Hello, roadman. Today I want to talk to you about something that…
Hello, roadman. Today I want to talk to you about something that completely changed my physique and that's cold. Let's cue the intro. The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Hello Roman! Welcome back to another Roman Podcasts. Thank you very much for joining me. It is my favorite day of the week and that is Wednesday. The reason for that is it's not because it's Champions League day. I remember Wednesday, I used to love Wednesday when I was in school. The Champions League was on Wednesday. I've long since fallen off of the football bandwagon. Now, the real reason is it's my long form, Roman podcast today. I wanna talk to you about something that it's foreign for a lot of you guys and it's definitely not something that's chattered about as a performance aide and that's coal therapy. Last week I had a guest on called Breed with Noyl and he spoke brilliantly and articulately about coal and how it completely changed his life. So I wanted to follow on from that And I wanted to depart from bringing guests on, and I wanted to take this soapbox of myself this week. And I wanted to tell you my story about cold and how I found cold, and just what a transformative effect that it's been on my body, my psychology, my mindset, my mood. It's been a complete game changer, and you know what? It's free, and I love an all conspiracy theory. This is one of the reasons I believe that it's not talked about that much. It's free, there's nothing to be gained, there's nothing to be sold. You can go and enjoy this in your local sea, you can go out on a cold day if you're landlocked, if you live in somewhere like Toronto, you can get out and just walk around in the cold in the winter and you're gonna get a lot of these effects. I'm gonna dig into a little bit of the science about it today, give you some facts and figures as Homer Simpson said, stats can prove anything, 96% of people notice. I love that statistic from Homer Simpson, great philosopher. Before I jump into that, let me just remind all you guys the way I get a chance to dedicate time to this podcast. It's because of Patreon. It's the reason we're able to host this podcast. It's the reason I'm able to pay the same microphones out to guests if they don't have proper audio quality. It's the reason this podcast exists. It's patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch if you could take one second, pause this podcast now. Don't procrastinate it, don't be that guy, take action right now, jump across the Patreon and buy me the price of a couple of coffees or a beer each month and just say, thanks very much, I like the direction you're going with the podcast. I promise you today you're gonna get a tangible benefit with this podcast and you are gonna feel amazing and you're gonna start losing weight. So if that's not worth the price for coffee, the price for a beer, I don't know what is. Okay, let's dive into this one. I wanna join you back and anyone who's been following journey for quite a while. Now I'm going to recap it in really short form. I'm on a bullet point this. So when law school started getting good at cycling in Ireland, took a contract over in France, went okay, took a contract in Canada for a little bit, then off to the States, rolled there. So it was like from 2012 to 2014, rode in full-time. So it wasn't for me, came home, stayed at the top of the game in Ireland, race and amateur for a few more years. Then I thought I was Billy Big entrepreneur and I said, you know what, I'm gonna buy a coffee. I'm gonna set up a social media marketing agency. I'm gonna code an app. I'm gonna do a bunch of other shit. And I thought that's what you needed to do to be a grown up. And while I was doing all that, I lost sight of just my health and I lost sight of my happiness of I'm completely honest and I spoke in previous podcasts about how that affected me. Um, one of the things that happened to me was my weight just started creeping up.
