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Cold Therapy might just be the magic bullet so many people seek. Studies are showing more and more benefits. We talk with an expert on Cold Exposure - Breath With Niall.
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Rowman's time to chat with the master of the cold. Braid with Neil. Let's cure that 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 on this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch and welcome to the Rowman Podcast. Welcome back to another roadman cycling podcast. It's Wednesday and it is my favorite podcast of the week. It's our long form interview podcast. So thanks for joining us. Today's topic is cold and anyone who knows me will know I've become obsessed and fascinated with the power of cold and connectedness to our ancestral selves. Back, anyone that hasn't followed this journey for me, back I was racing, racing, racing and then I hit a point where I was balancing racing with work and training and having a life. It just wasn't really possible for me and I, at that time I thought, you know, when I'm going to have to quit cycling, but even more than that, I taught, you know, I'm going to have to quit the vision I have for myself that it's just inevitable that just start putting on a little bit of weight as you get older. And honestly that was a really depressing insight and I won't get into the full story now but that walking away from the sport led me on a journey, an internal journey of trying to find an answer but also a physical journey where I traveled around the world looking for the answer to you know how do I biohack my physiology, how do I balance all these things at once. And when I came back I realized it's not just about training that if you're not doing training adds stress but if you don't have strategies on the back end for reducing or mitigating stress you're just banging your head against a wall and setting yourself up for defeat. Meditation, sauna work, light therapy, grounding, cold. That's not an exhaustive list that's just me rattling off some things but cold, cold therapy, cold exposure, it's powerful for so many reasons and that journey led me to find Brad with Neil and he is an expert at what he does. Called her to be stuttering under the great Wim Van Hoff and now very much in a religious sense, nearly a disciple of Wim Van Hoff and spreading his good words. I'm really excited to bring you that interview today. But before I do, I'd ask you to head across to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Walter Patrons, how I fund the podcast. We're seeing small businesses everywhere. Just look around, you've walked your local coffee shop. There's a chance it's not there anymore. Small businesses are gone under and it's a tough, tough time for small businesses. Businesses are changing. Small businesses, maybe it's not your local coffee shop, they're moving to online and it's an important time to support those and we're one of those small businesses that really, really needs your support. So if you can find it in your heart, head on over to patreon.com. Buy me a price of a beer once a month to say thanks for the bit of education. Thanks for the laughs if you're getting any and thanks for what you do and that's how you can do it. turn, you're going to get access to the secret podcast and adjust dropped January secret podcast a few days ago. And it's epic. I talk about strategies I'm using for cutting weight at a moment. I get into the COVID situation, which I've never spoken publicly about. I don't even think you've heard the word COVID on this podcast before. So it's definitely a little insider's look at what's what over in the secret podcast. Okay, folks, without I give you breed with Neil. Thank you very much for having me. I enjoy the fact that we have both foliage in the background. I'm really excited about this. I'm addicted to cold. I know our relationship as well. We got to know each other maybe 12 months ago, a little bit more at this stage. And I have not missed one day of cold work since talking to you. It's changed my life. And this is not like a pitch or any way promotional. way promotional, it's just a gods honest route. Yeah, it's, the cold is something that we kind of fear often. You know, we're brought up to think that the cold can make us sick. But in reality, the cold is something that we need. We need a little bit of cold every day to ignite our immune system and ignite our fast and reservoir of energy that we have. And so a little bit of cold, like you're experiencing every day, does have a deep transformer to the fact on this. And it seems like it's a perfect, you know, I only use the word juxtaposition because I sound like a bit of a dope, but it's the perfect contrast to the comfortable lives a lot of us live on the couch in the car Netflix.
