1.Went up one of the huge mountains in Poland in a pair of shorts,…

I went up one of the huge mountains in Poland in a pair of shorts, hiking up to the very top, amazing experience and something in me changed up there. If you look at a biological level, you could say, oh, it's probably your hypothalamus started working properly. But something might immediately change when I came down from the mountain. I never felt the cold in the same way again. The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, happiness and our long changes. That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Hello Roadman! Welcome back to another Roadman Podcast. It's Wednesday and you know what that means everyone. It's our long-form podcast. Today's chart is one I'm absolutely fascinated about. anyone that's been following my story over the last few years, I walked away from the sport and I took a little bit of a break and coming back into the sport I had, I always hate the word holistic so I'm going to use 360. I tried to take a 360 view of performance and didn't look necessarily just at training and nutrition, the cornerstones that we normally see in cycling performance. Instead I went on a deep search, I went searching in far-flung research libraries and corners of the globe and I tried to pull in best practices from other sports, from business people, from just other crazy endeavours, from meditation to yoga to breath work and one of the rabbit holes I went down was cold therapy and cold thermogenesis. I had no idea setting out on this journey that cold was going to be so powerful and it was really going to unlock one of the key things I was looking for and I speak today to a man who is an expert in cold therapy. He trained under the tutelage of Wim Hof and I won't spoil the grace explanation Neil gives us of Wim Hof and Wim Hof's background but Wim Hof is a quite eccentric Dutchman who has changed what we believe is possible around the limits of science and performance and even controlling the human immune system. It's some crazy crazy stuff. I'm gonna jump into it now but before I do jump into it just a couple of things I point the audio doors break up a little bit you know that horrible internet too slow here in Ireland, sort of break up where it pauses for a second. I've listened back a couple of times, cleaned it up as much as I could. It's a borderline annoyance at times. Hopefully you got your podcast and you won't even notice it. Done my best to clean it up, didn't want to scrap the podcast because it just is so, so valuable and it's a great conversation. Hope you'll really enjoy it. But before we jump in, as always, I would ask you encourage you implore you, whatever you will, to jump across to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Walsh. Patreon, it's the engine room of this podcast. It's what keeps this podcast going week in week out. It's what allows me to reach out to guests like Neil today and to have these chats. It's where I can carve the time out. It phones the whole podcast. So if you think what we're doing, we can't even go to the pubs at the moment with lockdown and new restrictions in place. So if you'd be willing to take that point of beer that you would buy in the pub and instead buy me a point of beer I would be forever grateful. Guys I'm going to jump into the chat you're really really gonna enjoy this one the master of cold breed with Neil. Take it away. Okay guys we have a very special guest today we have Neil Oh, Morku, Neil, I hope I pronounced that right as we were just commenting. I did get a C in pass Irish on my leaving shirt. You did very well. I think I actually got a D3 in pass Irish. So it wasn't until I got out of my back to learn that I actually figured out how to speak it. So you were pretty close to failing the leaving shirt, but we won't dwell on that one. And so Neil is a master of the cold. And over the course of this conversation, I know cold is something we've talked about a lot on the A1 channel recently and Neil has studied, I'm going to call it the soy podcast, I want to give it to her, her religious feel Neil. So I'm going to say you're the soy bull of Wim Hof. So I suppose best place to start maybe, give us a little bit of your background on how you got to know that kind of crazy bearded Dutchman Wim Hof. Yeah, so if I go right back to my kind of early 20s, late teens, I had dedicated my entire life to being a basketball player and to be an international basketball player with aspirations to be a professional basketball player.

