaves you with clean, pure, chemical free water.

It smells nice. And by the way, I was gonna ask you, like, there's no issue with the ozone bubbles, like, breathing that in? Is that a problem?

No. We've done a lot of readings both in the water and next to the water. At that surface area where the ozone bubbles pop to the environment. And they're gone so fast. So fast. We've even. I mean, we have units that are indoors. We took one to Burning Man. We had it in a shipping container, and we were reading ozone levels and everything was. Was well within.

Yeah, the way I do it, I usually have my head on the end without the ozone bubbler, and my feet are on the end by the ozone bubbler. So if it is on, I'm just, you know, I'm far from it anyways. But keeps the water remarkably, remarkably clean. And there's no UVs, just ozone.

No UV, just ozone. And yeah, we really dialed it in to make sure that there was really no necessary additional chemicals.

All right, and now this is perhaps something you didn't run across when you were doing your initial investigation of the cold tub market or what people were doing. But now I think it is something that I've seen a lot, and that is there are a lot of cold tub companies. Like, there's a lot of cold baths out there now, and I haven't really been able to find one yet. And I could be wrong. That actually makes it so that, like the Instagram video I did last night, because you guys came over, because I was having an issue with the tub and it. And you had to tweak some settings to get it back down to where it would get super duper cold. Because I just, like, I'm a time hacker, right? If I can do 32 degrees for two minutes rather than, you know, 45 degrees for six minutes, I'll totally choose the former. But anyways, the. The coldness of the actual temperature gets so cold, even when it's like a hundred plus degrees out here in Spokane, that I have to break through the ice to get in. I use what you guys recommended to me, a steel mace, one of those steel exercise bases. You just get, like, pounded a few times and boom, and you go. But it looks to me like surveying what's out there right now that most of the baths will go like 38, 39, 40, but they won't get down to that, like, break through the ice temperature. So what. What's the secret sauce there?

You know, I've never dissected one of the competitors that have popped up products. I've seen a couple of them in person. I've seen most of them online, and I really think it has to do with the technology they're using. A lot of them are using chiller units which rely on moving the water through A box or a device.

Yeah, that, that's what Rick Rubin uses. That's why.

Yeah, and so those have, those just have thermodynamic limitations. And you know, our, without getting too much into the secret sauce, our unit doesn't require moving the water to drop the water temperature. That's why we use metal tubs. The metal tubs are themselves kind of a chiller unit. They're in direct contact with the evaporator coil. And so that's kind of how we just keep pulling that thermal energy out. And as long as we're pulling thermal energy out at a rate that is faster than it is being regained by the environment, eventually we're going to freeze the water.

Okay. So in terms of the Marazco, basically. And then I want to get into some of the more subtle nuances of cold thermogenesis here. But basically it's like a tub, you can fit two people in it. Like me, me and my wife will get in there or you know, my sons will sit in there during their workouts. Like I told you guys, I'll have like one of the type of workouts that my sons do out in the patio is I'll have them do like, like three minutes Wim hof breathing, hold the exhale. Once you're not dizzy anymore, stand up, get in the cold tub. Two minutes in the cold tub, out of the cold tub, 30 push ups. And then you do like three rounds of that. And we'll put together like workouts like that that incorporate the cold. But basically you guys designed this to be like a one to two person. It's basically it's a stainless steel tub setup.

Right. We do galvanized steel and then we do have the stainless steel model as well that we've, that we innovated for the commercial settings.

Okay. And then when, when people get it, does do you guys have to bring it out there or do you, do you ship it to the house? Like, like how's it actually delivered and assembled?

We try to self perform deliveries in, in the southwest, or at least the west region. We do ship them ltl freight as well. So it's kind of a curbside delivery. They arrive completely fully assembled. They really plug and play. You fill it up, you plug it in, you get your get, get the temperature setting dialed in and you're good to go.

So if somebody has like a local plumber or an engineer MacGyver like you happens to be a friend, they can probably help them put it together.

There's no putting it together really Just.

Take it out of the box. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You literally take the box off, plug it in, fill it up and it's good to go.

Okay, cool. Get it. Cool. Okay, you guys, you guys probably heard that pun like a billion times.

Yeah, never enough.

Okay, so now I want to get into some of the more subtle nuances of this. Like I mentioned probably the first thing is that the sports teams for a long time have used this for recovery. What are your guys thoughts on ice bathing post workout? Ice bathing for delayed onset muscle soreness. Like how do you actually approach that?

What's interesting is we're finding that there's a lot of benefit in doing the workout after the ice. We did an event out in Austin at a place called ARX Fit. They make these really great strength training machines.

Single set to failure.

Yeah, yeah.

Work out against the robot.

Yeah, absolutely. And the data that they were gathering was showing that people were experiencing a 15 to 20% increase in their strength when they do the cold first and the strength training second.