When I was in France, I raised at 68 kilograms
When I was in France, I raised at 68 kilograms. I tipped the scales at 94 kilograms at my darkest days and I tell you what, there is not much crack in it. It absolutely tugs at your morale. I had constant low energy levels. I'd wake up in the morning and I felt tired. I even felt uncomfortable in my clothes, especially on warm days. I remember walking around town one day shopping with my girlfriend and just getting a glimpse of myself in a mirror in the apartment store and just thinking, that's not what I should look like. Like, it's how I look isn't lined up with how I see myself and I knew at that moment I just needed to take drastic action. So I went on that crazy journey around the world meeting different speakers, different high achievers, high performers. But one of the things that I stumbled upon was cold and cold was an unbelievably powerful thing for me. And so I knew what I was 94 kilograms. I set myself a target against 77 kilograms. So if you're listening, you know, just for reference, you need about 8,000 calorie deficit per week till it was 1 kilogram. So that's just over a thousand, what are they? It's 11 quick mats. It's 1,100 calories a day deficit you need. And I'd need to do it after about four and a half months to get to my target weight. You know, I could have obviously strung out the time period and said I'll take eight months to get back. But just four months felt like a period of time I could commit to and it wasn't going to be this mama task. So it was a big, big challenge and it is a great mark, twain. Whoa, let me see. I'm probably gonna butcherize it, but it's summed up for me. Why, why, he struggled so hard to find this solution. Why nobody was screaming cold therapy. Why there's no ads on the radio saying, you know what, you don't need this diet shake. You don't need this jam or this exercise class. All you need to do is get cold. Mark Twain quotes something like, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting your shoes on. A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting your shoes on. Mark Twain, yeah, that's it. And that for me is true because, you know, when I set out for this whole quest of how can I have health, happiness, and longevity, I found that that is a common tread that you're fighting against these powerful, I don't want to call them, it's not like a dark society or some sort of, you know, anonymous style underbelly that's deep state that's run in the world. But it's just companies that have big marketing budgets, they're able to scream a lot louder and in a world where we're getting bombarded with messages, it's only the companies that are screaming loudest on the lobbying groups that are screaming loudest that we get to hear about. Unfortunately, because there's not a big commercial interest and promoting coal and coal therapy that I didn't actually hear about. They were just being screamed out of a by-bend-on fitness and all the other big fitness institutions with the big marketing budgets. But it's a huge market. Overweight people is a huge market. I promised you some homework, sims, and stuff. The testics at the start. So here we go. The American Medical Association said the obesity rate among Americans is at 32.2% for men and 35.5% for women. So that's going to put the target market with the US population at around 100 million customers for weight loss products and that's in the US alone. So this is big, big business, make no mistake. There's a lot of people shouting at the top of their lungs to try and get your harder and dollars and call therapy, ICE therapy. Look, they're not getting unlucky. The truth, I was to uncover that didn't come in the the form of a pale that didn't come in the form of a course. It came in the form of a study I read by a NASA material scientist called Ray Cronoyce. Ray was a fascinating dude, but he was also, I suppose, he was an apologetic member of that 32.2% of Americans that were a terminal beast. Ray was a madman. He immersed himself in the data all the time, but all the calculations he was performing when he started tracking his weight because he wanted to try and get rid of some of that chunk and he wanted to try and get rid of some of them horrible feelings that I had of just not been comfortable in your clothes.
Heard Ray speaking, it was brilliant
And I heard Ray speaking, it was brilliant. But all the calculations he was focusing on were calories in and calories out. You know, this is a familiar equation. I know you guys now who are struggling with that kind of battle at a bulge. I'm sure you've tried things like Moi Fitness Pal and you're, you know, obsessed with his calories in, calories out and you're trying and calorie expenditure for the day. But then Ray heard about Michael Phelps and his consumption of 12,000 calories per day and he just questioned the validity of this whole calorie and calorie out model. Because if you think about it, 12,000 calories a day was reported that Michael Phelps was born and if we assume and we park for a minute because it's been validated, he actually was taking these calories. So we're not questioning whether he was taking these in or not, we're questioning how it's possible. Because if you were looking on a pure calories and calorie out model from Michael Phelps to born through 12,000 calories, he needs to be doing about 10 hours a day, training, at race pace. Now, I'll tell you, as a coach, there's no one doing race simulation stuff for 10 hours a day. It's just not happening. So if you think he's training hard, he's training like cyclists are in zones. He's training periods of time in the Jordan's periods of time in tempo periods of time in threshold. He is not zone four for 10 hours a day. So I can completely categorically say that was not possible. So