2.Then in the back of my mind, during those years I had these big kind…

But then in the back of my mind, during those years I had these big kind of questions that I was struggling with, big philosophical questions about life and about who I was and what I was and what this experience was. So after those questions became louder and louder I kind of turned my back on a glittering career playing basketball and instead kind of went looking for answers, looking for the truth. So wound my way through martial arts, went to study Kung Fu and fighting in meditation and Buddhism with the Shaolin monks and then spent years doing yoga, trying to figure out the truth there and then coming back to our own traditions in Ireland of using plants and meditation, things like that, to figure out who I was and to help the body heal. And eventually, I heard Joe Rogan interviewing Wim Hof on a podcast. And for me, what he talked about was this ability to use our breath and to use the cold in this really simple, this really effective way and this scientifically proven way to dramatically improve how we feel and dramatically improve our strength and dramatically improve our health. It was like the thing that I had been looking for for all those years. So, once I had experienced it and felt those scientifically-proven benefits for myself, I just committed to learning everything I could about it and that led me on to being an instructor and that led me up frozen mountains in my sh-t. In all types of adventures and that's where I find myself now teaching all over Ireland and Europe. teaching people how to use just their breath and just a little bit of cold every day to take control of their nervous system and take control of how they feel and how they think ink, which is very important. So were you kind of drawn to this Wim Van Haff character? When you heard him speaking on Joe Rogan, was it the character you were drawn to or was it his teachings or are those two inseparable? Well, Wim is a very interesting man. I love the way you put the van in there as well. Yeah, I'm stuck in it. It's a rude van, it's still right. That's what I was thinking. Or some of those football players. To me, Wim is a very charismatic character. When you hear him talking, his passion and his unique approach to what he's doing is very attractive. So that, of course, got my attention. But to me, it was the simplicity and effectiveness of it. So when I first came across the Wim Hof method, I was in a stage of my life where I was very run down under a lot of pressure. We had talked about it before. I had four young children at that stage. They're still with me, but they're a bit older. And just feeling lots of the pressures of modern life. And we had a death in the family. And really kind of myself and my wife were really struggling at the time. And what Wim was saying was that we can take control how we feel and how we think and we can dramatically improve or help just by these really simple techniques. That's really what got me. But then the thing that kind of drew me in deeper into it was the fact that the Wim Hof method is dragging science, kicking and screaming to understand what we can do, to understand the potential in a different way. So for the things we were thought not to have conscious control over part of our nervous system, including our immune system. Now that's been proven that we do have it. We were thought not to be able to control the fight or flight, the terror that we feel, the anxiety we feel, or the worry we feel, or the fear we feel just by using our breath. And then we know that we can. And there's endless things like that that the Wim Hof method has proven. And that's what we really got me. I think what struck me what Wim Hof is, it's, I went on to check out a lot of the scientific papers that he spoke about. I think I cut the voice documentary was my first introduction to him. And then I, yeah, like a lot of people, the Joe Rogan podcast, uh, was a nice little sort of, uh, indoctrination into it. But we, it's, it's science, but it's not wrapped in the same package that we're normally used to say in science wrapped in because he's not your typical academic. He comes from, you know, you're probably better placed. He's a friend of yours to fill us in on his background and how he came to this because it wasn't like typical lab cult doing experiments and he stumbled across this thing called Colterma Genesis. He kind of came out a different way. Yeah, I think that's what appeals to people. You know, Wim is a very unique character like we all are, but his story is very compelling.

