77 | How Sauna and Cold Plunge Help Your Nervous System! - The Nervous System Week 2

Hello. Cabrew cold brew. Oh, alright. It's actually pretty good flavor. Mic check. Real Health podcast. Let's go.

Welcome back to another episode of the Real Health podcast. We are stoked about July. We got a fun event coming up, July 23rd here at the Health Factory from 4 to 6 PM.

We are doing a back to school event. This is a time where even if you're not a patient, you can come in and kids receive free adjustments. We're doing free spine evaluations for, like, scoliosis and, backpack checks to kinda help you understand where backpack should be worn to prevent this like dreaded text neck that's happening, this forward head posture issue. We're gonna be having like a lot of giveaways and raffles. The first 50 kids get free Wooden Spoon, which is like a natural shaved ice, so it's gonna be awesome.

Would love to have you come out. Again, July 23rd, 4 to 6 PM at the Health Factory. It's a Real Health Co. sponsored event. And so, you know, the month July, we've been talking about recovery, how to maximize it, what does, like, the right amount of training load and the right amount of recovery look like for whether it's athletic development or prevention of injury or even just living a healthy life. So last episode, we talked about the nervous system which is the foundation of recovery and training.

And so we talked about what is the nervous system and ways to help the nervous system adapt and recover to stress. And today we're gonna talk about stressors. So the 2 big ones we're gonna talk about is hot and cold, fire and ice. A lot of conversations are in this space of sauna and cold plunge. So sauna and cold plunge or heat and ice.

And so I'm gonna give you some tips even if you don't have a sauna or cold plunge that you can immediately start doing to create a very similar effect at home that's virtually free. Okay? So we're gonna talk about that at the end of the episode. Let's talk about fire and ice. Let's talk about sauna and cold plunge.

I'm gonna start off with if you were to kinda say, pin me in the corner and say, hey, doctor, give me one of the 2 that I should do. Would it be sauna or cold plunge? It's sauna. Hands down, it would be sauna. Because the sauna is, has so many more benefits than cold plunging.

The sauna, you still get stress adaptations, you get heat shock protein production, but with the sauna, what's unique to it is that you sweat and you sweat profusely. And sweating is one of the best ways of excretion of toxins, so detoxification. So you detox through urine, feces, or sweat. Sweating is a lot of times what we find in patients that are chronically ill, they don't sweat well. They're actually their sweat glands are super constricted, they don't sweat, their body can't even sweat.

And so one of the best ways that we help patients detox and feel better is by getting them in a sauna and training their body to sweat and cleanse those skin toxins. Just think about all the stuff you put on your skin, and just think about all the layers of plastic, because gosh, the pants I'm wearing, the shirt I'm wearing, this is all plastic. It's nasty. Plastic. We live in a micro plastic world, and it just fills our pores with toxins.

Not to mention the lotions, the sunscreens, all the things that we're just stopping up our pores with. And then what we ingest is just overloading our sweat glands. So that's one of the reasons we don't sweat. We also have an unhealthy liver, so we're not detoxing well. So sauna is the best way to help detox through sweat glands.

So that's why it's my favorite. You also get some incredible benefits. There's research showing its anti cancer properties, Sauna shows, it's improving and decreasing Alzheimer's dementia. We see it in longevity studies that people who sauna live longer, healthier lives. So sauna should be like this daily practice for a lot of people.

There are so many health benefits that it is definitely a- if you were to like say, hey, what's the one thing I should invest in at home? In transparency, the investment, those dollars should go to a sauna. So now there's a lot of different saunas out there. So recently So I've had an infrared I've used well over a decade in my house. It's in my garage.

So it's far infrared and so far infrared penetrates really deep into the body, kinda heats you from inside out. So you can you can actually, you know, sweat at a lower temperature, which is which is fantastic. Like, a 100 degrees and I'm sweating profusely. The problem is we're not getting, like, deep because the the the heat temperature isn't, like, 200. We're not getting activation of heat shock proteins, which are necessary for repair mechanisms, anti cancer properties.

So one of the downfalls to infrared, even though it has a lot of, positives, is that we're not getting a high heat environment. So you're near infrared, far infrared, yes, they're great in a lot of ways and I love infrared saunas. Recently, in like recent by last month, I've switched to a heat sauna, like a Swedish heat sauna. So this is a traditional heat sauna that gets my, sauna it's a big barrel sauna from Redwood Outdoors, gets my, the sauna goes up to over 200 degrees. Very hot.

And that high heat environment forces a greater stress adaptation than infrared. Now, if you're cooking at 15160, that's great. That's about the highest infrareds will go, but as you approach 170, 80, 90, and 200, it's forcing a greater stress adaptation response and more heat shock protein activation which again is necessary for repair mechanisms and overall healing response. So I've just noticed the stress of a higher heat environment has been, something I've been mindful of because it's actually kinda worn me out, drained me, because I thought I could be- I used to hang out in my infrared for an hour, and you know now after about a month I'm pretty close to that in my heat sauna. But, gosh, the first time I used it within 23 minutes, I was getting cooked and it just wore me out.

So I do think there's a a high benefit to both, and so you just gotta figure out what fits your lifestyle. And for me, I've just recently switched to the Swedish style barrel sauna traditional heat sauna for those higher temperatures and also the aesthetics of the have a really cool barrel kinda vibe aesthetic. So sauna over not, you're gonna get a lot of benefits. Now switch to cold plunging because this is a common, like biohacker, thing right now. A lot of people are are are plunging.

