I've tried to get into this cold adaptation business several times over the last few years, but I had always failed until this year. I tried what the Cs said, cold bath for 10-15 minutes, several times, usually got sick the day after and thus stopped. It took a while to try again, and even when I didn't get sick, this was kind of hard to continue daily. If you get out of the bath and shake for an hour, who wants to do that again the next day? And the day after, etc. Plus it felt like wasting a lot of water, so nothing much ever came out of it.
Last autumn I had some health problems that probably messed up my immune system, and in the winter I kept catching colds from kids in the family, and recovery was unusually slow. So in January I decided I had to do something about it and started taking cold showers while still recovering from a cold.
For those who
want to do cold adaptation but feel overwhelmed or intimidated by 15-minute baths, my advice is:
start with as little as you can handle, but do it every day. Once you establish this habit, you'll be able to build up. And you'll probably find that you adapt faster than you expected.
At first I would start with a warm shower and then turn it cold and do like 30-60 seconds. On day 3 I noticed that the beginning isn't as much of a shock as the first day. Within just a few days I saw that I was already getting used to it. After two weeks, I started enjoying it. I started turning the shower all the way to the right to get the coldest water possible and prolonging the showers. After a while, I got rid of the warm start.
I measured the temperature of the coldest water I get here, and it's usually around 8°C. After two months, I was doing 3-5 minutes in this, 3 times a day (because it's fun). After that, I usually just sit on a towel and read or meditate and let the body dry on its own. It prolongs the exercise a bit under slightly different conditions, but as the body gets dry, I start to feel warm, and that usually lasts for 30-60 minutes. Only after that I get dressed. Sometimes, in the evening, I open the door to the balcony after the shower and sit there for 15 minutes until I'm dry. The evening breeze at about 5°C has its own magic. Sometimes (depending on how long I was in the shower) I may shiver this whole time, but it doesn't bother me anymore. Even when I have the physiological reactions like shivering and cold skin, I feel I can handle it much better than before. Sometimes it's even pleasant. And I don't get sick from it anymore.
I also started adding baths. Instead of the 10-15 thing the Cs said, I would usually do the 8°C for 3-5 minutes. Basically same as the showers, but the full body exposure definitely has a stronger effect. As I was getting comfortable with this, I felt it was time to try 15 minutes again. So I filled the bath tub, measured the water at 13°C and got in. Being used to colder by then, the beginning was fine. I had my shoulders and arms out of the water, which, as I discovered later, makes quite a bit of difference, so I started shivering only after about 5 minutes. I did the whole 15 minutes and shivered maybe for another 15, and it took an hour or so to start feeling warm again. So the duration makes things much more difficult than the temperature, at least as far as I'm concerned.
A few days later I tried 15°C again, but this time with water up to my neck, with arms in the water. It took only a minute before I started shaking, so the difference was huge. I did only 10 minutes, shivered for another 20, and didn't feel warm until about 2 hours later.
To put this in some perspective, I read this near the beginning of this thread: "
if your Body Mass Index is below the lowest normal range [18.5], you can't do cryotherapy". Well, I calculated my BMI to be 16.4. (I know like 3 people who weigh less than me, and they're girls whose height is barely up to my chin.) So I'm clearly a candidate for freezing before everyone else, so the 15 minutes of 15°C is probably a bit of an overkill for me.
At any rate, I much prefer colder water for shorter time than 15/15. And the big difference is that
after the former, I feel warm for an hour, and after the latter, I feel cold for an hour. So one of those is significantly more fun than the other. The question is, though, since the Cs recommended this, what is the benefit of longer exposure and shivering for an hour after it? Am I just overdoing it because I'm skinny, or is there actually any significant value in that? I can say for sure that I had adapted noticeably from just the 3-5 minute showers. So I wonder how far one should push this. I generally just get to a point where I shiver a little for less than a minute, but not beyond that (unless I expose myself to cold air after the shower on purpose). This feels like the "right" amount for me (stop shortly after I start shivering), it's enjoyable and fun, and I have no trouble keeping it up several times a day.
During my first month of this, I figured it would be a good idea to read some more about Wim Hof, so I read "What Doesn't Kill Us" (and later "The Way of the Iceman"). This did two things: gave me a lot of motivation to push further with this and to experiment, and prompted me to start the breathing exercises. This turned out to be one of my best ideas ever.
I've had headaches since I was 4 years old. In recent years, I'd have the really bad ones (24 hours of really intense pain) about 3 times a month, and milder ones about 3-4 times a week. So about 15 days of any month, I'd have some kind of a headache. Since going keto in 2014, I've felt like I never really lack energy, but the headaches are basically even worse than being tired. It's not that I don't have the physical "energy" to do some work, but with a headache, everything is so much of a pain in the ass that I really don't want to do anything.