And then you just the cold water hits you and it's like, I'm a, like, I'm a beast. I'm a hunter-gatherer. I'm just, it's, it nearly transports you back to your ancestral heritage. Yeah, and there's a reason for that because, you know, these bodies that were in when we're sitting there and watching Netflix for hours and hours and then these are very similar bodies to the bodies of our ancestors. And our ancestors had these harsh conditions that they had to deal with all the time. They had, you know, terrible living conditions, coals, famine, war, all those other things to deal with. and these bodies we have need a little bit of that stimulation, that discomfort every day to really be at their optimum. So when you're jumping your cold chair and you feel like that raging ancestor, that's because your body's remembering what it could be. I think viewers are gonna get so much out of this chat in a number of different ways, but I think I wanna start off and talk about because we can't escape COVID and the effect that that's had on not just athletes, but the wider population. And how can we use some of your teaching specifically breath work to deal with that stress and with that anxiety? Yes, stress and anxiety are a natural experience. There's something that just as part of the human condition. I think that I'm able to deal with them in short bursts. I think the problem is, like you said now when we're talking about COVID, the problem is that if we're in a state of stress, which is a pressure that knocks us out of balance, if we're in a state of stress for a long, long time, then it starts to have this detrimental effect. Because when we're in stress, the body is being moved up into fight or flight or emergency mode or survival mode, which lots of people are in at the moment. And when we're up in that mode, the body is very clever and it's taking energy from other very important parts of the body itself. The digestion, for example, or the immune system, for example, to keep us up in this survival mode. And of course, if we continue to do that chronically over a long period of time, then we start to develop problems with our immunity, then we start to develop problems where our digestion, inflammation kicks in, we start to get sick. So during this period, learning how to breathe in very simple and very effective ways can just bring us back down into the opposite of fight or flight, which is called rest and digest. And in this rest and digest mode, The body feels safe, the body can repair itself, the body can restore, and it can prepare for whatever is next. And there's some very simple breathing techniques that we can use to do that. Anybody can learn them, for example, when is the kind of focusing on the exhale? So just breathing in gently, but focusing on a long, smooth exhale. And by focusing on that long, smooth exhale, maybe taking five or six breaths. The vagus nerve kicks in, heart rate goes down, body starts to feel safe, and the body starts to feel safe. It can adapt to whatever pressure it's feeling. So are you trying to take a deep breath in, and then a long, slow exhale? Yeah, yeah, the breath in, you know, will look after itself. Don't worry about the breath in. It can be deep, but the focus is really on the long exhale, fully breathing all the way out. So when we're fully breathing all the way out like that, And we repeat that, we breathe in, and we breathe all the way out. And we repeat that again and again five or six times. The body then kind of adapts to whatever pressure that we're feeling. So that can be a pressure at home and work, performance. We face all types of pressure, but this focusing on the exhale to bring us down into a state where we feel comfortable again is very important. How often would you, I suppose two questions here, how many breaths would you take in a session and how many sessions would you recommend in a day? So this vagus nerve breathing, it's called a vagus nerve breathing because when we focus on that exhale, the vagus nerve activates and drops the heart rate. It's a skill like anything else, so a very easy way for people to start breathing like this, it's just to set their timer on their phone for two minutes and just practice that long exhale for two minutes. And if you're doing that maybe once a day, the trick then is to try and remember to use it when you feel pressure. So we're gonna feel that sense of fear or that sense of uncertainty or worry. Just to say, okay, I can use my exhale now. So I know you've worked with a lot of athletes. Do you recommend that I'm doing it like pre-competition? Well, definitely. I was working with an Olympic athlete And their particular issue was that just before their performance started, they were in the starting blocks for maybe a minute and a half before the gun went off.
