small spit of land just north of Cape
Cod called Plymouth Rock it’s here that
some religious settlers from Europe
decided to set up a colony that would
one day become the new world it was a
brutally cold winter and for three
months they didn’t see anybody until
this dude named Samoset walked up to
their camp and said to them in English
welcome welcome
Englishman but have you ever thought
about what Samoset was wearing in this
iconic American myth just a loincloth
that was it it was the sort of outfit
that would make any one of us want to
curl up into a little ball and just try
to like keep all the heat in but how was
it that Samoset was so comfortable in
such a cold condition how was it that he
was immune to the elements
was it this resistant something locked
in his genetic code that was just there
or is it something that lies in all of
us I began to understand the answer to
this question about six years ago when I
met this guy that’s wim HOF Dutch
daredevil fitness guru he holds a
fistful of World Records for dunking
himself in the ice water for longer than
anyone else swimming under polar ice
caps and getting up 3/4 of the way Mount
Everest in just a pair of shorts and no
shirt so wim HOF can do some pretty
great and sort of crazy things but when
I heard about him he claimed something
even greater than that that he could
teach other people to do these same
feats and not only that not only could
he you he teach you to control your body
temperature at will but also your immune
system and when I heard these claims I
figured that he was a liar
that he was charging money to make you
sort of superhuman and even worse than
that I figured that he could get people
killed
right well he’s not the first false guru
that I had unmask in print recently I
just written a book about another guy
teaching that through Tibetan Buddhist
meditation he could make you an angel
and one of his followers who is
following this technique ended up
meditating until he died in a cave in
Arizona I’d built my career debunking
figures like this wim HOF guy I still
had to give wim HOF a chance right I
mean you can’t just go and lay into
someone in print so I flew to Poland
where he had a training center to try
his method myself and it only took a few
days to figure out that wim HOF was on
to something
within a week I was climbing snowy
mountains in a winter that stopped
Napoleon’s army on his march to Moscow
okay
it was the same winter that stopped the
Nazi blitzkrieg and here I was sweating
not freezing and the method is fairly
straightforward you start by some
gradual cold exposure go out and stand
in the snow and then work your way up to
you can do things like meditate on a
riverbank until the snow melts around
you and the key is to suppress your
shiver response and redirect that
clenching feeling that we all have in
the cold which is a signature of the
fight-or-flight responses and when you
do that you’re trying to heat your body
with muscle movement now by redirecting
it and not shivering you actually force
your metabolism to take over those
heating duties
we also learned a breathing method which
is hyperventilating than holding our
breath and then hyperventilate and hold
a breath and I kept on doing that until
I could hold my breath for three minutes
at a time with empty lungs so these
relatively simple techniques to learn
you can learn them in about 15 minutes
did not give me superpowers what they
gave me were human powers and as
recently as 400 years ago when the
pilgrims met Samoset it was something
that they found so alien but the thing
is that this comes down to human
evolution our species I’m talking about
homo sapien sapien has walked the earth
for about 200,000 years in that time we
endured crippling cold and scorching
heat we trekked out of the Middle East
over the Alps over the Himalayas we even
populated the new world without a
whisper of what any one of us would
consider modern technology yes we had
leather shoes and maybe some bows and
arrows
we even had boats to get to the new
world but our most valuable asset in all
of this has been our body doesn’t matter
whether it’s a snowstorm or a scorching
Sun our bodies had to be our bodies had
to adapt quickly if we wanted to survive
and pass on our genes which means that
you are the descendant of an
evolutionary winner so why does it seem
so crazy these feats of our past what
was it about our
ancestors that was so much stronger or
in other words why are we so much weaker
now well the difference between your
Paleolithic grandfather and grandmother
and us is that we have the ability to
manipulate the world around us with
technology and driving a lot of that
technology is this feeling of comfort
that we all want to embrace blizzard
outside scorching weather it doesn’t
matter we can live in a perpetual
climate of about 72 degrees which is
eternal summer it’s this narrow band of
comfort which is so attractive to this
inner nervous system our inner jellyfish
that just want to be comfortable all the
time and the technologies that have
allowed this to happen
central heating air conditioning that
cool polar fleece that you wear it’s
only arrived here in the blink of an
evolutionary eye and that means that
that hidden biology that we have to
adapt to the changing environment around
us lies dormant and this is a problem
take for example the basic mammalian
response of vaso constriction your body
has about 60,000 miles of tubing in it