I started the Wim Hof breathing exercises on the 1st of March. I really like the way he "designed" them (though apparently he does all of this intuitively). The breath retention makes it pretty awesome for several reasons. First, it interrupts the breathing, which is good because breathing like that non-stop for 10 minutes is really hard work. So you do like 2 minutes of breathing, and then however long you can hold your breath (which, after the breathing, will be a LOT more than you can normally do). (This cycle is repeated 4-5 times for the whole exercise.) Second, the breath retention is motivational for me, because I want to know how far I can get, and I get to see some "progress". And third, it's actually useful for processing oxygen.
Several people in YouTube videos about their Wim Hof experience recommended the book "The Oxygen Advantage". So I started reading that. What I learned from it is that if you breathe deeply while at rest, you don't get any more oxygen than you already have, but because you deplete CO2, you actually get less oxygen into your tissues, because CO2 is necessary for oxygen to get from blood to tissues efficiently. So if you hyperventilate for 10 minutes, you lose a lot of CO2 and can't absorb enough oxygen from your blood into your body. But if you do the regular Wim Hof 30-40 breaths and then hold your breath, the CO2 replenishes itself during the breath retention. I had no idea about this before.
(Sidenote about "The Oxygen Advantage": It's an interesting book that may be worth your attention, but I'll quickly sum up what I got from it here:
1. Apparently many people "overbreathe", which leads to the problem I described above. This results in unnecessary tiredness during both rest and exercise. During exercise, you're much more "out of breath" than you'd be if you breathed properly.
2. You should breathe slowly, about 7-10 breaths per minute, and only as deeply as you really need. Basically he recommends to breathe as "little" as possible.
3. Always breathe through your nose, for many reasons explained in the book.)
To get back to my point about headaches... in the 43 days of the breathing exercises, I've had one (1) headache so far! It took me out for a whole day, but it wasn't actually as intense as it usually tends to be. Two days later, I woke up with a mild headache again. This was rather annoying so soon after the previous one, so I immediately did 3 rounds of breathing while I still had some energy, and within minutes, the pain was almost completely gone. So this, while completely unexpected, was the main benefit for me. Also, with the headaches mostly gone, I could confirm that I have no problems with energy or tiredness whatsoever. I credit mostly the keto diet, but I think the cold is actually helping with that too. Definitely a big fan of the Wim Hof method now. To learn more about it, I highly recommend reading "What Doesn't Kill Us". (Here's a presentation by the author:
)
Along with doing these things at home, I also started going out to the forest and doing some cold exposure there. I go there for 2-3 hours and experiment with various things. Walk around just in a T-shirt when it's 5°C, or even without it, Wim-Hof-style, if it's a bit warmer; walk around barefoot, sometimes through a stream; take a bath in the stream, etc. Just today I slept in the forest (it was freezing at night) and sat in a stream for a bit in the morning. The water was 4°C. (Yeah, I bought a thermometer for that.) I started with all this after snow was already gone, but I'm looking forward to next winter.
Sometimes I sit in front of the PC, reading or whatever, and I'm feeling cold despite drinking hot tea. So I'm postponing the cold shower, thinking I'll get warmer in an hour or so. But sometimes that just isn't happening, for whatever reason. (I never turn on the heating at home, so the regular temperature inside is around 18-20°C these days.) So I say 'screw this' and go take the shower anyway, say 2-3 minutes of 8°C water. The paradoxical thing is that (aside from fulfilling my "I took a cold shower today" duty) it actually makes me warmer.
Yep, I'm at my PC, dressed, with long sleeves, feeling cold; then, without any warming up, I take a cold shower, get out, sit in front of the PC on a towel, no clothes and I don't even bother drying myself, and for an hour I feel perfectly warm.
The paradox is only apparent, though. In fact, I think it makes sense. Before the shower, I'm feeling cold, but because the temperature is only 1-2 degrees below comfort level, the body is basically ignoring it and doing nothing. (Well, actually, it's withdrawing blood from extremities, which is kind of the problem.) The cold shower is my way of telling the body, "Seriously, dude? You're just gonna do nothing? How about this? Is this cold enough for you?" and the body goes, "Wow, shit. This is really cold. Fine, I'll turn the heating on." and apparently this forces it to produce enough heat for an hour in indoor conditions. When outside in near-freezing temperatures, it's enough for 10-15 minutes of comfortable warmth without clothes.
So, yeah, you can make yourself warm by taking a cold shower. Who would have thought?
Another interesting thing happened one day when I cycled to town and back. I decided to try doing the breathing the whole way. (Not the breath retention.) This was interesting in and of itself. Since I breathed a lot ahead of the uphill parts, I had enough oxygen in store, so I pretty much never felt out of breath. At the most difficult parts, the exertion just about caught up with my rate of breathing. The effect was that I could go much faster overall than usual, especially uphill. So because I pushed myself to go as fast as possible, and because I had decided to wear a sleeveless T-shirt in a windy weather, I was fairly exhausted when I got home and my head was kind of pulsing. (And this is exactly the kind of thing that would very likely have given me a headache before.) So I thought I'd lie down to let the body rest a bit. Then I thought I could take a cold shower first. And because I was pretty warm inside after the exercise, I changed it to cold bath. So I used the coldest water, jumped into it... and within 20 seconds, all sense of exhaustion was completely gone. I didn't lie down after it because there was no need.