So that minute and a half used to be torturous because obviously you're about to begin to perform. Heart rate is pounding. The mind is anxious. The mind is imagining all the worst case scenarios. So in that case, by learning how to focus on the exhale in that minute and a half, All of a sudden that was an opportunity to get the body primed to get the mind primed performance So when the event started there were actually in a state where the body was ready and relaxed to perform I think it's doubly important for athletes because we have all the stressors that you spoke about but we have Stressful training which a lot of people think is a positive stressor but it is a stressor and our body doesn't necessarily differentiate the positive stressors from the negative ones. Yeah, and I think, especially athletes, there is a cumulative effect as well. If people are building towards an event of performance, their training is going to be harder. They're trying to get recovery days in there as well, but there's also the mental strain that comes with that as well. So trying to find time to take a few minutes every day to breathe is essential. It should be seen as an essential part of your recovery. If we think about athletes, how much time do we spend obsessing about food and nutrition? And if we start eating, it would take us a few weeks before we eventually died. It's the same about hydration and drinking. It's a huge important part of it, but if we stop drinking, it would take us a few days until we died. If you think about the importance of breathing, if we stop breathing, it would be over in a few minutes. That's how important it is in comparison to drinking and eating, but it's given very little attention. It is probably the underlying fundamental factor in our performance, is how we're breathing. trying to make that move from passive breeding to breeding with intent. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And you actually hear a lot of nutritionists speaking about and a lot of different areas as well whether it's nutrition, hydration, training. Let's shift from just eating on front of the television to actually eating and appreciating it. Yes. Yeah. And you're spot on because breathing is a huge part of the quality of our existence, the quality of our performance and sport. Thankfully, we don't have to think about it all the time. We breathe about 20,000 times a day without having to think about it. But as you said, when we put our attention on it, when we put our focus on it, it's like a gateway into deeper parts of the physiology. And it gives us access to levels of energy that we probably wouldn't have for your stress. So a little bit of focused breathing in any sport, at any time, just gives the body a break and helps the body recover very quickly. I know I do the daily podcast, you know, and the podcast, it's all energy in a day where everybody's friend and pre the podcast. Like I don't walk around like that every day. I'm not at the dinner table of my girlfriend. Hey, everybody, pass me to the side. But I just, if I just before a podcast, I do take time out to purposefully breathe, to change with stage, talk to us about that effect to change your state because that's so powerful for, because everyone listening here, everyone's athletes of some kind, so I just put there also a fodder, there also a husband, there also a worker, there also a leader, and being able to change your state has such a powerful effect. about coming in from a bad day at work and instead of bringing that tension into the family home with you, you have a newer tool to change that stage. Yeah, it's a great question and one way to look at it is that our breathing is like a remote control for our nervous system. So our nervous system dictates how we experience what's going on around us. So for a nervous system is out of balance and chaotic, the likelihood is that our breathing is out of balance and chaotic and it works both ways. So if we come in and we're in a state of despair or imbalance or whatever it is, we can change that by simply changing the breath, by focusing on the breath, by making our breath calm and deep and smooth, we can then change our experience to be also calm and balanced and smooth. and it's just remembering that at any given time we can transform how we feel and how we think by changing the breath. And this is like cycling, it's, you know, we had an era, ultra 90s where riders were pushing the limits beyond what was legal and taking all sorts of performance, enhanced and subs. And so it's the nature of the cyclist to figure out how to get little extra gains. But this is such an underexploited area. And I'm even thinking about, you know, You know, cyclo spent thousands of euro each year on fancy recovery strategies to minimize inflammation.