what was going on? It was something else and it's called hermogenic effect. And this was something that Ray Cronus was super familiar with because he was working in NASA and he was working on shuttles and of central importance to every single launch, it's thermodynamics. So let's rewind folks. Remember science class? What is thermodynamics? It's that relationship between heat and other forms of energy, if you remember. and my science teacher got me into cycling, which I believe I've shared out to Ferris Ryan if he's listening, got me into cycling back in the day, which is a strange place to get into cycling. That's non-sport that was practised in our school and I think in our school it was me and a trying partner of mine and we both went on and on decent things in cycling for a school, St Paul's and Rainey and Dublin that wasn't a cycling skill at all. Is there such things as Eutland's skills? Maybe there will be. Yeah, that's my little rant. But of course he's listening, he will be proud to hear that I know what an open term or dynamic system is. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. And that's what the human body is. So Ray had in fact unlocked one of the most potent fat loss secrets of his generation because we now had a toward variable. We had calories in, we had calories out, and we had temperature. insane stuff I know. Stick with me folks, stick with me because it's about to get super interesting. We've got two different types of fat. So we have what we normally refer to as fat and that's quite fat, but we have a different type of fat and that's brown fat. So if we want to burn fat from physical exercise, so going out training, this is actually quite difficult because we have two different fuel tanks. We have our normal glycogen glycos fuel tank and first of born fat we need to completely deplete that tank first before moving on to the second tank which is the fat tank That's not an easy task But there was a professor from Ottawa and his name was professor Blonden and he showed that you can dip straight in to burning fat But we're burning a different type of fat called brain one fat We can do this when we induce shivering true cold But we can also speed up metabolic rate 5 fold by doing this. So this explains the Michael Phelps 12,000 calories a day. A 5 fold increase in metabolic rate gives us that 12,000 calories a day. So Ray Cronoy's this theory has now been extensively studied with hundreds and hundreds of papers and they all speak to its efficacy. But there was one study that caught my eye and it was a Harvard study where they explained The rats get a rough deal, don't they? They get expe- when I'm in the shower, having a shampoo, I'm thinking these poor bastards got dosed to my head and shoulders. Now here they are again and they're getting dipped into cold water for our amusement and benefit.
Harvard study and it showed rats exposed the cold
So this Harvard study and it showed rats exposed the cold. The exhibited less weight gain even though they were fed 150% more calories than the control. Group were exposed to the calls they also lived two months longer and they showed 50% lower cancer rates This ship blew my mind when I read it because no one's talking about this stuff So I knew when I was Starting to read these studies and there's so many of them out there I knew when I was starting to read them that cold hermogenesis It was gonna be such an important part of my quest for health happy I'm forgetting what her intro is even here health happiness longevity Cold is so, so central to that cold termogenesis. It's shown as well to have such a powerful effect on immunity. There was another study where they studied like 2,000 people and they were given 90 second cold showers daily. So half of them, the control and sample half were given the 90 second cold showers daily. They exhibited 30% fewer sick days than the control. 30% that's massive. Why are they not chilling this stuff on Facebook? Why is every company in the world not recommend them. This 30% fewer sick days is insane and for us as athletes calls also shown to increase the production of nitric oxide which aids recovery by increasing blood flow to the tissues. It's also going to increase testosterone production and decrease inflammation and it's going to make you more stress resilient. Guys this is all the stuff that we're hunting for. Now you're probably starting to see a trend across the podcasts. It's not one thing that makes us healthy, happy and live longer. It's this collection of stuff and that's my goal with the podcast. It's to illuminate and bring to light these little nuggets and it's my hope that by pairing all these little nuggets, the zone of podcast back, it's probably back a month ago but if you haven't listened to how to determine your threshold, how to set your zones, that's such a pivotal podcast. But when I look at the future of the coaching company and the direction I'm trying to go with it, it's not just about training because training is such a small piece of the puzzle and I only really discovered this on the comeback when I was trying to get from that 94 kilograms to 77 kilograms. I only realized it's a tiny, tiny part of the puzzle and it's all the other parts that we need to do in combination with that which give us this totality. So if I think about it now, I think about it. Body balance being equals performance. Body, like what am I talking about on our body? Body we're looking at diet, we're looking at training, we're looking at strength training. Balance, it's the idea of work, family, balance and cortisol levels across the two of them and being it's the idea of mindfulness, it's the idea of gratitude and combining all this stuff together. That's what gives us our performance. If one of those is out of sync, like if you have a