Yeah. And that's something that actually Brad Kearns and I'll in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com ColdPodcast I'm going to link to an article that Brad Kearns, who's kind of a, and he, he's a triathlete now. He, he works with Mark Sisson and, and their whole publishing company. But basically I, he's a super fit. Sorry, Brad. I'm going to say this older gentleman, he wrote this article about the, the amplification of exercise performance and the vastly reduced rating of perceived exertion when you get cold before the actual workout. And so here's what I've seen on this. If you get cold before the workout, there's not a whole lot of evidence I've seen that that does a good job shutting down delayed onset muscle soreness or accelerating recovery, but it enhances the actual workout itself, probably due to the adrenaline, norepinephrine, you know, the upregulation testosterone, which is, you know, one, one benefit of cold that a lot of people don't talk about. But you know, I know, I know biohackers and you know, Russian power lifters who ice their balls to get the testosterone, testosterone up. But you get that and then kind of like this blunted pain response effect. And I think the only caution there because I've sprained many ankles, for example, in Spartan triathlons where you cross an icy cold lake and then you get out and you're running or you'll see some People who will get an injury doing a very complex movement when cold. And so I think it depends on the complexity of the workout. Like if you're going to practice your clean and jerk form and do some snatches and engage in some other somewhat more complex lifts. Getting cold beforehand is something that you'll want to be cautious with because some of your motor function if you get really cold can be impaired. But before like a, let's say you know, doing like a push up airdyne, you know, pull up squat type of workout where the movements aren't as complex. All I've ever found is that you feel amazing during the workout when you're, when you're doing it after the cold. Do you have any thoughts on the idea that if you do the cold afterwards, despite it kind of reducing soreness and perhaps reducing your body's core temperature and allowing you to recover a little bit faster, that it might blunt some of the hormetic effects of exercise, like shut down. You know, this is what people talk about, you know, shuts down mitochondrial cell proliferation or shuts down satellite cell proliferation. So you don't see as big of a fitness response if you get super cold right after you work out.

I think all that's a little bit above my research level. I defer to your wealth.

Okay, well real quick, I'll tell you right now. It's usually most of the studies that show that happen are 10 plus minutes at a pretty cold temperature, like usually somewhere between about 32 and 38 degrees where the muscles internal temperature is dropping considerably compared to like a quick one to two minute dip in the Marozco or a quick cold shower or something like that, it's a pretty stark difference. So it depends on the length and the temperature and the intensity of the cold. And what I tell people is if you're going to do one of those long ice baths where you're just sitting in the ice for a while, reading a book or doing your breath work or whatever, save that for at least a couple hours after the workout. In the same way you'd save like a high dose of antioxidants for a few hours after the workout so that your body has a chance to mount its own inflammatory response. So don't just basically do your longer ice bath later in the day after your workout, not right after your workout, although a short exposure is just fine. Adrian, I'd love to hear your take on this. There seems to be like a real interesting psychological effect that I guess it seemed like you experienced a little bit, but but have they done much, much research or do you know much about like anxiety, depression, stuff like that in response to cold?

Most of my contact with that is experiential based, so working with clients that are moving through those things as well as myself. So part of going through chronic illness, you get this super fun side effect of depression and anxiety. You feel like you're dying all the time. You're scared of everything. You don't know what's going to make anything worse. So you become, or I became like paralyzed within myself just in this illness. Chronic illness with depression, anxiety. One of the things that I've seen, not only through my experience, but through that of my clients is when you take an ice bath, you get that surge of norepinephrine and dopamine, and that just makes you feel good. Everything that you were dealing with prior to that ice bath suddenly seems so much smaller. One of my favorite examples of this.

Like when you hit your thumb with the hammer and the rest of the body feels really good.

Yes. And you're like, I totally forgot about that back pain from putting this roof on my house. Yeah. One of my favorite examples of this. And this is when it was the most effective and when it really dawned on me the impact of mental wellness and deliberate cold exposure. This is when we still had our first ugly prototype, but we had 24, seven ice bath. Jason and I were on the patio and I was arguing with him about something. I don't know what, but I was emotionally dysregulated. I was crying, I couldn't get a sentence out. And in my head I'm thinking of therapy. I'm thinking of dialectical behavioral therapy. Just stand up and change your physical state. Just stand up. If I could just stand up and change my physical state, then I may be able to change my emotional state.

Like Tony Robbins says, motion creates emotion.

Absolutely. And I couldn't do it. I was paralyzed in my own emotional dysregulation. And all of a sudden it was like a light bulb flipped on in my head and I thought, stand up and get in the ice. And it took a couple of repeating that inside my head before I actually did it. But I stood up, I walked across the yard, I stripped down, I sat in the ice bath. I was there for a little over four minutes, and then I got out, I went over and I sat down next to Jason. I said, all right, here's the thing. I don't remember what I was upset about, and I'm not trying to revisit it. Can we Just move on and enjoy our evening. I think I heard some fireworks go off somewhere because I don't think he'd ever heard me say anything like that.