But breeding again has the power to affect our inflammation levels. Yeah. You know, one of the big, one of the big advantages, benefits of combining breathing and combining the cold training that we've talked about is that it's shown to reduce inflammation dramatically. And if you learn how to breathe and find that kind of sense of calm in amongst the chaos of the cold shower or in amongst the chaos of an ice bath, it's been shown that inflammation is going down the body for six days afterwards. You know, so there's huge gains there to be had if you're doing some breathing and cold every day, and you're kind of slowly and surely driving inflammation down on the body. So of course your recovery is quicker, your performance is better, preparation is better. And as you said, it's a very overlooked part of performance. And it allows you to compound your gains because as the inflammation comes down, that means I can go out now, I can train harder, no other wise, would I be able to train tomorrow? But I can come home from that session and I can do it again and I can bring that inflammation down again. So it becomes this compound and effect and if you do it over weeks, months, years, you actually end up being a completely different athlete. Yeah, I think there's a part that we haven't even touched on yet, which is the mental resilience of builds up. Because anybody who's tried to get into the cold shower or into an ice bath knows that there is an internal struggle there all the time. Even if it's only turning on that cold shower at the end of your hot shower, every time we do it, and this is over the years teaching people, there's a sense of victory to it, because you feel fearful getting into the cold. you get out and you feel like a different person, you feel transformed. And if you're facing that fear in a small way every single day over days and weeks and months, slowly this resilience to fear and this resilience to these difficult things builds up. And that's where kind of a person's ability to focus on something really difficult in a lot of pressure, that's where that starts to really sharpen. And you can see people's mental strength improving as their bodies also improve. Probably the most common question I get in Instagram is like what are you taking? How do you get so much done in a day? And I honestly credit my productivity almost entirely to my morning routine, which doesn't take very long. I grew up and even this morning I super early started because I was recording a summit interview and then out on the bike and I was up and it's dark straight away. I do 10 minutes of red light therapy. I use this tube unit that mimics the zone coming up and it releases the hormones like the zone is coming up. Then I do 10 minutes of meditating then I get into the cold shower and I have my coffee while I join off for five, 10 minutes and it's that practice every morning because now I've control on my day. I don't pick up the phone and see a message from a customer that wants a refund or see a problem that's happening or the election is you know under investigation for fraud. You're starting the day on someone else's terms with a lot of the stuff you're talking about in a chaotic world we're taking back control and we're living the day and especially the morning part on on air terms. Yeah the that sense of control is important for anybody who's experienced the cold even jumping into the sea you understand that there is no fighting the cold there's immediate sense of chaos there's immediate sense of fear and and your bodies in fight or flight you're trying to get out. So learning to use the breath to find that sense of calm and control in amongst that chaos is an invaluable skill. And once we learn to use it, and it takes practice, but once we learn to use it in the cold, then it starts to spill over into all different parts of our life. Imagine the ability to be able to just find a sense of control and peace, no matter what type of chaos, no matter what type of uncertainty is around us. You know, that has that has a great value in every part of our life. And as you said, it's a great way to start the morning because then you've already had this victory and you're already in a sense of control and direction of where you want to take the rest of the day. So when did you force the score to power a cold? A pair of the cold and must have been, as a teenager, I always lived in Pope I'm not too far from the sea and I remember jumping into the in high rock there and understanding that this was a huge, hugely powerful force but I didn't really understand its significance at that point.
I was an athlete at that point playing basketball for Ireland and I feel better afterwards but I couldn't link the two things together and then when I went later on to become a Wim Hof method instructor, that's when I really understood that the cold can be a source, a force of goodness in our life. And really understanding the science behind it and really understanding how to channel that into a very digestible, simple way for people to be able to use in their own daily lives, that was the real turning point for me. So you mentioned to use in their daily life, so how do you use it at the moment or how do you combine breeding and cold? Because I know one of the stories a lot of people are telling themselves right now is Anthony Neil. This all sounds great, but I have kids, I have a family, I have a job and I'm cycling. Are you asking me to squeeze in another two hours of stuff per day? Because I don't have time. Absolutely. Yeah, and it's a very good point because their lives are already chaotic, our lives are already hectic. So my suggestion to people is you already, most days you're probably already in a hot shower. So in that hot shower, you would hope, you would hope, especially cyclists, but we know a few that maybe don't. But in that hot shower, at the end, turn it to cold. You'll feel that sense of shock as the cold hits the body. And just to use that breath that we use at the very beginning of the podcast, just that long exhale, try to find that long exhale in the cold. And that might take maybe less than a minute just to try and find that