3.Wim would describe himself as a school dropout

So Wim would describe himself as a school dropout. So he didn't finish school or wasn't well-suited to the schooling system, but now he finds himself lecturing to arenas full of professors and doctors on what we're actually capable of. Trying to teach them how to see the body and our ability to control the body in a totally different way. Of course, Wim came to it in true tragedy. He was living in Northern Spain at the time and he had four young children himself and his wife had been struggling with mental health. At one point she jumped from the eight story of the apartment block that her parents lived in and killed herself and Wim was left distraught and heartbroken and shattered by the experience and he had put his four young children to raise and he would describe himself at the time as not having many qualifications or not having much money. The place where he found solace was in the cold in the canal als in Amsterdam in the ice. So when he was in the cold and the ice, he couldn't, he could only think of that experience. He was relieved of the heartache and the grief and the trauma of what had happened. And then, after a while, he developed the breathing as a result of that when you get into the cold, your breath is taken away and he felt it if he could relax his breath, he could stay in a bit longer. And that then developed further into separating out the breath and the cold and he felt that if you couldn't get to the cold one day as he was trying to raise four children, that if he did the breath himself at home, he could generate similar feelings. And then over years of ridicule as Wim would describe it himself in Holland of people saying who's that lunatic get into the ice and what's that kind of heavy breathing? He felt himself that his energy levels were high, his immune system was bulletproof, his pain, his inflammation, his stress was disappearing all the time. Eventually, eventually, Wim had the opportunity to put all of that into the test. In the first couple of big scientific experiments, he, in the first one, sorry, the second one, he was injected with a form of E. coli in Radbach University in Holland. able to fight it off and his breathing techniques not started then the scientific communities were reluctant, reluctant appreciation of what he was doing and reluctant kind of agreements that we are capable of far more than we think we are. And when William jumps into the water on a cold morning in Amsterdam in the park is that you know is it kind of a not in a suicidal way but is it almost that ended the road. He's exhausted all these other options. He's gone down to looking through meditation, looking through yoga, searching for these answers much in the way you talked about your journey, or was it less systematic than that? Yeah, I think actually it's a very good point. From one of Whim's earlier books he talks about, he's kind of looking for the truth as well, through yoga principally and philosophy and religions and hands on. I think it was maybe late in his teens, early in his 20s, he made a trip to India and he was checking out all the different gurus and different styles of yoga. But it wasn't until he got to northern India and he kind of as part of one of the yogic tradition, jumping in the river. And he said that he never felt anything like that, what would you call it, the purity and intensity and power of freezing cold water. So that was the first step in developing what is now the Wimmoff method. But it had started from a place of trying all the more established ways of doing things and then finding this way which is pure. Like you were in the ice bath at the workshop. Like there's nothing like the experience of being up to your neck and ice. It's an intense experience but it makes you feel. So you're burning, you're so alive, Mary. It's one of the things we're really looking for, Neil and Poi, we introduced it into endurance sport and why I think it's forming a big backbone of stuff. We're going to be talking to our clients, and I'm sure you'll be seeing a bunch of our clients out your direction. We're looking at stressors and our body's not capable of differentiating between the physical stressor and mental stressor, dietary stressor. So the more we can reduce dietary stress, mental stress, on somebody's, the more physical stress we can give them further training, which means they're gonna get more training adaptation and get faster. But when we search for things like meditation and the idea of being in the moment and present in the moment and letting go of thoughts and pasts, letting go of future expectations and just focusing on the right now and if a thought does come into your head, just notice and let it go.

4.Can talk somebody through or you can go to the best clinics and…

Like, you can talk somebody through or you can go to the best clinics and workshops on this meditation. But, and I'm sure that you get the exact time you could talk about the cold all day, but there's no substitute for when you get into that cold, you're totally focused like nothing I've ever seen on just this moment. Yeah. Yeah, it's mega meditation. You know, if meditation's objective is to get us focusing on one thing. So everything else falls away. So the body starts to, it can adapt to the scenario. This is the ultimate version of that. So way back when, when Wim jumped in the cold, it was the only thing he could think of so he couldn't think of the grief. Now we're talking in this context, we're talking about people getting into the ice and in those moments in the ice there is nothing else you can think of. And when you're training yourself to do that, and you're training your mind to be that strong, your focus, sing on one thing in the eyes. And then what happens is the body, when we learn to breathe in a very specific way in the cold, the body starts to relax under that stress. And when the body starts to relax under that stress, it can adapt. And that's what you're talking about with the other stresses and the other parts of the training you're talking about. It's training the person, training their mind, and then their body will follow us to be able to relax under this incredible pressure. And once they can do that, then they can apply that to performance they can relax under all types of pressure. Well, I say in one of William's quotes and he was saying, feeling his understanding. He said I could present you with hundreds of studies, but your field, the difference, as soon as you get into that water, it's going to be better than the most compelling argument he can put on. I listen to you speak. Anyone who hasn't seen Neil, he's a very captivating speaker and he has the room, nobody's taken out phones. Everyone's completely focused. But it brings it to a new level then when you get into the cold. Like we the one girl when I was at your clinic, she just completely lost her shit when she got into the cold. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And that so everyone's approach can be different. And as we as we talk about like the cold really represents all the things that we struggle with. So we're first struggling with performance or grief or anxiety or worry or depression or stress. all those are form of pressure on us. So when we're looking at the ice, that's what it represents, and it drags up fear and worry and anxiety from all other parts of our life. And in that woman's case, for some people, when they're looking at that ice, it's all rushing towards the surface, and it's all bubbling up. And that's why the way in which we teach is that the person has total control if they focus on their exile. If they can ring their mind to focus on the lungs, to exhale slowly, the vagus nerve kicks in, body starts to relax. And that's when you witness that woman, she was anxious getting in. And when she got in there, like you, and most people should, it's a natural reaction to feel a panic, that cold, like, oh my God, I need to get out of here. But in a way, it was a great example for everyone that was attending, because you could see after four or five long exhales, you could see the vagus nerve trigger. can see her heart rate drop you could see her relax in it and that's the Power of it so now she goes or whatever kind of life is throwing at her She knows that she can take control of how she feels under any type of pressure Like one of the things I took from your workshop You gave one quote and it just said I'm sure if you intended to be so meaningful But just said it's a comfort killer and I really talked about that it represents all that stuff if we don't want to do. But if I've been nailing the coal showers for a sting in the morning, and it just creates this crazy momentum for the rest of the day. Like I'm just out my two very years, cuddling beside the girlfriend, the bed warm. You know, you don't want to get into a coal shower. No one wants to get into a coal shower. But it feels like if you get that win, it's like Andy Cole, the footballer, you bubble went in off your shin, you gotta go. creates that momentum and good stroke or stroke down for years and I feel like we can benefit from that same thing in our day Yeah, that's it and like we know something as simple as a cold shower Balances or hormones You know, we know that it gets the circulation going and when we approach it using the breathing that you learned, you know It has these deep effects on the immune system as well But also it's the mental aspect so when you get out of your eyes do they there's always this dialogue And I have it all the time still.