Oh, fire of angels.

Yes. In the course of our years long relationship at that point, he never heard me do that. I'd never heard myself do that. And I'd certainly never in my life been able to just laugh, let something go after that level of emotional dysregulation. So now I knew that I had a tool. A tool that breath wasn't doing for me. A tool that I couldn't get through meditation and yoga. A tool that I may have to wait a month or a week for a therapy appointment for now I had an actual button that I could push as a reset on emotional dysregulation.

Yeah, I've never. Because I have. You guys have seen my Marozco. It's right outside my office door. Literally, I open my office door and I'm out there. And of course, that's, that's often my substitute for an afternoon cup of coffee. Sometimes I'm lazy or I have my shoes on because I've been out walking and I literally just plunge my entire upper body in and then get out and throw my head back and let it all drip down my butt and all over my body. And I mean, that's, it's a, it's a super good wakey wakey call, but I have never done that or more significantly, gotten out of the ice bath after a couple minutes and been in a bad mood mood. Like my wife always knows if I do a cold soak before dinner, I am a hoot at the dinner table. Like, I, I just, like, I can't stop talking and I'm loving life and everything's amazing. And I also am happy because I know I can eat more food and we'll get into that. And so yeah, it like the mood uplifting effects, which obviously translate into a host of physiological effects just based on, you know, not only that motion creates emotion thing we're talking about, but also so you know, Bruce Lipton's biology belief. And you know, this whole idea of when you rip the cells out of that sympathetic nervous system fight and flight mode, which they're briefly in when you're in the cold, but then kind of like the sauna just pumps your blood glucose through the roof when you're in the heat. And then when you come out of the heat, the response is better glucose management, better insulin sensitivity. It's kind of like that with cold. You're super kind of stressed. When you're in there, even if you're calm, your body is still fighting that calm. But then when you get out, it's as though your body has learned to be much, much calmer, possibly due to that, you know, hitting your helmet, your thumb with a hammer type of effect.

But, and I think that's what we're training our bodies to do when we put ourselves into those freezing temperatures. To me it's got to be 35 or below in order for me to put myself intentionally in a state of fight or flight, to then allow myself to train myself to, in a safe environment how to move through fight or flight without becoming reactionary. So instead of reacting to stressors in my life, I'm responding, I'm able to create that pause, that power of the pause.

Yeah. Okay. So the, the thing I briefly alluded there to related to eating, I mean I wear this, you can see this continuous blood glucose monitor on my left arm. I'll slap that thing on the sensor lasts 14 days. It's a Dexcom Libre that I'm using right now. And I'll put that on about once every couple of months. I don't wear it all the time, but I'll always do check ins or I'll put it on before I travel so that I can, because I'm kind of outside of my normal environment, learn a little bit more about where my blood glucose is at. Right. Like am I hungry right now because I'm stressed out and I just checked into my hotel and it's been a long day of travel or am I actually hungry because my blood glucose is low? Right. So I can look at my blood glucose and see how it responds to meals, activities and stress and everything else. The thing, and I've said this before on a podcast, but I'll repeat it real quick for people. The one thing that plunges my blood glucose and keeps my blood glucose low the entire day. 10pm after that last slice of carrot cake that I snuck out after you guys left, my blood glucose was at 70. Okay. We ate at 7:15, 7:30. I did my morozco soak about, about 5:30 or so. But if I time a cold soak anywhere in like the, the, you know, 20 minutes to two hours prior to dinner, it like the impact on blood glucose is absolutely staggering. Have you guys messed around much with continuous blood glucose monitoring?

No, I'm on the, the list for, for levels which I don't really know what, when that's going to circle around something that I want to look into.

Yeah, levels being, being an active that a lot of consumers are now using for blood glucose or experimentation with their glycemic variability.

Right. I might look into, see what else is more readily available and I'll dig in on the one that you're wearing.

And Tom wrote an article, Tom wrote about an article about ice bath and ketogenesis, which is on our website under the journal section.

Oh, really?

Where he talks about that, those type of benefits for deliberate cold exposure and glucose. His son is diabetic and so this is type 1 diabetic. So this is close, near and dear to his heart. And it makes a difference. Deliberate cold exposure makes a difference, yeah.

Have you guys looked into much of the research on the, on the androgen or on the endocrine system? You know, like impact on testosterone, you know, related to all the, all the old school power lifters icing their balls and stuff like that.