exhale. And when you can get that exhale going and you can get that exhale nice and smooth along, then you know you're getting all the benefits that we've talked about. Inflammation is going down. Hormones are balancing. Circulation is improving. Mood is elevating. And that might take a minute. And you're already in the shower anyway. You know, so combining those two in a very kind of small and highly effective way, that's the way to do it. It doesn't really add any more time to your other daily practices, but that is a transformative technique that we really have a huge impact. I love that because you're just, you're not asking someone to do anything extra. You've almost no reason not to do this. Yes. Because the science is so strong, arguments are so compelling, and the advantage you can glean from this is so huge. And there's no downside. We're not asking you to go attend, you know, crazy Wim Hof's house in Poland, like you have to do to learn this stuff. It's very simple. And I think it has to be convenience. As you said, you know, we already do so much, you know, people are reluctant to take on another practice. But when it's so simple and so effective, the only thing that might be holding people back is this innate fear that we have of the cold. And actually from my experience over the years, teaching thousands of people had to come through ice baths and very extreme cold is that I feel that the cold is like a mirror. And a mirror's back of this reflects back of this lots of the different fears and worries that we have and the rest of our lives. So the cold shower isn't going to hurt you. But you might be fearful of it. So by getting in there and addressing that cold, you're addressing those fears. And as we said, that little victory every day slowly weakens those fears and other parts of our lives. So what's not what's not the love of that? But there's a great discipline to that because I've had we just spoke off air. I'd say it was 12 months or so since I was at one of your seminars and every single morning since then and every single noise I've had a cold shower. Every morning I've woke up from a warm, cosy, comfortable bed. Not one morning I ever wanted to get into a cold shower, but I have this schizophrenic chat with myself. There's this guy on this shoulder saying, no, you shouldn't do this today. Like it's raining outside, it's cold out there, you'll get a shower and then have the other guy saying, this isn't a debate. I told you we're getting into the calls, getting into the fucking calls. Every morning I have this and this dude always wins. Am I crazier is this debate, a real thing that other people are experiencing? To be honest, I think it's something that the majority of people have every time, no matter how long they've done it. Like even this morning, the ice bath was at the back, full of ice, freezing cold. And I was coming back from the beach, I've been doing my breathing on the beach, and it's coming back above the beach and I was saying to myself, oh, you know, maybe I won't do the ice bath today.
You know, I was like, but the more you experience it, the more it's like, I know that battle is over. You know, I know I'm getting into the ice bath, so that voice becomes weaker. But I think that voice is there for a good reason though. You know, that that's our survival kind of instinct in a lot of ways. That's kind of fear of the unknown, it's fear of discomfort, it's fear of all those types of things. And that that that voice becomes weakened. And in fact, we learn that we can overcome that voice. So when it happens in other parts of our life, not that we don't ever want it to be there, but we just know now that we have the skills to overcome it. But it seems to me that's what we should be seeking out each day. We shouldn't be seeking comfort. Now, as comfort doesn't bring us any happiness, we should be seeking uncomfortable situations, challenges, and especially called forasting in the morning because once you knock that domino down. It cascades into this chain reaction of the next thing you have to do is the old saying if you have a frog eat a foresting in the morning, if you have two frogs eat the bigger frog forest cold becomes that every single morning for me where I'm like, I've got a busy day and if I don't, I've just maybe a rational maybe rational fear now one morning that if I don't have a call of shower, the rest of my day is just going to be a give in to the voice to go, oh, maybe you should take it easy today. Maybe you shouldn't try it. Yeah, well, it's kind of interesting because as you're describing, I've heard many people describe a similar kind of transformation as they've kind of delved further into the cold. And the word addiction comes up a lot. People start saying to me, I'm addicted to the cold chairs now. And it's kind of funny because we were having this conversation a while back myself and a few people and we're saying, addiction is kind of defined as something that we continue to do, but even though it has a destructive impact in our life. So we're trying to see about, you know, what's the positive version of addiction, you know, because we're, you know, we're still doing it, even though it's having a good impact. But what I think is happening in this is that the body is nearly always seeking homeostasis. It's, you know, it's we're built to try and find this perfect balance in the body there. And after a while, the cold brings about this balance. It brings about a balance pH in the body. It brings about balanced hormones. It brings about all these kind of balances of these different forces in our body. So after a while, that's what the body craves. You know, it's craving that balance again. And that's where that feeling of initially when people start to cold shower is, oh, they're grim, you know, like they're difficult. And then after a while, when you get used to the benefits afterwards, you get out of the cold shower and you feel amazing, you start to remember that more. The battle getting in is easier because you know what's coming afterwards. And then the body starts to actually crave that feeling, you know, and that's really, yeah, that's when you know it's a