5.It's like, oh, do you want to get in

And it's like, oh, do you want to get in? Oh, don't get in. You know, this kind of, will I won't die? By facing that every morning, just a little bit, that's a victory then you take with the rest of your day. And there's a little, there's an empowerment there that you've got to answer the cold share. So by the time you start doing the next thing, you've already done this amazing thing that most people would never do. And there's a real sense of empowerment and the real sense of facing again, that cold share represents loads of the things we struggle with. So before you even started your day, you've already faced things and other things in your life starts to become a little bit weaker. The motivational speaker Tony Robbins, who we spoke with this on the YouTube video, and I was interested to see that he has houses all over the world, but he said the first thing he installed in any of his houses, it's a cold pill. And he said it every morning when he wakes up in the last 30 years, he jumps straight into the cold pill. and he said, in that 30 years, there has been zero times he got up when he wanted a job at a job at a college. Now, your relationship with the cold starts to change. When I first started doing it, it was winter time and it was myself and Josie were only getting to do the cold showers, very late in the day, maybe 10 o'clock in the winter's night because we were trying to get all the other stuff done. I used to dread them. Then after a while, your relationship changed because of course your body starts to learn and adapt and before beforehand it's like, oh I hate this thing, but then you feel great afterwards. Then that kind of distance between those experiences is a little bit shorter. Then your body's like, I know that I'll get into it. And then after a while you start to crave it. I still need to call now, but still just that second before I turn it, there's always that little bit of voice saying, ah, don't bother. Don't bother doing it. And how do you find it affects your sleep if you do it lasting at night? is it jacking up cortisol levels? It actually makes you have beautiful sleep really. Because what happens is you get out of the shower, you know the cold shower and you feel great, but because the stress hormones are managed in a different way because of our breathing, it's not like we're in a car crash and the stress hormones are like peeking and dropping. So they're kind of managing it in a slow kind of way and after you kind of relax a little bit, The sleep benefits from the Wim Hofmann, your sleep is much deeper and more productive because the hormones are balanced. Do do do do do do do do do. It's intermission time. You can take off that scarf. I'll call even listen back to this podcast. It's a cold chili oil podcast because how I keep the fire light into prevent it. I'm not going to go down that route. The intermission is all about taking that little pause, that collective exhalation. You'll shake it out, get ready for the second half of the show. It's also a time where we head on over to patreon.com forward slash company under scroll watch and we buy me a beer, buy me a coffee and tip the cap and say, thanks son, enjoy this podcast. I had no idea about some of this cold stuff. This has blown my mind, I'm gonna buy you a beer. Let's get back and chat with Neil. Like, you're kind of, so that was one of the things that I wanted to for because being kind of stressed my sleep for once in my life wasn't working and that's not a problem anymore. Like there's a bunch of benefits, you know, I can link up some studies in the description and I'm going to write a blog a bit more detailed on the science side but just benefits like nitric oxide, production, decrease in inflammation, increase in testosterone. Oh yeah. But what I really want to hone in on is fat loss because cyclists, you know, not too similar to any endurance athlete, we're all obsessed with fat loss. It's like power and weight are our two things. Cyclists, backwind cycle, I'm in true kind of an unhealthy phase of Lance Armstrong era. The joke was the cyclist's dinner was two liters of fizzy water and a couple of sleeping tablets and got a bed for another. I can see why the Wim Hof method would help with that, you know, because there's plenty of research to show that the metabolism really speeds up when we start getting ourselves in the cold water. Because obviously when we start to relax, when we start to relax in the cold, that's the difference between say the Wim Hof method and other approaches, looking to find the place where we're relaxed and peaceful in the cold.