Tom and I have gotten our testosterone checked. I got mine checked. Checked right about my 40th birthday and then again on my 40th, 41st birthday, I'll be 42 in October. So I'll probably, you know, get another data point there between, for me, between those two data points, I got about a 30% increase which is, you know, again, I'm in my early 40s and a lot of, a lot of men in our society are on the downward slide with their testosterone level levels and I'm actually increasing. It'll be interesting to see what kind of increase there may be on this second or on this third data point. Tom likewise got his checked and his testosterone level is insane. He's basically at the testosterone level of a 19 year old and he's in his mid-50s.

It's a little paradoxical because the other thing that happens is if my wife and I are getting it on at night and I've actually been in the cold tub like prior to that. It's really hard to get it up like that. Oh yeah, yeah, I have. Well, I get, I get treated. No, it's hard for me to get it up. Maybe I've got a leaner dick than you, I don't know. But anyway, that, like it takes me a little while to recover from that when it comes to the shrinkage or the blood flow. I suppose the thing that I've been asked, and I'd be remiss not to ask you guys this and see if you have any perspective on it is obviously when you get into cold water, there is a sympathetic nervous system response. There's a Fight or flight response that if you tackle that properly. And I want to talk to you in a little bit here, Adrian, about the type of meditation, breath work work that you've designed for pairing with cold tub. But if you don't manage that fight and flight sympathetic response properly, you freak out. You do the nine second Adrian thing. And I'm curious, are there people who you think should be super careful? Have you ever seen any indication that folks might have a heart attack when they get in cold water or something like that?

We like to say that our lives are the product of the story we tell ourselves. And Adrienne has a wealth of experience. She's guided thousands of people through. And the ones that I've witnessed in events, I can always tell who's not going to make it to two minutes because they're already telling themselves the story, they're already anxious about it. And one of the things that we all in our company and our culture and our coaching try to do is to help people reduce that anxiety that they, that they're experiencing before the sensation, you know, the past and the future don't exist. That's, you know, our memory and our anxiety. So bringing them to that, that present moment is very important. We've never really seen anybody suffer any sort of, I'll say, real problem. It's all been just kind of a limiting belief and then they'll jump out of the bath and then got the sauna right there.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think if anybody is concerned about something like that, that just, you know, in the same way that you would probably, if you had like vagal nerve issues or hypotensive issues or something like that, you would want to do like Wim Hof breathwork by yourself because you'll probably pass out and you know, anything like this, any of these hormetic stressors, if you are nervous, just have a watch or have a sitter, have a facilitator and you know, those, those type of words might seem like words you'd hear more thrown around in meditation or yoga or, or plant medicine. But it kind of leads to the idea that this could be approached as a very deep meditative practice similar to some of those type of protocols. This is kind of new for me, Adrian. I don't know much about it, but I noticed on your website that you're, you're kind of like now including some type of, of meditation or breath work training or something like that to teach people how to deal with the cold. And so I'd love to hear you walk folks through like, what a gold standard, how to control your physiology type of practice would look like when it comes to their ice bathing protocol.

Yeah. So I will say the only contraindication I've come up with for deliberate cold exposure, in my experience, is pacemaker. You don't want to shock your system if you have a pacemaker. So make sure if you have a pacemaker, you're getting some sort of doctor consent or talking with your doctor about what that would look like. And if you are concerned with anything like that, if you're concerned with shocking your system too much, or not being afraid or not being able to do it, it is okay to experience 55 degrees. It's okay to get yourself to a point where you feel cold, maybe not freezing cold. Any amount of cold is a good amount of cold.

And you're not just throwing that number out there. Actually, 55 degrees is actually the temperature at which you do start to see something kind of like with fasting, you start to see some benefits of like eight hours.

Yeah.

So even with cold, you start to see benefits of 55 degrees. Not more than that, but 55.

At least 55 is a good start. And you don't have to go for two minutes. Get yourself all the way in, get yourself all the way up so quickly. After I started this practice, within just the first few plunges, I realized that the WIM HOF method was not the method for me. It was hyperactive, it was holotropic, it was high energy. And then the way that they meet the cold is with competition. So it's that, like, I'm going in the cold, I'm gonna own this cold. I'm gonna make this cold my bitch. And that's not the way that the cold works for me. I found that I needed to find a way to achieve ultimate surrender, ultimate surrender through that fight or flight. Ultimate surrender to the discomfort my body was going through in that cold experience. And I've craved those freezing temperatures from the beginning. So even when I'm introducing people to the cold for the first time and they have no experience, I put them in 33 degrees. There's no I to me in the ways that I've guided people. There's no such thing as too cold for an ice bath and for a first timer. So within my first few ice baths and I realized, like, too high energy, I needed to do something different. I started to pull from different experiences that I was learning from in my healing journey. So a little bit of dialectical behavioral therapy where you're engaging all five senses in order to ground yourself a little bit of breath work, mindful meditation, setting an intention, deciding that I was doing this even though it was uncomfortable, I was doing this even though it was hard, I was doing this even though I was afraid and anxious and I was going to do it anyway.

