i have been lifting weights since 2001 undulating between powerlifting and bodybuilding. in the beginning of 2011 i decided to be serious about powerlifting again after some years of pure bodybuilding. that decision meant a royally sore but. and legs, and back, and chest... basically everything hurt. training was intense and i loved it, but i started to need a bit more as a recovery aid than the usual glutamine. cold water came to mind. so since early autumn (august) of 2011 i started taking cold showers after workouts- i started out with short (minute or 2) usually targeting my legs. as i started to feel the results and getting more adapted to cold i added to the time and graduated to fullbody showers. then around the end of 2011 - bang, Dr. Kruse comes out with the CT series and puts a big smile on my face. around that time i got around to taking labs to track my MS - hsCRP, cortisol, leptin, vit D, thyroid hormones, DHEA... the whole shebang. and i liked what i saw, but there was room for improvement. now i have been doing 2 x 20-30 minute showers 4-5 times a week for 3 months. a few weeks ago i decided i should test the functional benefits and went for a walk - in around 0 degrees celsius in my underarmour heatgear (designed to cool you off in hot places) t-shirt and shorts. i was pink and peachy and walked at a leasurely pace enjoying the looks i was getting on the streets. just last week i got the opportunity to try immersion for the first time : 8 deg celsius water for 30 minutes. i would have gone much longer but i decided not to give my mom a heartattack - we were having a spaday - she in the saunas me in the coldtubby. id say this is an experiment that has graduated to a lifefstyle for me.
before embarking on this journey i had been mostly ketogenic paleo for years, so i think that the sucess and easyness of CT for me must be partly attributed to that fact. to tell you the truth im not crazy enough to revert back to SAD, trigger my MS and then implement keto and CT just to prove the point, but my extremely subjective feeling is that the MS issue has improved even more. sometimes you dont notice anything is wrong before it is gone and you feel perfectly normal and go "hmmm i guess that occasional nagging numbness in my upper thigh must have been lingering symptoms after all."
you know, im quite a shallow person - i like to work on my body just for esthetics sake - im the first to admit that the hours i spend deadlifting have nothing to do with the health of the posterior chain (a weak link in human physique) and everything to do with how my skinny jeans fit. but in the next addition to this series i`d really like to talk a bit about health for a change. neolithic diseases of civilisation, autoimmune disorders and ageing in relation to circardian biology and cold. in addition id like to bring up a theory of mine about the connection between the brain and autoimmune disease: what if it
all starts (or at least is connected) in the brain afterall - lets talk about LTP (longterm potentiation). yes i know this is something that has benn researched in neuropsychology and memoryresearch, but my theory gos something
like this: if LTP works with psychology (one neuron that encodes an
experience triggers another neuron that ellicits the response), then
could it work more generally also... might there be a neurological
trigger to autoimmune responses? if so which enzymes cause which
proteins to be triggered and do they have antagonists? i mean could there exist a socalled biochemical "memory" that initiates
the same kind of neurological consolidation process when a autoimmune
recession takes place? and how is it all connected to biological mismatches, circardian biology and coldadaptation. stay tuned.......