6.When we're doing that, the body will act and start to adapt

When we're doing that, the body will act and start to adapt. It's generating more heat. To do that, obviously, it's obviously using more calories. The body's revving itself up. It's not an official side effect of the womb-huff method or benefit, but people often say to me, my God, I've been doing the cold showers. I can feel my body composition changing. They're toning up. They're losing weight simply because the body is doing a few things. We said burn in more calories and toning and also they're getting fitter at the cardiovascular fitness is improving as well. And as we talked about it, the other factor is they're quite fat and slowly changing to more brown fat. So the brown fat, if you're exposed to cold more frequently, the composition of the fat in the body starts to change and brown fat is brown because it has more mitochondria, little engines in the cell that generate energy and energy and heat. So the more of that you have, the more energy you're kind of producing and heat producing so you burn up more calories as well. So it's a kind of slower process on the weight loss side but you know, shares, co-chairs every day within a couple of weeks you should see everybody starting to change a little bit. Yeah, I know. So I'm not sure. Do you ever come across a guy called Ray Cronice? I think that's the name. Yeah, he's an interesting guy. I've forced him across him. I think he was on the Tim Ferriss experience, maybe using Tim Ferriss's bookoretum, and briefly Ray Cronus background, he was a material science engineer for NASA. And he was a fat motherfucker, and he wanted to figure out how not to be a fat motherfucker. So, like all good Matt's guys do, he figured out the calculation, he's like, right, it's calories in versus calories out. Shit, I taught to be a bit more to it than this. And so he tried to change up his activity level, reduce his calorie, you know, like so many people do when they're trying to lose weight. But then he heard about Michael Phelps and he heard this story that Phelps has, you know, eaten 12,000 calories a day. And then he talked to some coaches and he's like 12,000 calories a day. Like what sort of training would he need to do to a born 12,000 calories a day? And the coaches are like, not possible. Like he'd need to be doing nine hours of race pace efforts every day and he wouldn't even get near that calorie count. So he's like, okay, so he's utter a line about his calories or to something else going on. So the calories were verified, so he ruled that out. So he went to research and he found the exact thing that he spent this entire day on, termogenesis, heat. And that was the misinfactor. So he actually changed the calculation from calories in, calories out to calories in, calories out and termogenic load. And he's some great studies on rats' exposed and rats too. You can feed a rat like 1.5 times the amount of food as the control group. And they're losing like 20% extra calories when you add in cold exposure and so on. It's mental studies, been done on it. I haven't got them offhand, but I'll link them up in one of the blogs. But I thought that was super interesting. It was one of the benefits that really attracted me to. And you feel it? Yeah, and you can start to feel that say, Let's say a person has been practised from for a little bit and they're a little bit more advanced and they're getting used to the method and they're slowly and gradually approaching the cold. We had talked about this before, but when we're doing any type of cold training, it always has to be gradual and always has to be respectful. You know, because as wind would say, the cold is righteous, but it's also dangerous. So we have to be very careful when we're doing any kind of cold training. But as you progress in your training and say some of the more advanced things we do like hiking up these huge mountains and Poland and the dead of winter and kind of minus 10 degrees minus 20 degrees just wearing shorts You can start to feel the heat coming off the body you know so you Can so you can imagine for the body to be able to generate heat in order to deal with the the blizzard You can imagine what a demetro energy has to use and calories that has to use to do that So I can well believe those studies sound very interesting and I've felt some of that myself So the cold effect is it's not confined to water. It's not to do it like the the pressure against the skin of the water Well, the pressure we feel in the ice baths is probably one of the most direct pressures that we feel But you of course the cold your cold exposure Your cold exposure training can take many forms So obviously the water is one part of it, it's the easiest thing to do, just turn your cold shower or your hot shower to cold at the end or jump in the sea.