Okay. So when I get in the bath I typically will focus on nasal breathing only just so I'm not activating a lot of those baroreceptors in the chest from mouth breathing that would amplify the cortisol response. And what I typically do is box breathing. And then primarily because probably the longest I've ever spent in an ice bath was actually when I was doing the, the Navy Seal, the Kokoro down in Encinitas, which is kind of like the, they do almost like a Navy SEAL hell week for civilians. And you can go in there and basically pay guys a bunch of money to treat you like shit for a few days and beat you up and spit you out. But in all reality it definitely makes you a better person going through all of that. But during one of the so called beat downs or evolutions, they stuck me in an ice bath and I was in there for about 19 minutes breathing through a plastic bottle, bottle, like a cut off plastic bottle with my head under and occasionally they'd like splash water into that bottle and I had to maintain my, my cool. And it was, it was tough. But then one thing that they taught us because they actually do teach you a lot of stress control strategies there when you're whatever sitting in the Pacific Ocean at 2am and trying to control the hypothermic response is box breathing, right? Four count in, four count out, four count hold or four count in, four count hold. Four count out, four count hold. I've personally found no other breathwork practice to be as effective as that for being able to maintain nervous system calm when in the cold is what do you use though?

So that is, that is effective. I do love box breathing. I like it for when I'm stressed in traffic, when I'm anxious, before, you know, a meeting or a podcast. And the way that we teach, the way that I guide the Maransko method is you want to enter the cold with stoicism and grace. You want to enter the cold with mindful meditation. So what you need to do as you're standing next to the ice bath is bring your focus into the now by touching base with all five of your senses, sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. You're grounding yourself in the present moment. So I'll look around. What do I see? This is how I guide people. What do you see? What can you hear? What can you smell? What do you taste? What can you feel? And that brings you into the body and grounds you in the moment. And then we work on belly breathing. So when you're in an anxious state, you're going to breathe up into the chest. And I can see this as I'm guiding people. They're breathing the chest. I can tell they're nervous. So I guide them into breathing into the belly. I also use a little bit of yoga nidra, a little bit of hypnosis, and put you in that calm state.

Yoga nidra being almost like a body scan.

Yes. We start at the feet. You're grounded. Your feet are firm, solid beneath you, ready to carry you on your journey ahead. We move up the body, the arms relax, the shoulders relaxed.

And this is all before you even get in.

All before you even get in. And I also use the environment. If I'm outside, if I'm at an event, if there's music, if there's a lot of noise, we're going to incorporate that. We're not going to ignore it. We're going to embrace that as part of the experience. So I also guide you to step fully in, calmly, without hesitation. Sit all the way down, get all the way to the neck, Drop your arms and your hands. I know the hands and the feet are uncomfortable people, but that's the part.

People complain about the most. Their feet pop out, their heads pop out like a short.

And the only way to train through that is to do it. And you can train through that. That's your vascular system. We need to be training through that. So I advise them to go all the way through one foul motion, one. One fluid motion, sitting all the way down. At this point, especially if it's your first time, you're activating fight or flight and you're hyperventilating. When we hyperventilate, we tend to focus on the exhale. And what I'm teaching you to do is flip that. I want you to focus on bringing oxygen into the body. So part of the cold is it can feel like it's difficult to take a deep breath. Like me walking and talking on this podcast right now, it's hard to take a deep breath because your chest feels like it's constricting. So what we're teaching is breathe in anyway. Like, suck that air in. Suck that. And it's okay to do it through the mouth. As you're in your new. As you're new to the practice, you just want to teach yourself to bring that oxygen into the body. That only lasts about 30 to 45 seconds. And then the dorne, the norepinephrine kick in. Everything starts to calm, and then you are in control. You're able to slow your breath. And if you're not someone who can get to two minutes, that's okay. It is important to get in with calm, mindful intention. Step out with calm, mindful intention. So if I occasionally come across someone who's in there for, like, 15 seconds, says, I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it. I got to get out, that's okay. Move slowly. When they get out of the cold, you're disoriented. You don't know up from down. You're still trying to catch your breath. Whether you've done two minutes or not. I have you stand in a power pose. You guys can look this up. It's called arms akimbo. And I learned this neat little technique from Joe Navarro in the book what Everybody Is Saying. It's called arms akimbo. So your feet are a little more than hip distance apart. Your hands are in fists on your hips with your thumbs pointing behind you. Your chest is out, your shoulders are back, your chin is up. And I have you.

Like Superman.