I've read about athletes doing this after training or a match. Jump into ice water. It relaxes the muscles and refreshes you. It really works.
I've noticed my adaptation through the reaction of pain receptors. The first time I sat in 8°C water, my feet were in pain in like 10 seconds. So I had to lift them up, wait a bit, into the water again, and repeat. Since the feet are usually the first in and last out, they've adapted the most. Now I can stay in even colder water for a few minutes, and no pain in the feet. Hands are worse, since they don't spend that much time in the water, so sometimes I train just the hands. Wim Hof recommends up to 8 minutes in ice water for feet or hands. Supposedly after 2 minutes or so, blood should return into them, but this never happens for me. Maybe because I'm so skinny, but I still have cold hands pretty much all the time. If I put them in a small container of 10°C water, I can just about take the pain and keep them there for 10 minutes, but mainly because during the first 2 minutes, the hands warm the water up by about 2 degrees. Lower temperature than this brings pain within 20 seconds. So I'm hoping to improve that.
Pain receptors are also triggered by 8°C in forearms and upper chest, likely because these parts haven't been trained that much. A few days ago I tried a bath in 20°C, just to see what would happen. The water temperature barely registered up to my chest, but the top of the body, shoulders, and arms felt pretty cold. But it was doable. With some shivering, I did about 18 minutes. As soon as I was out of the water, though, I didn't feel cold at all anymore. The interesting thing was that the next day, the pain response in the upper chest in the regular cold shower was noticeably milder. So I guess even 20 degrees has some use when it's long enough.
One thing of note is that lower temperature has more of a warming effect than higher, and there seems to be a fairly specific threshold. (Though the threshold may be different for everyone.) I've noticed this on myself. Very cold makes me warm afterwards, but just mildly cold might not. I think for me the "switch" is somewhere between 10-15°C. This is partly why I almost always go for the coldest option.
So it's been 6 weeks of breathing and almost 3 months of cold exposure. The body has clearly adapted very noticeably. There's less pain, and I can take the cold for significantly longer than before. Also I don't bother with warm water anymore. I just start the shower with the coldest. I do 3-5 minutes 3 times a day, and several baths a week (same cold water, 3-5 minutes). I also notice that even when I
am cold, it bothers me much less. I may be sitting outside for an hour, feeling cold and occasionally shivering (I generally dress very lightly all year round), but it doesn't seem to penetrate inside that much. I can feel the cold, but it's somehow much more tolerable and I can bear it longer. And I don't seem to get sick no matter how much cold I decide to take on on any given day.
As for the breathing, I usually do 4 rounds in the morning with breath retention, and then one round with pushups. When I hold my breath without any preparation, I can do about 1 minute 10 seconds. After my very first round of the breathing, I did 2:20. After a week, I got to 3 minutes, and after a month, to 4. The Wim Hof method actually does the breath retention on exhale, but I feel like on inhale works better to prevent the headaches. There's more pressure in the head, it's more intense, and there's more going on, and it feels like something just gets "released" like that. So I do 2 rounds on exhale and 2 on inhale, just to cover all bases. Currently the records are 3:30 on exhale and 4:20 on inhale. Before this, I never imagined I could hold my breath for two minutes. Like I said, this is very motivational for me, and the body is clearly learning something.
The pushups are done after the last round of breathing, also while holding breath! Just as Wim promised, I do more like that while holding my breath (around 50) than I can do normally with breathing. And the feeling after that is pretty amazing too.
Interestingly, it appears that in the last few months I've also gained 4 kg, which is kinda nice. Maybe the body is finally building some fat reserves to burn for heat?
As far as
advice for others goes, my experience is that
any cold exposure will adapt you to some extent. So it's better to start with a little and slowly build up than to start with a lot and fail to keep up. Even if you can't build up much, you'll benefit. Just push yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit and see how far you can go over time. And try to do it regularly.
By the way, when you get that gasping reflex at the beginning, try to overcome it and breathe slowly. Also, overcoming the shivering (during and after, by loosening your muscles) helps turn on the inner heating.
Wim also emphasises attitude. Cold exposure works much better if you're mentally prepared for it, best if you're looking forward to it. So if 2 minutes is something you can look forward to and 10 minutes is scary, I'd say go for the 2 minutes and enjoy it. This way you'll come back for more and progress naturally.
Let us know how it goes! And remember to listen to your body. It's not for everyone, and everybody is different in terms of their tolerance and their needs.