7.In the winter time, there's lots of variations on that

But in the winter time, there's lots of variations on that. So you can do it like wear a little bit less clothes for 20 minutes, walk out out in your shorts to the shops and back. So it's exposure to cold in whatever way you can get it as long as you're being safe and respectful. And how cold are supposed to different levels though, because we're looking for the mental clarity level and then there's the whole activation of brown adipose tissue. Is there a recommendation of you need to shiver in your opinion? I think there's an actual temperature. I think it's like 40 degrees. It's when the brown fat starts to activate and below. So it's not really that cold. It's just that we've got so used to living in this comfort zone of about 20 degrees or or a bit higher, you know, and for a lot of people, their entire lives are spent in this kind of mild, kind of comfortable temperature, which is fine, but we do need to get out of that, and we do need to get into the cold and use that cold as discomfort, and then learn to be comfortable in that discomfort. So for me now, I went up one of the huge mountains in Poland and a pair of shorts, hiking up to the very top, amazing experience, something in me changed up there. If you look at a biological level, you can say, oh, it's probably your hypothalamus started working properly. But something in my image changed when I came down from the mountain. I never felt the cold in the same way again. And that was a few years ago. And now I wear shorts all year round, all year in the winter time. And yes, I get odd looks in the dead of winter. But my body reacts differently to the cold to how it did before. Is that because you now have, I know I've often done super cold races where you know I've been shivering, can't get the bottle out of the cage, breaks don't work. And then I have that as a reference point. So if it's super cold, now I go, it's cold but it wasn't like Lake Abey's that day over in Canada. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So I think there's definitely a part of that. There's definitely a part like I've been in, I've been in minus 18 air temperature and the water's been like frozen solid and you're getting in there jumping in there for a dip getting your breath under control and getting out standing in the forest floor trying to use the horse stance the this exercise we use to warm up on your feet or frozen to the forest floor and you know being able to control the breath generate heat and warm up naturally. Then I know whenever it's like cold it's like yeah but it's not like that you know you You have that reference point that's deep inside you and even somebody that comes to the workshops here, you know, they're getting into an ice bath and it's cold. And you know, once they've done that, but I try to kind of get people to think about themselves and believe in themselves is that once they can deal with that type of pressure, then they can take that and deal with whatever life has to throw at them or whatever the piece has to throw at them or whatever they're kind of whatever issue to say, have with their performance, if you can deal with kilograms and kilograms of freezing water and ice on you and relax under that pressure, you can do it anywhere. Is there a recommendation you'd make for someone that's trying to get into this, but they haven't done it before? Culture are the easiest place to start? Yes, the cold shower is always the easiest place and it's always the safest place. What I'm not trying to say is that we should be in cold showers and caves and discomfort all the time. We should definitely have a balance. We need both comfort and discomfort. So turn your share on. Have your normal nice warm share. Enjoy the warmth as it opens up all those blood vessels and gets the blood flowing. And then decide, and this is very important, you have to make the mental decision in your mind, okay, I'm going to now switch this to cold. I'm going to keep this on for maybe 30 seconds. When you switch to cold, of course your body is going to react. Take a big breath, it's going to go into fight or flight. You're looking to use your exhale, focusing on the out-the-in-health focus on long, smooth exhales to relax the body. Get that vagus nerve going, get the heart rate down, get the body nice and relaxed and train yourself to pay attention to the exhale. That's the easiest way to start. A little bit of cold at the end of your hot chair.