Yes. Or Wonder Woman. Pick your king or queen. Pick your king or queen, and I will have you stand that way still, while you're catching your breath, post cold. And the reason is, if you step out of an ice bath and you curl into yourself and you don't stand fully up and you reach for that towel, you're creating a physical muscle memory of anxiety, of fear. Whereas if you stand in that power pose, you're doing a few things. One, you're creating a physical muscle memory of empowerment. Two, they call arms akimbo the power pose, because by standing this way for two minutes, you're invoking chemicals in the brain that create space of calm incompetence. And three, by standing fully still and breathing through and relaxing your sugar response, you're activating your brown fat, which is then going to turn your white fat into burning energy. So I do not say move, run, jump, do all these things. I say be still. Let your body do the work. And so the whole premise of the way I guide and the way that I now certify other instructors to guide the Marozko method, is meeting the cold with stoicism and grace. Stepping in with mindful intention, stepping out with the same mindful intention. Everything we do around the cold is calm, intentional, and mindful.

I love that. And the Marozco method, that's a great name. By the way. Are you guys planning on having, like, videos and stuff on your website that teach people this or walk them through it or like audios, things like that?

Right now I have online deliberate cold exposure meditations. So if you're new to the practice, go to our YouTube at Moraletsko Forge and look at the DCE meditations. You can select by number of minutes or by focused healing. I also certify people to do this to become guides in this practice. I hold host workshops wherever anyone will have me. My next one's in Boca Raton, September 11, and I will be releasing a fundamentals course where you can go online, get familiar with the practice on your own, and then decide if you want to move further along.

Yeah, I joke sometimes that, like, one of my most popular YouTube videos is how to take a cold shower. Because I'm like, let's get in and turn the water on cold, you know, but really, in all seriousness, because I've done other videos, you know, how to do an ice bath. Like, there is so much more than just getting into the cold cold. And as you alluded to, Adrian, like, the whole idea of intentionality and setting an intention body awareness body scan and mindfully paying attention to where your nervous system is going. Like, that's where you go way beyond. Just gonna get through the cold, gonna get through the cold, gonna get through the cold, you know, whether it's in the shower or in the bath. And so, yeah, if you're gonna use this time anyways, use it wisely. Get. Get as much as you can out of it. Just like when I work out, I like to listen to an audiobook or a podcast because I like to make myself smarter if I'm going to use that 45 minutes to also make myself stronger. The couple of things I would add in that I found to be useful in addition to what you just outlined, Adrian, was I've found eyes open seems to for people who really struggle with the cold, almost be better than eyes closed. And I think it's something about, like, the distractions of the external environment and things to look at that seem to kind of take your mind off the cold. Whereas, and you might want to do this if you're really trying to turn yourself into a cold ninja, Closing the eyes seems to actually kind of make you think about the cold a Little bit more.

I think that's accurate. And there are a couple of reasons for this. So, again, when we're using sensory immersive grounding techniques, we want to engage all the senses. When you're closing your eyes, you're removing one of our greatest senses that alerts us to danger. So if your eyes are closed and you're already afraid, you're going to increase that. The other thing is, when I'm guiding someone, I'm activating mirror neurons. Your pupils are looking at my pupils so that you can see that I'm calm, so that you understand that there's no need for danger.

I love it. Okay. And then the other thing is, you know, in addition, and, you know, this is something James Nestor talks about in his new book, Breathe, for example. And, you know, even the use of, like, carbon dioxide therapy via a device called the carbogen for people with anxiety and depression and impaired stress responses to actually be able to handle any of these type of things a little better. Kind of like ice makes you a little bit more resilient to anxiety and stress. High levels of carbon dioxide seem to do the same. So in addition to belly breathing. And I love your idea about just, like, embracing the inhale, slow exhale. So. So you're not huffing off too much CO2. You're just basically, you know. And I realized that the box breathing is not necessarily a slow exhale, but if you actually find yourself super stressed, you can actually do an even longer exhale. You can go like 4 in, 4 hold, 8 out, 4 hold. And for a lot of people, just that slight increase in carbon dioxide, along with the eyes open, can help out with. With kind of maintaining your relaxation in the tub.

Absolutely.

Well, there's one thing that we haven't yet talked about, and I'm wondering if we should. If we should tell people about the secret sauce. We are, by the way, just so you guys know, we're headed towards the river. We're gonna actually go, go, go finish today's episode with a little soak in the Spokane river with the crawdads and the trout and the scary Loch Ness creatures that eat your toes off.

I'm so ready.

But the. The secret sauce. You guys remember the secret sauce from last night that I had in the steak rub?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay. Should we tell people about it?

Yeah.