fight with your girlfriend or boyfriend, are you gonna try and well that day? Absolutely not. Are you gonna sleep well that night? Absolutely not. But yet we know how central even if you take something like sleep and it's something I will deep dive into a full podcast on because it's so so important. For us to get into the deeper regenerative phases of sleep, cortisol needs to be low and if you listened last week, the podcast about blue light blocking, it talks about the importance of sleep and the importance of regulating the hormones to help us sleep. But when we're having a fight with our significant other, cortisol is up to the roof that inhibits our ability to get into this deep phase of sleep, which means we haven't recovered properly from the session we've done today. So although we worked real hard to fit that session in, we moved meetings around, we got up early to get the session in, the benefit of that session is when we sleep and we get those regenerative effects. But you now go off and you have a fight with the misses and you don't get into a proper stage of sleep and it's undermined and everything. So that's why this body balance being equals performance. It's so, so important. So I'm going to talk in an upcoming podcast about intermittent fasting because it's in order one of the areas I think deserves a lot of attention and it was interesting speaking to Barry Morrie a couple of weeks ago on the Wednesday podcast.
When I was speaking to Barry, we spoke about oftentimes it's not…
When I was speaking to Barry, we spoke about oftentimes it's not addition but it's subtraction that gives us the answer. And by that we meant, you know, we used that broadly to mean, you know, for it was kind of a metaphor for a lot of things in life. But when we refer to diet, it's rarely adding more supplements. Everyone wants to know about supplements all the time. And there is some good supplements you can use. And I recommend someone over on Roadman resources, which I've tested. But a lot of the time it's peeling things back and intermittent fasting is a great example of that where you're subtracting, not adding. That's often the answer because it's our quest for our bodies to live ancestrally and kind of reset back to our default. We're just not made folks. You're listening to this and you're probably in a car or you're probably Bluetooth headphones or you know you're in your house with the heat and all. We're not made for that. We're not made for that. We're outdoor creatures. You know that's where we drive. We drive in adversity. We drive in the cold. We drive in the heat. Our body is adaptive to that. Our body is not adapted to this sitting in the chair looking on a screen it's fucking us up day by day, month by month, year by year, until we're tired, sick, frail, old creatures. So this is our wake up call, this stuff. Like when I found this stuff, this was the metaphorical slap across the face for me. Wake up and sort yourself out because it's not how we're meant to live. And if you keep living like that, there's going to be consequences. There's going to be consequences to your health, there's going to be consequences to your happiness, and there's going to be consequences for how long you live. So I am going to talk about intermittent fasten in an upcoming episode, but intermittent fasten and cold therapy have a crossover which is very interesting. And it's this ability to inhibit something called mTOR and the inhibition of mTOR, it's why we fast mTOR when it's inhibited, it allows our cellular cleanup to take place. And so you can take a call as a second layer of a cellular clean up after the fasting protocol. And the cellular clean up, it means our body gets a chance to repair things like pre-hearsenogenic cells and it can go off and it can have a chance to kill them. And that's like another reason it's so, so important. The list of benefits you'll experience from regular cold exposure, they're likely a result of our body's desire to live, and successfully, because in our essence we're hunters. Our bodies should be lean, we should be fast, we should be strong. For millions of years, we trived without these modern conveniences, and now they've stripped us of our vitality. We have inbuilt mechanisms for restoring our ancestral hunter predisposition. We just need to learn to let them flourish again. And that's what I want this podcast to be. You learning to let that ancestral predisposition flourish. So my challenge to you, roadman, if you choose to accept this, which you better accept this, I'd like you to start with your cold therapy. I realize that some of you guys don't live by the sea, if you do live by the sea, brilliant aim to get down there as often as you can, but as a starting point, what the challenge is, I want you every morning, Tony Robbins is a great motivational speaker and I have a lot of time for Tony Robbins and stuff that's easy to access on YouTube. I've even recommended one of his courses in the roadman resources, which I think is brilliant. It was life-changing for me. It's something if you have time and on your hands and working from home, you can squeeze this in. Your lunch break, I highly recommend that in roadman resources. But Tony Robbins speaks about cold therapy and he said every single morning he gets up and the first thing he does is jump into an ice cold plunge pill and he said there's not a single morning in the last 30 years that he's woke up and he started himself. I'm really looking forward to getting into this ice cold plunge pill but he's done it anyway and the reason he's done it, it's to create momentum in his day because as soon as you start getting that little win early in your day it becomes this you know ball rolling down a hill and it's just easier to start accumulate and odor winds earlier in the day.