there are arteries that take blood away
from your heart and veins that bring it
back and along the arteries are
something called smooth muscle which
will contract to bring the blood into
your core if you’re cold now if you were
to plunge into ice water right now that
would squinch with so much force that
that your hands would just be incredibly
cold but you actually have to get cold
and actually feel that sensation in
order to activate that muscular response
there has never been any evolutionary
pressure to put it under conscious
control and that means that the vast
majority of us who live under climate
control conditions never experience
vasoconstriction we don’t see
temperature and the environment
in the same way as we do say exercise
which means someone with that perfect
gym body six-pack abs and big bulging
muscles like my friend Channing Tatum
over here could be hiding very weak
circulatory muscles and vasoconstriction
is just the tip of the iceberg
there’s an entire hidden biology honed
to deal with various environmental
conditions extreme heat will let your
pores encourage evaporation if you go
into the cold you will ramp up your
metabolism if you go to altitude you get
more red blood cells in order to
compensate for the decreased oxygen and
this brings me back to Samoset the
Algonquian nurtured their underlying
biology by not building barriers between
themselves in the environment in
childhood they would take their infants
and put their infants in the snow for 15
minutes at a time before bringing them
back inside it’s the same technique that
Scandinavians use to today and Russians
and indigenous people all over the world
and what this does is build a resistance
to the elements that will last your
whole life and you could also build this
in adulthood as well the conditioning
activates metabolic processes in your
body that will suck white fat from your
system and transform it directly into
heat energy
now think about this that spare tire
that many of us carry around our waist
is not there because you’re waiting to
get into a place where you have no food
that you’re starving it’s actually
kindling for your metabolism to heat you
up in a cold environment that’s right
this is a message for Oprah’s Book Club
the cold will let you lose weight for
several hundred years human health has
rested on twin pillars of diet and
exercise it’s always been about the food
you bring into your body and how you use
it with your muscles but there is a
third pillar of the environment which is
as equally important it’s not just
vasoconstriction this hidden biology
also includes the immune system insulin
regulation endurance and respiration and
all of that is below your conscious mind
and there’s no better time than right
now to try to undo some of that
comfortable conditioning you can start
with a cold shower and I know this is
the hardest thing that a human can do
here you sit there under that warm water
and you turn to that knob and turn it to
cold I know it’s hard but I believe in
you the key is the one that water is on
you to sit there and relax into it
and instead of clenching up and heating
yourself up with your muscles let your
metabolism do that job and it will just
do it automatically another thing you
can do is turn down your thermostat in
the winter bring it down to about 62
degrees or in the summer turn off your
air conditioning this will put your body
in touch with the seasonal variations
that you’re not getting if you live in
summer all year round you’ll also save
on heating so that’s cool and these
simple things really start to trigger
some rather extraordinary changes in the
body and I ran an experiment when I was
starting this research where I measured
my own metabolism at the Cu Center for
sports medicine over here on on the
boulder campus and they put me through a
vo2 max test which is a sort of me
running on a treadmill as they slowly
increase the the pitch of the running
and as they did that they hooked me up
to this oxygen monitor that saw what
sorts of things and energy I was burning
and it was no surprise to me that I
would burn mostly granola bars it was
all carbohydrates that I was burning
which is not really what you want if you
endurance athlete it’s very quick sugar
but after six months of training I went
back and I did the same test and not
only did I run better
I became primarily a fat burner and I
know this graph doesn’t make a lot of
sense when you initially look at it but
to translate this the the doctor there
said that it was the equivalent of me
adding seven hours of cardio exercise
every week to my routine but all I was
doing was this breathing method and cold
showers that’s the only change I made to
my to my diet and exercise routine which
is hugely efficient but that wasn’t the
only thing that changed I also managed
to sue I also managed to do some rather
incredible things that’s me on the top
of Kilimanjaro the highest mountain in
Africa with wim HOF and you’ll notice
I’m not wearing much but I was warm as I
went up this mountain and I could never
have imagined doing anything like this
six years ago when I first met wim HOF
but with these small steps cold showers
ice baths occasionally rolling in the
snow when I can exposing myself to
environmental variations I was able to
get in touch with that evolutionary
power it’s because our bodies know what
to do with environmental stimulus we
you [Applause]