Okay, so this. So we didn't get deep into the science of these uncoupling proteins, but basically, when you get cold, you're up regulating the activity of what are called uncoupling proteins, which cause your cells to, instead of using calories to generate ATP, using calories to generate heat. Right. And this is why, for example, you see people talking about white adipose tissue when you get cold slowly with repetitive exposure getting converted into brown adipose tissue, which is more metabolically active. And when they say metabolically active, they're specifically referring to the fact that this brown fat has a higher activity. These uncoupling proteins that just basically take calories and boom, shove them straight into heat, eat. So it's kind of like that extra metabolic boost, that extra calorie burn that results in many people seeing, you know, really, really accelerated fat loss in response to cold, especially if they do it fasted because then your body's grabbing fewer of the fatty acids and glucose from your bloodstream and having to tap into that adipose tissue a little bit more intensively. But that all being said, there are certain secret sauces and secret things that, that increase the activity of that uncoupling protein. So do you guys remember the name of that one we had last night?

Grains of Paradise.

Grains of Paradise. You buy it off Amazon. I, instead of putting black pepper in my pepper grinder, I put the Grains of Paradise in there. And you can put a few twists of that into like a morning cup of coffee. If you can have coffee before your cold soak, you can use it afterwards too. I actually, just because it increases metabolic rate across a wide variety of scenarios. I'll use it on my breakfast, on my lunches, on my dinner. But Grains of Paradise is one. And then the other things we were talking about where any of these so called glucose disposal agents, these are things that people a lot of times will do before they eat, I don't know, four slices of carrot cake or any appreciable amount of carbohydrates or alcohol in some cases. So things like berberine or even dihydroberine, which is more, more, more active form of berberine or bitter melon extract or even Ceylon cinnamon or apple cider vinegar or some people even use metformin. Like any of those actually pair pretty well with cold to increase the effects that you're looking for. If you're looking for more that metabolic fat loss type of effect. So that's, that's one little, little secret that I wanted to share on today's show. I guess it's no longer a seasonal. I love that now Amazon's gonna sell out of Grains of Paradise. But then if you're doing a sauna session, you do black pepper and that heats up the body. So the black pepper heats up the body, the grains of paradise increases the uncoupling protein.

I love that.

And then the other thing is to be combined with cold. And I wanted to ask you guys about this. There's some interesting things about getting the Marozco. Like I had Brian Hoyer, building biologist from Shielded Healing, come out to my house and do a whole EMF walkthrough and I had him test the Morozco because I wanted to make sure I wasn't like cold soaking in a, you know, man made electrical radiation soup. Yep, he tested me and then he tested what's called the, the phase angle of my body. And, and that was basically measuring how well I was grounded when in the tub. And so you hear a lot of people talking about these grounding mats, earthing mats, going outside barefoot, laying on your back. You know, I have a whole podcast with Clint Ober about the magnitude of anti inflammatory effects from grounding. He tested me and I was grounded. It was something like 20 times more than when I was standing barefoot on the ground when I was in that steel tub underneath the water. And so there's this anti inflammatory grounding effect. Did I tell you guys about that?

You did. And he also did Luke's stories and he did a beautiful video explaining it all, which is on our YouTube channel.

Oh, okay, sweet. I'll link to that@the BenGreenfieldFitness.com ColdPodcast. There was another thing because I totally forgot to ask you about this, but do you guys actually do heat? And if so, how do you combine that with the Marozco, like sauna?

We do. We, we like to start in the sauna so that you're starting at like already a base state instead of going into the cold first, relying on the.

Sauna, wasting your time.

You're just wasting your time. And we're all trying to be efficient with our time, right? So we start in the sauna, get a really good sweat going. I like to give myself a few minutes between sauna and cold, letting my body do the work. I'm not relying on the forge to cool me off post sauna. So I give myself about 3 ish 5 minutes between and then I do cold plunge.

Okay, you do the same thing.

Same, yeah. From a time management perspective. And also, you know, this, this therapy, this deliberate cold exposure therapy, as we know, works on so many different systems. But one of the favorites for me to think about and talk about is the vasomotor constrictive response and Again, I feel if I'm going from hot from that vasodilation to the constriction, going from dilated to constricted is a lot faster and deeper than going from constricted to dilated.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in most cases with hot, cold contrast, as it's called going back and forth, hot to cold to hot to cold to hot to cold is actually the very best. I mean, when you look at the studies on the, on the men, the Finnish longevity study, you know, I've been over there to the men's Finnish sauna society and they will, you know, do us do a sauna and then go jump in the Baltic Sea or the cold body of water nearby and then come back up onto the deck and kind of like let themselves get warm by not being in the sauna sauna and just standing outside, which, you know, anytime that you let your body get warm on its own, you guys, rather than go and taking a hot shower after the cold, you're going to get even more benefits. And so always try and let your body warm up itself, even if you got to do a few, you know, jumping jacks or burpees or whatever. But anyways, the back and forth from the hot to the cold to the hot to the cold, they'll do that multiple times. And sometimes I think they leave that out of those reports on how sauna increases lifespan in Finnish men, because I've been over there and their sauna practice is actually sauna, then cold, then standing around for a while, then sauna, then cold, and again multiple times, often sitting quietly in a little bit more meditative state inside the saunas. So, yeah, there's a lot that you can reap from a sauna or a hot, cold contrast type of practice that goes beyond just sitting in the sauna. And my practice is because I don't have a lot of time to go back and forth and back and forth. Forth is four to five days a week. I do about a 30 minutes of just like flow yoga in my sauna and then I get out and go to either the Morozco or I'll go swim a few laps in my. I have like an above ground cold pool that stays like anywhere from 45 to 55. So I'll go swim around in that or hit the Morozco and then whichever one I don't do that morning, I do later on in the day. So. All right, so we have covered eight a ton. And there's one last thing that we have to do for this podcast to really be a smash hit. And we're going to upload some photos and videos. We have a wonderful videographer and photographer, Anna, out here with us. So she's going to put some cool content for you all up on the website. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com ColdPodcast but what we're going to finish up with is a nice little dip right here into the wonderful Spokane River. You guys do many open water soaks?