Decision making, it's a muscle. And the more often we exercise that…
Also, decision making, it's a muscle. And the more often we exercise that you hear people saying, oh, I'm a procrastinator. Yeah, you're a procrastinator because you let yourself be a procrastinator. You're a procrastinator because you self-identify as a procrastinator. We need to start making decisions. And when we decide every morning that we are gonna get into cold therapy, that's a decision. We're strengthening that muscle, we're exercising that will. and I have, at least Tony Robbins was explaining this and I completely identify with it. Now, every morning I jump into the coal shower and when I'm jumping into the coal shower, this internal dialogue starts and I start thinking about reasons I shouldn't jump into the coal shower because that's what we need to do. We need to sell ourselves a story to justify our decisions. So I start selling myself a story where I shouldn't jump into the coal shower. Oh, I'm going out training, that's really cold outside so maybe I shouldn't get a chill. Oh, I'm feeling a little bit of a scratchy throat coming on, maybe the cold, I'll aggravate that and I'll end up being sick. And as soon as this dialogue starts in my head, as soon as I start trying to rationalize and justify my decision not to get into the cold, it's almost like I'm having this weird schizophrenic conversation. But as soon as that dialogue starts, I say no, that's not happening. I decide we do. This is not a dialogue. I'm not discussing this. I've made a decision that we're going into cold, boom, that's what we do. And that's what I do every single morning. Tony Robbins explained that he goes through the exact same mental process. And I heard that, I thought, you know what, I'm on the right road. So the challenge, you're gonna get this internal doylock and it's gonna say to you, no, it's cold, no, you're working, maybe you don't need to do three minutes, maybe start off in 60 seconds. I'm calling bullshit on it. Three minutes, you're gonna get in, you're gonna have your regular warm shower, wash yourself, shampoo, yada, yada. And then you're gonna turn that knob all the way around to cold and you're gonna stand there and you're gonna suck it up. And it's gonna be miserable. And you're gonna have that reflux where it's gonna be like panic breathing, but you're gonna overcome it and you're gonna box breathe. So box breathe, you're gonna go, breathe out one, two, three. Hold for three, one, two, three. Inhale for three. Hold for three, exhale for three. And just repeat that, it's box breathing and you're gonna do three minutes. sitting alarm clock, set a timer. I just try one spotifying, I listen to one full song. You're gonna start doing that, three minutes every morning, you're gonna experience a load of those cool benefits that I've talked about. Roadman, this is a big one. This is one of the pieces that opposable people are always asking me, oh, what's the magic piece? What's the key session? It's not one thing, it's a puzzle with a load of different pieces. But I'm telling you, call exposure. No one's talking about it because there's no commercial interest talking about it. It's legit, it works. If you can get down to the sea instead of into the shower, it affects from here, absolutely magnified. The sea I just always feel amazing straight after it. This has been the roadman long from podcast guys. I'm going to be back again tomorrow. I would encourage you please to jump on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch. That's the place that you can support this podcast. That's Keeps going guys if you can afford it Please ask you to jump on over there Don't assume someone else will do it. We're still a long way off break even on the podcast So every little bit helps on the podcast helps make this sustainable Thanks for listening and you know what I'm gonna be back again tomorrow I want to see pictures each year for another old man. Jot this out. Bye .