Wim Hof and Craig Foster were dunked in ice water as infants and argue controlled cold exposure builds resilience in children. Foster was placed in 10-12°C Atlantic water two days after birth. Both say gradual, supervised cold challenges teach boundaries and self-reliance, though tolerance can fade during puberty.
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Do you do a lot of the, the cold as well, or not?
Not, not too much, not too much, but I do come sometimes here and take the ice bath with my dad. But he, you know what my dad did with me? He, he hold me to my Achilles and dunked me into the ice bath, and I never got sick again.
Yeah, when he was a baby, he was never sick. He always laughed after. You get them in the cold water just a brief moment Fully immersed and then out and the energy, you know, because I never stopped laughing.
But you know, the funny thing is my dad, when my dad, when he brought me home from being born from the nursing home, I think it was my second day on the planet. We lived right next to the ocean and the Atlantic and he took me in. It was like 10 degrees, 12 degrees water and as a tiny child, I mean, straight into that water. Same thing. Yeah. Yeah. So I was 2 days old.
I always thought it was child abuse, but so, okay, so other people do it. I don't like them. All of comforting your child too much is abuse. That's, that works like abuse.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's true.
Yeah, we were, we were talking with Lewis Howes, right, about loving people or loving It's not like protecting from everything out there. It's like exposing them for everything out there so they may grow and develop.
Make them ready.
Trusting them, trusting them to actually, you know, look after themselves a bit. I've done that a lot with my son and it's been terrifying at times with big sharks in the water and that kind of thing. But, but, but, uh, it's, it, you know, people, youngsters need initiation. They need to know their boundaries and be responsible themselves. You know, if you, if you closet them too much, then I agree, they can actually become irresponsible. Yeah, my son, yeah, he, he was very, very good with the cold when he was like 7, 9 years old, 7 to 9. And then when he hit puberty, found the cold a bit difficult. And now that he's out of that, he can deal with the cold easily again.
Beautiful. Amazing. The thing with my dad, like, always when I had— I climbed a tree, it was never like, oh, get down. He was always saying, go higher, go higher, go higher.
And I never fell.
I never fell. But the thing is that you have to expose your children to that because falling is learning how to fall. Otherwise, when they're adults and they fall, they break 3 legs and they only have 2. So strange, strange logics, right? So I got that from you.