We're getting into it. We just went to a place called a blue pool in Oregon a couple weeks ago.

Yeah. Here we can sit down and keep the mics close together while we take off our shoes. So I used to come down here to this little lagoon. This is in a little place called the Islands trailhead in Spokane. And I'd get in here sometimes in the morning and almost use this like an outdoor or lap pool, you know, swimming back and forth.

It's beautiful.

And there's. There's something about the open water that I like, I was talking about earlier. I just like to throw in every now and again because you just feel primal when. When you can hunt down an open body of water to do this. And so, you know, even. Even if you don't have a Morozco, you can, now that you've learned the secrets, go to Costco and buy yourself a bunch of pretzels and salsa and float them in your bathtub. You can hunt down a cold body of water. You can take a cold shower. I'm going to put a. A link to Marozco because we've got. I forget what it is, but people get some kind of a special discount on your guys's tub. And so I'll put that@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Cold podcast. Do you remember what it is? Yes, Adrian.

One is Benforge. The other is Boundless.

Both those codes work.

Both those codes work. One gets you 500 off the prism. The other gets you 150 off the filtered or the cold forge.

Okay, sweet. So there's a few different. Few different models, but. Oh, there's a duck. Duck came over to say hello to us. All right, well, folks, we're gonna get into the water, and just so I don't drop our precious microphone here and lose everything that we just talked about, I'll. I'll hit stop in the recording. But in the meantime, if you guys want to dig into the studies we talk about, learn more about the Marozco. Learn more about the Marozco method that Adrian was talking about. And check out some of the meditation and breathwork videos. If you have your own comments or questions or feedback, you know, Jason and Adrian and I can always hop into the comments section and reply to you there. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com ColdPodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com coldpodcast and that's where you can find all the show notes. All right, so we're down here at the water, and just for you listening in, I think as I was taking off my shoes to get into the water, I pressed stop on our recording. So it might sound like we're just leaping into a whole new discussion here, but I decided to turn the recording back on because we're going to go wade into the water. Come on, you guys.

Come on, you guys. It'll be fun.

And there was a question that I totally forgot to ask, so I thought I'd ask it just because it's kind of interesting. And that's this whole idea of, like, people taking Epsom salts baths and, like, soaking in, you know, magnesium salts and stuff like that. Obviously, I've never put those in the hot tub because it messes up the filter, but have you guys ever done that in the Morozko?

Yeah, we've been. We've been putting about eight pounds of Epsom sales salt into the bath. And this accomplishes a couple of things. The first is that it softens the ice. So sometimes when we want to build up those good ice layers, we end up with, like, three inches of clear, solid ice on the bottom. We struggle to get it to pop up to the top, especially in different, like, hot. Hot or ambient environments. But that Epsom salt in the water is going to make the ice softer, which is going to make it easier to pull up and create like this.

Oh, my God. Gosh. Okay. I'm totally gonna do this. I gotta try it out. I bet. Yeah.

We don't have a whole lot of evidence on this, but there could be some. Some benefit with transdermal soaking of the magnesium, the magnesium actually soaking into the skin.

I mean, that's why I do it in the bath. I would imagine it's gonna probably soak better in hot water, but still, I mean, even if you keep it, if you get out and you don't take a shower, it's gonna be on your skin, seeping in. All right, so cool. Well, everybody, we are. We are now standing knee deep in the Spokane River. And again, I'm going to put all of the show notes, everything we talked about. All the studies, the links to the Marozco, all the special goodies@BenGreenfieldFitness.com ColdPodcast where you can jump in and leave your own questions or comments or feedback or anything else you want to pipe in on. Jason and Adrian and I will be there to help. So, Jason, Adrian, thanks for doing this, you guys.

Thanks for having us. Ben.

Do you guys want to go in a little deeper?

Oh, yeah, we do.

Me too, but I gotta ditch this microphone. All right, well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure, sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every weekend.