8.When you get used to that, then you might extend it to maybe a minute…

When you get used to that, then you might extend it to maybe a minute and then you might decide, okay, I feel like I can adapt that pretty quickly. Then the big jump is for anyone listening is to go turn your chair first. To step into a cold chair is a big psychological jump and that's a real sense of challenge. Have a little bit of cold at the start. Then have your normal hot chair and then finish with a little bit of cold at the end. You touched on something there which I think is pretty cool. You were talking about the contrast between comfort and unpleasant. I talked to Wes, the founder of Juve, they do a red light therapy. The reason people need to get red light is we don't go outside anymore. They were referenced in a study where in the American study, 92% of your time spent indoors At the moment, the average American. 92%. And, you know, we're built as creatures, you know, hunter-gatherers, you know, fishers, industrial revolution, fucking realm, those like. Yeah. Well, we're mammals, you know, so we're part of the great, great ape family. So I know from, from my own experience and even with the children, everyone runs happier on their outside more. In Ireland, I often hear people say, oh, it rains a lot. Like in Ireland, we're a piece of rock out there in the middle of the Atlantic. It's going to rain a lot. For me, it's just about changing my idea of, from good weather to bad weather and just enjoying weather of all sorts and being outside as much as possible. I think ultimately in a society that if we're spending too much time inside, what the Wim The dream half method does is I can see it in people as they start to progress. They start to do the breathing. It starts to make the body stronger. It opens the body up, makes it more sensitive. They start to use the cold. Their immune system gets stronger. They get more energy. Slowly but surely you can see people actually spending more time outside. They go from the cold chair and then they're thinking, God, you know what? I could jump in that lake. It would be just as easy or jump in that river or jump in that the sea. You can see this kind of progression in people. Ultimately, really, the Wim Hofmatt is bringing us back to nature, but bringing us back to our own nature so we can be free in our minds, our minds can be clear, our bodies can be strong. What happens then is people want to run up to them in their shorts. I see this and again, it's not an official benefit of it, but you can see this change in people that they actually eventually start walking around barefoot more. they start going outside more, their body starts to crave that stimulation. Well, I've noticed like I'm always happiest with contrast. So, you know, I love being inside by the fire and watching a bit of Netflix or reading a book because I've spent five, six hours out in the cold in the rain on the bike. Exactly. But when I started doing them called Sharer, there's something fucking cool about even if you have a day where you're cooped up on the computer or doing Skype calls or whatever and you can't get outside, you're comfortable all day. But if you start the day with that bit of discomfort, your happiness levels, maybe it's just anecdotal and it's me but my happiness levels are just, like I'm coming out of the show or singing fucking show songs. Yeah, but like that's your experience, but it's not just anecdotal, just tons of research to show that too. So like if you're looking at the research side of it, you get in there, your hormones balance, your body starts to become a little bit more alkaline, Plus as well, if you're breathing in a relaxed way, the body starts to release, really, this endocannabinoids, which makes this you feel euphoric. Inflammation starts going down, pain's going down. So when you get out of the shower, it's not just you. Everybody's feeling that way. You know, and that's why it's so good for mental health as well, because whatever mood or kind of level of tiredness or rundown, we are getting into the cold front when you get out. You know, so that's the kind of on the biological side. Just one more thing on that when you're sitting there on Skype. The other part is again, you're actually immersing yourself in nature. The cold showers and waters and elements of nature, you're jumping in and you're jumping back out and getting back on Skype and feeling good. We're finished with this one, Neil. I always ask guests when they come on. I'm a big believer in morning routine and we talked about that idea of creating momentum. So I've got to build up a little bit of a morning routine with, you know, between cold, journaling, a little bit of grounding, some red light therapy and small bit of meditation and then I get my day started.

