SAUNA and Ice Bath Benefits Ideal Durations Revealed NEUROSCIENTIST Andrew Hu
00:00we finally have some good signs to put to this and unfortunately it wasn't from my lab this is the beautiful work of Susanna soberg who's over in Scandinavia published a paper and sell reports medicine showing that the threshold you're trying to hit each week is at least you can do more but at least 11 minutes of uncomfortable but safe cold exposure per week total so that could be three minutes Monday three minutes Wednesday so on to 11 minutes and 57 minutes per week minimum size that's what they found what did they find increases Brown fat thermogenesis thereby metabolism thereby Comfort being you know in cold Etc um clearly there's a resilience effect clearly there's a dopamine increasing effect and clearly you can do more you can do all that in one day or you could spread it out throughout the week or you could do more it kind of depends on what you're shooting for how cold people always say how cold how hot well for heat is generally uh between 187 degrees Fahrenheit and 212 degrees Fahrenheit somewhere in that range and for cold it's cold
01:00enough that you really want to get the hell out but that you can stay in safely because I don't want anyone to kill themselves but doing this stuff did I see you say that um evening time heat exposure increases growth hormone release by 16 times or something insane but subsequent sessions of the same only increase it by a very small margin yes am I talking about my asset no you're absolutely right so we can we can delineate some protocols if you want to get better more resilient cold exposure is going to be great anytime post cold exposure your body is going to heat up think of your body heating up as waking up so if you are concerned about not being able to sleep then I would suggest you do your cold exposure earlier in the day right heat does the opposite so I'm laying out some parameters here heat does the opposite you're going to heat up while you're in the deliberate heat exposure but afterwards there's a post heating dip in temperature we
02:00can talk this was all covered in an episode I did with Dr Craig Heller on thermogenesis gets a little bit down in the weeds but take my word for it if you want to get the science you can go there to find the science behind this so sauna at night is great as well now let's think about how to combine these things so let's say you you know you're on it's a Tuesday you've done your weight training on Monday and you want to do your heat and cold you don't have time to optimize everything perfectly you could say okay I'm going to do my heat and cold at 10 A.M or 8 AM you getting the sauna for 20 minutes or so and then you get into the cold for three minutes and then you might get into the sauna again for 10 minutes and you get in the cold for another minute or so you end on cold yes why because it'll wake you up and presumably you're not you want to be woken up for the day that also means don't then if you're doing it in a facility don't then go and have a warm shower right once you've finished right coolest shower is fine because you want to clean off often I mean the ice bath is clean-ish but it's you know it depends while you're going in Laboratories you're absolutely right in Laboratories if we want to preserve something
03:00in particular a virus we put in the freezer if you want to kill a virus you heat it up of its own autoclave if it gets hot enough right and the cold cold stuff needs to be cleaned out now and again you get mold growing in a in a freezer which is kind of freaky to think about but you really can't it's never going to grow in a sauna Never Gonna grow if it gets hot enough now there is what I call the soberg principle uh which is if you are using deliberate cold exposure to increase metabolism end on cold so finish on the cold not just because it wakes you up more but because then you have to heat your body up naturally which is a thermogenic metabolic response so end with cold and if you really want to push it you can do things like don't use a towel use evaporation spread out your limbs and don't huddle so that you have to shiver more Etc I mean a lot of little games you can play but let's say you want to reduce post exercise inflammation you're not concerned with hypertrophy gains of muscle size gains or strength gains well
04:00then get in the cold after your your workout do that for one to some people can do 10 minutes reduce inflammation let's say you really want to hit growth hormone which is what you asked the biggest effects of sauna on growth hormone and they are big effects are when the sauna is only done once per week but it's done in four Cycles or sets we could say of 30 minutes each so that means 30 minutes in the sauna at the temperatures I described before then a five minute break just air cooling off or 10 minute break then back into the sauna for 30 minutes this is brutal then again in the afternoon 30 minutes in the sauna then 10 minutes just air cooling off and then back into the sauna for 30 minutes so that's two hours at 187 to 212 degrees one day in one day with a maximum of what less than sort of 20 minutes of rest in between those little sessions than the big resting so you have to be very careful right he can kill you you got to hydrate you need to make sure you get enough salt like it I mean this is this is work right
05:00um but you get you see in these human studies up to 16 fold increases in growth hormone so you can imagine this could exert some very strong reparative effect if you're training for a big event or endurance event or maybe you're just really wiped out from the week this is a stressor but it's a stressor that delivers a potent growth hormone response now if you do sauna more often than that you're not going to want to do two hours a day in the sauna because presumably you're doing other things you have a life you have a life and in addition to that the growth hormone effect starts to diminish if you become too heat adapted and that raises a more interesting question perhaps which is why is it that this two hour protocol really works if you do it once a week to increase growth hormone it's because it's a stressor and certain stressors increase growth hormone does that have to be heat no you probably also do four really long rounds of ice bath and I'm guessing you'd probably see a similar effect no one's ever really looked you probably see a similar effect because it's all about the stress stimulus now those that work on exercise