force for good in your life now. But is the big objection to cold? And it's one, I probably had the subject to myself before I met you. And I hear a bunch of our clients at Roadman's cycle and have this objection when I mention the cold, are gonna get sick. Yeah, but when you actually understand that and you can tell me a little bit about it now, it's the exact opposite. It has a powerful effect on our immunity. Yeah, it's amazing. In my training as a Wim Hof method instructor, Wim Hof had us doing all these things that I would have told impossible beforehand. One of them was climbing up this huge snowy mountain in Poland on the Polish Czech border in the depths of winter. And it was about a two and a half hour hike up, but I was only wearing shorts and boots. And it was, you know, blizzard conditions. So it was about two and a half hours up, two and a half hours back. So five hours in sub-zero temperatures. And about halfway up, I taught to myself, you know, if we lived, if Irish people lived in an environment like this, this harsh environment, we'd know that you have to go out and embrace the cold. You can't hide away from that type of cold. But because in Ireland we live in a place where it's kind of not too cold, not too warm, it's somewhere in the middle, we don't have that push that we need to really figure out a way to deal with these harsh environments. But in reality, all of us need to be able to deal with harsh environments because it's just the way we're built.
We've become stronger as a result. Our immune system becomes stronger. Our stress levels go down, which makes our immune system go up. So this kind of facing the cold and embracing the cold and learning how to use it as a tool is so very important. And before I started really getting into the cold training, we have four children, myself and Josie, and they were, we have a kind of split. Two of them were pre-Wim Hoth and two of them were post-Wim Hoth. So the children before Wim Hoth, it was like the way we usually think, oh, put a jacket the cold, I'll get shot on the child, I'll get cold. But the other ones came along and it was like actually let them run around with no jacket on, you know, let them run free. So they're they're running around with no shoes on shorts all the time. And they are so incredibly healthy because we are apart in nature, we're mammals, you know, we are built to be out nature all the time. And when we do that and we allow ourselves to do that and not be fearful of it, then our immune system becomes incredibly strong. And there's a freedom in that, even for the, even for the cyclists listening, who might be fearful of getting sick or fearful of getting a cold. If we embrace the cold and we embrace the breathing and our immune system starts to become stronger and stronger, there's a freedom in thinking, FEC it. You know, I don't care what the weather is like or how cold it is. I'm going for it because you know your body's able for it. And as cyclists, we're totally obsessed with weight loss. There's only two variables that make a cyclist. It's power on the one hand and then weight on the other hand. So as much as people train to get stronger and more powerful, they're also trying to cut weight to be lighter and lighter on the far end. And I remember my force introduction of the intersection of cold and weight loss. I came across, I'm not sure what book it was, but I came across a NASA material scientist called Ray Cronice and he was overweight and he started studying Michael Phelps and he was looking at Phelps' daily consumption of calories. And it didn't talk up for him. He said, we typically been taught that just two metrics here. We've calories in versus calories out. How much training are we doing versus how much are we eating? And he's like, it didn't make sense. Phelps was eating a crazy amount of calories, 10,000 calories a day. And when he looked at his training, it wasn't possible that he was going to born 10,000 calories a day. So he went down a rabbit hole and he found there's actually a torrid variable, thermogenic effect. and it's our body temperature. So we actually have ability to melt away body fat by exposing ourselves to calls. Talk to me about that. Yeah, it's kind of one of the things that isn't really but it's a huge benefit of a gradual exposure to colds and it makes total sense. So when you plunge into the colds and the body starts to adapt to it, the way it adapts is it starts generating heat. If you can keep yourself relaxed, keep yourself calm. If you're intense, it's not going to work. If you can be more relaxed, the body starts generating heat. And to generate heat, it's burning calories. So obviously, that has a big factor. So Michael Phelps is burning calories in lots of ways. But if his body is being forced to generate heat, that's one way of doing it. And gradually, exposure to cold also changes the composition of the fat in the body. So as a person is more exposed to cold, the kind of normal white fat gradually becomes brown fat. So in the brown fat is more mitochondrion. So they are burning up calories, they're generating energy, they're generating heat all the time. And this is something that kind of slowly happens. So people, the more exposure to cold they have, they're starting to slim down and tone up. And in the case of cycles, probably lose weight without kind of having to think too much about it. because the body is just generating more energy and heat to deal with the cold. And at Agline, I use for the podcast and it's probably a recording team through this summit as well as like I'm very much interested in using cyclin. Yeah, as a tool for performance but that performance is a boy product. It's more about cyclin for health, happiness and longevity. And I've seen a story recently, we haven't talked about this, I'm not even sure if you've seen it, It was the power, I think I'm not sure where the story was. It was Oxford, Saudi, maybe I'll try and dig it up and send it on. It was the power of cold on dementia and its effects of future proof against dementia. So when we talk about, like, one of the goals being longevity, it doesn't get any better than a chance to stave off dementia.