9.It's about forty-five minutes total

So it's about forty-five minutes total. You know, I just get up forty-five minutes earlier and it just has the momentum built for me for the day. Do you have a routine that you like to go through? Yeah, there's definitely a few elements that I always try to get in. So the very first thing I do in the morning when the alarm goes off again, setting it early is to get my breathing in. The Wim Hof Method breathing, three to five rounds of Wim Hof Method breathing, getting the body alkaline, getting the respiratory system working, feel great afterwards. Then for me, I have to do a bit of training. I have so much energy from the Wim Hof Method. I don't feel run down anymore. I feel full of energy. So I have to do something. So it's 20 minutes of hard training of some sort, but something to kind of get the heart rate going. And then I'm kind of ready to go. And of course, at some point in the day, I'll be in a nice bath or in the sea. But it might necessarily be in the morning. But there are the kind of three elements. For me, it's kind of, it's the breathing, it's the cold. Because we're mammals, I have to move. I have to move in some kind of intense way, whatever that may be for that day. Nice, nice. Neil, where can lads reach you, give your social plugs or a website or whatever? Lads can point you to this? Yes, so on Facebook, Instagram, the website, it's all the same. It's Breathe with Neil, but Neil is spelled in the Irish way, which is confusing. So it's Breathe with N-I-A-L-L. Breathe with Nile. Breathe with Nile, cool. And I can totally attest to a great day out at your clinic. out and interestingly when we went around the room at the start so many people have the same problems they're just lacking energy and these problems are mirrored in the clients that I'm speaking to every day with coaching and they're lacking energy they're lacking focus distractable you know and yeah going away just so many people seemed like they had at least a partial solution to a lot of them problems they started the day with it yeah yeah absolutely and that's why I love of here and how I'm watching people change as the day goes on. You know, because at the end, as you said, they walk out of there and all of a sudden they have these tangible tools that they can use to increase their focus under pressure, to change their mood at will and to eventually, you know, take control of how they feel. But isn't it, isn't it fucking crazy how much we're changing in Ireland? Like I know some of our listeners in the States and Canada or whatever, they're a bit more progressive than we are. you're roughly the same vintage as me. Growing up, if your parents were unhappy, you just didn't talk about it. No one said they were like an energy or stress. Everyone was happy back then. They're just more drinking and more smoking. You'll be glad. But it's amazing to see. I think it's more people going on. I went on a similar journey to you. and the journey of spiritual enlightenment or search for meaning or whatever you want to call it. But I guess five, ten years ago, you know, you would have been egged in school or ridiculed for saying something like that. Yeah, yeah. I would totally agree with you. There's been a huge shift in Ireland in lots of ways. And I suppose you could argue that it's for lots of reasons. But I went away, myself and Josie moved to London in the early 2000s. So we missed the kind of peak of the Celtic Tiger when Ireland was changing and people had money and people were travelling and the whole place has become multicultural. And we kind of came back towards the end of it. And for me, Ireland had completely transformed. I remember getting the Lewis into town and it was like Berlin or something. This wire was new and everything was different. I think as part of that shift, we've just kind of, we've changed. I think the, so we've changed, But on a global level as well, access to information has been revolutionary. Definitely. You know, so when I was younger, we were playing basketball, you could only get basketball gear in America. So people going to America would get a shopping list and come back. You know, those have a days of restrictions of what you can get or information are over. And that's a massive change for good and for bad. But it's also, as you said, when you hear people having the kind of confidence to be able to talk about how they feel, the kind of deep, dark part of it. That's amazing because in my generation, like when I was 20, we just didn't do that.

10.Can slowly see as well that people are just, it's the knowledge…

And I can slowly see as well that people are just, it's the knowledge economy that you were talking about there. I can see people are slowly just starting to question stuff. Like we had just the toured parties like banks now. Hold on a second, after 2008, do we trust the trusted toward parties? You see the emerges stuff like Bitcoin, where it's trustless systems. I know people are starting to question the whole nine to five thing. Do we really need to give up five days during the week to get two days of the weekend because a five or two tried to sound that for me. No, I suppose those models worked for a very specific time. The kind of model of the industrialised, kind of model of schools churning out people to work in factories. Factories gave them a couple of days off and banks financed the factories. You know, those kind of models work for our time. The access to information allows people to question things. And I think it's incredibly healthy, especially in a society like Ireland, where we had oppression from the one empire to oppression from the church from oppression. You know, there's a whole generation, my grandparents' generation, and they wouldn't dare question things. You know, so I think it's really important that we do question things and access to information is a big part of it. Like my entire life now would not have happened if we didn't have access to information. I never would have found one half. I never would have been made those decisions to get me where I am now. So, I'm questioning things as a big part of that. It's been a pleasure. I think you and me are basically in the same industry. It's trying to increase people's happiness a little bit. It's true with different matters, but I think where there's a lot of parallels on what we do. So, I've really enjoyed speaking to you. Look guys, definitely go and check out what nails up to uncross all the social channels and sign up for one of us clinics Brilliant. Thank you for having me with the real pleasure. Cheers boss That's a wrap for the Roadman podcast for another week I've been building up the Roadman resources library. It's at roadmanresources.com Everything I find everything I research goes into the Roadman resources library, it's just my collection of stuff I found useful through the years. It's not necessarily affiliated with any brand, it's brand agnostic in that sense, so I feel that way you can trust what I'm saying. There's no ulterior motives, it's just the towers I recommend there, are there because they're the best towers, they're the grippiest towers. And it's my collection of stuff I'd ask you to go across and check it out if you're looking for anything. I really you enjoyed that podcast with Neil if you are so minded to try and follow him a bit more. He's definitely worth a follow on his Instagram account. He's one of the accounts I follow there and I don't follow many. Guys, thanks for listening and I'm going to be back to you again tomorrow for another short form Rob and Boyz podcast and it's a cracker. Jatiran.