06:00science and weight training would probably say yeah you could also do a this has been shown you know a 90 minute 10 sets of 10 multiple exercises for 10 sets of 10 high volume German volume training work out and get the same growth hormone effects there's so many studies like this I personally like to do the sauna two or three days a week and if I'm traveling off and don't get the opportunity if I'm in Austin it's great because there are all these sauna places but if I'm traveling abroad I don't have the time then I might do I might take a day I'm thinking wow I did three podcasts I'm exhausted when I'm in New York I like to go to a place I have no relation to them but I think it's called Spa 88 it's a Russian Banya and I'll just go for the whole day if I've been working really really hard they serve food there they serve borscht and all this other kind of like pickled vegetables and um they must think that you're Russian they must you must walk through the doors and they go hello brother sometimes I usually just don't the best way to to appear Russian Lex I hope you're listening is to just not say anything just just enough that's the most Russian thing that you can say is nothing exactly hilarious stoic um that place is great and
07:00they have different sauna steam sauna they have cold dunk and sometimes I'll just spend three four hours there there's one in San Francisco called Archimedes Banya so sometimes that's an occasional thing now most people are trying to incorporate this into their daily life and just like as we said for ice bath if you don't have access to ice or ice bath or cold tub you do cold shower or longer cool baths with heat I realize not everyone has access to a sauna hot baths do work now one thing about hot baths and hot sauna is they will nuke your sperm that it's not new a nuke is a you know slang they will reduce viable sperm count so for males that are trying to reproduce you know trying to create children you want to be careful about hot baths and hot sauna too often some people will bring a cold pack in and put in their groin you can't do that in a bath but I mean sperm are maintained outside the body the testicles are maintained outside the body um you're right the scrotum has varying elasticity in order to maintain temperature of the sperm that's why that that's the the various effects that have been described are there on purpose
08:00um so why human evolution designed this way I don't know someone will say but in any case unless you're trying to you know and again the ice pack approach is interesting um some people do that actually there's a kind of interesting relationship between cold and testosterone and Therma and spermatogenesis there's a little cottage industry out there I think on Amazon people will buy these gel pack underwear of I think they're called snowballs this is cooling the scrotum in order to try and increase spermatogenesis okay now I'm not aware of any data on this but people report Anika data and have shown their blood work and stuff that it it actually works to increase testosterone levels I am not aware of any periods I am not I'm not I would not be sitting as comfortably as I am right now you're going to want to hydrate after going in the sauna when you go in the sauna you lose water and when you lose water you need to
09:00replace it why well you need water for all your cells but you also need electrolytes so make sure that you're replacing the water that you lose in the sauna now there's no exact formula of how much water to drink and whether or not you need electrolytes in that water or not it's going to depend on how much you sweat meaning how heat adapted you are it's going to depend on how much salt you tend to excrete in your sweat huge amount of variation but in general one way to approach this would be to make sure that you drink at least 16 ounces of water for every 10 minutes that you happen to be in the sauna you could do that before and during and after you could do it during and after or you could do it after now there are other reasons to do deliberate heat exposure that have nothing to do with cardiovascular effects nothing to do with growth hormone or anything of that sort but rather have to do with improvements in mood and mental health first of all we need to ask how is it that deliberate heat exposure can improve our mood and well-being well it turns out that it improves mood and well-being but it also improves our capacity to feel good in response to things
10:00that would ordinarily make us feel somewhat good now this is not a situation where you're going to be walking around grinning ear to ear in response to nothing at all simply because you went in a sauna what I'm talking about is the up regulation of Pathways meaning chemical Pathways in your brain and body that allow you to experience pleasure in all its fullness when we get into a hot sauna or a hot environment of any kind dinorphins are liberated in the brain and body and I should mention that dinorphins are made by many neurons in many different areas of the brain you might think well why would I want that why would I want to release dinorphin into my brain and body well first of all when you get into an uncomfortably hot situation uncomfortably hot scenario oh gosh this is sounding terrible and a deliberately hot environment that you are using to try and Trigger some sort of biological or psychological benefit I should say
11:00the discomfort that you feel the desire to get out of that environment is in part the consequence of the release of dinorphine it's also the consequence of the activation of that sympathetic nervous system over time that binding of dinorf into the Kappa receptor leads to Downstream changes in the way that the feel-good endorphins things like endorphin binding to the muopioid receptor and there are still other feel-good endorphins so to speak that system becomes much much more efficient such that people feel an elevation in their Baseline level of mood