And cold thermogenesis where we switch our white and brown fats to actually force our bodies to be more metabolicly active is one of the reasons why, you know, cold exposure drives fat burning. And I actually did an n equals one experiment in that my own house, did a pre and post body fat analysis, lost about 2 a half percent of body fat, dropped down to a little under 8% body fat from a little bit over 10% within 60 days of cold plunging every single day. And so, you know, some of that stubborn last 2% body fat was in large part due to that like centripetal zone, that mid section zone that's really hard and stubborn to lose, and cold plunge would actually help me break through that plateau. Why? Because again in those cold environments, our white and brown fat gets swapped so we get that more metabolically active brown fat that we're able to use for energy expenditure.

Whereas that white is more storage based. So it's one of the benefits to cold plunging. You also get cold shock protein activation, which are which are great, proteins necessary for, again, repair mechanisms, healing responses in the body. And then, of course, cold shock cold exposure, you're getting the benefit of stress adaptation. And one of the big things that people talk about is how it stimulates the parasympathetic system, which is a massive part of the nervous system necessary for repair, recovery, healing response.

And the biggest nerve of this is called the vagus nerve, the wandering nerve. So the vagus nerve or the wandering nerve that goes out runs the autonomic nervous system is necessary for like gut function, heart function. This nerve can be stimulated through cold exposure. It can also be, stimulated through chiropractic adjustments, can be stimulated through, you know, breath work, but cold exposure is definitely can create a strong vagal response. There's other neurological response that happened cold exposure like dopamine production, cortisol production, norepinephrine production, which are like these really good feel good hormones that's why you get this high when you get out.

But in particular, that vagal nerve stimulation, especially if you get into a cold exposure up into the neck, you're gonna stimulate that vagus nerve. That is one of the great benefits to cold exposure. At the beginning of the episode, I told you, hey, there's something you can do without a cold plunge. It's virtually free and can create the same effect by stimulating this vagus nerve. And here's what it is.

So instead of a cold exposure, we're exposing your entire body, if you expose there's the three surfaces of the body that have the most like nerve sensory endings for cold and heat. It's feet, hands, and face. Feet, hands, and face. So your feet, hands, and face, if you stimulate to cold, stimulates the nervous system the most. Okay?

But particularly the face. The face, if you are able to so here's the at home cold plunge in a bowl. So you get a big bowl, big salad bowl, and you fill up with water, and then you fill up, like, maybe a third of the way with water, and you freeze it. And then take that out and fill it up with the rest of the water, maybe you're at, like, 3 quarters of the bowl was full of water. So you're getting this ice cold water.

Okay? And then you just submerge your face in it. So just close your eyes and just put your entire face in it. And you wanna try to like hold it for 2, 3 seconds because that's probably the most you'll do it at first, until you become more cold at it adapted. But that like extreme cold environment that you're not used to stimulates a very similar response to exposing your entire body.

Actually, there's some research on this that showed face exposure compared to the entire body switch is very similar in the neurological effects in terms of cortisol, dopamine, norepinephrine, and vagal nerve stimulation. So as you train this though, and you can do it multiple reps, but as you train it, you wanna be able to hold for 10, maybe 15, 20 seconds at a time, do that multiple times, maybe 2 to 3 minutes of accumulative time. And as you stimulate those sensory endings of cold on the face, it helps drive a lot of those neurological adaptations and neurochemical responses that you're looking for from full body cold exposure, and again it's practically free. So no you don't need full body exposure. Yes, there are benefits to full body exposure, but as simple as your face, just your face.

Expose your face to cold water for a period of time can have that same effect. Most of the time, the research in hot in hot or sauna environments show that a 20 minute, 3 time a week sauna exposure is gonna give you the like at minimum the benefit of sauna. So we need to be doing that at least 3 times a week. And it is more is better with a sauna. So they showed if you multiply that daily or increase the time domain and did that 3 times a week, more is better with that.

Obviously, gotta stay hydrated, drink elements, restore your electrolyte balance, and be very mindful of hot environments. Always speak with your medical provider, make sure that your body's ready to do hot and cold extreme environment exposures. And then cold, if the temperature is below 50, really 2 to 3 minutes is all you need to create that therapeutic response, and more is not necessarily better with that. So when we look at the data doing that, again, 5 days a week is fantastic, 3 days a week is great, but more is better, just not necessarily more time when it comes to cold exposure. So if you're looking at hot and cold exposure, I'm a fan of hot.

If you're looking at the benefits of hot and cold, do them both if you have access to it. I think they're fantastic in your body's ability to recover and adapt to stress. I think it helps create more stress resiliency and can really help train your nervous system to be more adaptive. Hey. This episode will be published on most platforms.

But one of the things that we do with this episode is we make reels out of it. And we've got some shirts in the health factory that the first five to comment on the reel from this episode, the first five to comment, Real Health gets free shirt. So we'll just look at that on our Instagram, and the first five to comment, Real Health gets a shirt from this episode today. So today was all about neurological adaptations through hot and cold exposure. Next week, we'll get into training loads.

We'll actually have a special guest, Dr. Andrew, here with us joining us and talking about how to load the body and recover and how much is too much, how little is too little. So we'll have a deep delve into training loads. Thanks again for listening to another episode of The Real Health Podcast.