Yeah, there's been a few studies now that have looked at the effects of cold on part of the brain that usually we have very little control over, you know, say the brain stem, the ancient part of the brain, which is where fight or flight generates itself from. And the studies are showing that part of the brain that usually does not much activity around light up when we're in the cold. So when we kind of developed the ability to stay in the cold and to have control in the We can get these benefits that, you know, as you said, we're looking at the coal as a way of dealing with dementia. We're looking at the coal as a way of dealing with balancing hormones. All these things are connected. We're only starting now to truly understand scientifically to understand the deep benefits of the coal. Like we've known about this ourselves culturally for a long time and, you know, as part of our traditions, but it's amazing to see now science kind of catching up and quantifying what can happen. It's so baffling and mind-blowing, like across all the speakers we have on this summit, everyone is bringing massive value of every topic on it and just so fascinated and I can't advocate enough for somebody to just start integrating this into their life. And the last one I want to touch on, because we could probably stay on now talking about all the benefits are cold. But the The last one, and it's another area, it is just so, so important for us, like, it's recovery, and the best way to recover is sleep. Breathing calls, they have such a powerful effect on our ability to maximize our sleep and get into that restorative phase of sleep. Yeah. It's, you know, it's in that long exhale, that long exhale to kind of keep the body nice and calm. If you do that before you go to bed, let's say you're lying in bed and you just take a few minutes to breathe gently, to breathe deeply and to focus on that exhale. Again, if the body has been put through a lot of training that day and if the mind is still racing, it just brings both the mind and the body down into a place where it's again feeling safe, it's starting to recover, it's starting to heal. And of course then a good night's sleep is only a couple of steps away from that. You know, so that's a very practical way just to focus on your exhale as you're going to bed. But also again, if we look at the coals, the reason it improves your sleep so much is because your hormones are balanced and your stress levels are low. You know, so one of the things that kind of undermines our sleep a lot is the overactive mind. You know, we're not getting deep enough sleep. the body is still kind of running through races or running through training. So just a simple thing like your hot and cold shower and a little bit of breathing and the beautiful night sleep you have then is well worth it. Bradenail, that was absolutely unbelievable. If people want to follow along and learn a bit a little bit more about cold breathing techniques, what's the best place for them to follow your journey. Yeah, so you can find me on Instagram or Facebook, breathe with Neil, N-I-A-L-L, so breathe with N-I-A-L-L. You can also find the Breathe with Neil podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, and of course the website is breatheatneil.com. And I'm going to link all that up down below the interview here along with extra information about Neil, products he has common hours and all all that good stuff. Hey everybody it's Anthony again, really quick I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge, it's a challenge called a 14-day kickstart challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you the leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans regardless of what your level is. There's the master's beginner advanced, there's meal plans shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you true at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio that roadmansoycling.com slash 14 day.
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