What is contrast therapy and how does it work?

My name's Elle. And I'll be taking you guys through a little bit of information to do with the new contrast therapy baths that we have at Fast Twitch, which is pretty cool.

So what is contrast therapy?

We've recently changed over the bathing system. Previously, there were three ice baths in there, and now we've changed them over so that there is a hot tub, an ice bath, and a magnesium soak tank. And these are going to be super interesting. They're going to excel in your recovery, and you're going to find out all about how to use it if you stick around.

Okay. So why is it effective? There are two ways that you can use it. You can use it for competition, as a sportsperson. That can help you with recovering quicker. It can help you to lessen the delayed muscle soreness that you have after your sessions. It can help you to burn calories. It can increase your circulation and the lymph drainage in your system. It can reduce swelling, it can decrease inflammation, can enhance sleep quality, it boosts your immunity. It floods your brain with feel-good chemicals. It increases good fats in your body and it decreases the bad fat. And I'll go into that in a little bit as well. It increases your pain tolerance by upping the level of endorphins in your body. So you're able to feel less pain. And you also have a reduction in blood pressure and heart rate, which helps with a lot of health mechanisms as well, which I can go into.

So why is it effective?

How does it do all of these things? Well with contrast therapy in particular, what you're doing is you're going from a hot environment to a cold environment interchangeably. The number of times that you do it is up to you. We've put up a little protocol on the wall in Fast Twitch that encourages everybody to get their feet wet, pun intended. So it'll just be cycling through with cold first. I know a little bit hard to begin with, but I promise you do get used to it. One minute in the cold bath, then one to two minutes in the magnesium soak tank, followed by four minutes in the hot bath to warm yourself back up. So if you go through that cycle four to six times, you're looking to be in that area for, maybe about 20 to 30 minutes all up.

And the benefit of this is that when you're in the hot tank, you get lots of blood circulating through your system, clearing out lactic acid and metabolic waste that builds up in your body post-exercise as well as just in everyday life by increasing circulation and bringing blood flow to the surface, improving your vascular health. And then as you move into the cold, those blood vessels constrict and tend to take that blood away. So you're shunting blood through your system up and down, which is getting your heart rate varying through changing levels. It's simulating what exercise does for you. And it's also increasing your circulation and moving things around. Now, why is this effective for people who do sports specifically?

So you might see, there's a lot of information about footballers, soccer players, tennis players, netballers all jumping into the Fast Twitch ice baths after their sessions. Why do they do that? So there's information to suggest that doing it immediately, post-exercise prevents all of the inflammation that comes from the task at hand. So for example, for an athlete who needs to perform, especially in the competition back to back, or has to back up their training on a daily schedule for performance purposes, they need to be fresh. They're not looking for muscle growth at that specific time, they're looking to perform at their best, at their peak, and then they need everything to be in good working order to back it up the next day. So we want to blunt that inflammation response that occurs after, say a soccer match, as an example, but really - whatever sport you're into. Ensuring that the lymph is draining any lactic acid sitting in those muscles, that's going to potentially make them hurt tomorrow is squeezed out into the lymph system, so that it can cycle and drain out of the body, preventing delayed onset muscle soreness (or DOMS, for short).

However, if you are a person who is looking to build muscle, aka hypertrophy, or is looking to receive basic fitness gains, there is evidence to suggest that contrast therapy too soon after you've worked out is a bit of a backward step. You do want the inflammation to be occurring after you've worked out in that instance because those microscopic tears in your muscles are actually what helps the muscles to grow. It's a necessary and positive type of inflammation called hormetic stress. If you blunt this kind of inflammation, then you're going to prevent muscular growth. So there is a recommendation, and it is written in our protocol that's on the walls, that you should leave at least four to five hours between your workout and your contrast therapy for muscular gains.

So if you are planning to do contrast therapy on a day that you've got resistance training, for example, perhaps do your training in the morning, and then come in the early evening for some contrast therapy before bedtime. Not only is that going to enhance your sleep quality, but it's far enough away from your exercise session that it's not going to blunt that hormetic response and prevent that muscular growth. You don't want to spend all of this time lifting weights and then have all of the effects just canceled out. So that is one thing to be cognizant of when you're moving through this therapy. How can you benefit from this? Which protocol is best? We have written up two different protocols on the wall. So we've got your post-exercise session and your session for every other time.

I can tell you, there is a third session as well, it's a deep dive session, which is pretty cool. A lot of the studies that I've read are based on sauna use and the release of what's called heat shock proteins in the body. With added benefits seen in those that then cycle through with some ice bath therapy as well. So for your deep dive, we recommend booking out the infrared sauna for preferably 45 minutes, if that's in your timetable. But if not half an hour is still better than nothing. And then jumping in the cold bath after a quick rinse off in the shower, and trying to stay in there for as long as you can. Okay. So to begin with, obviously, it might be one to two minutes. In terms of benefit, you can see a growth of the feel-good chemicals in your brain from between 60 to 90 seconds, this creates a massive dump of these awesome endorphins and feel-good chemicals. For those looking to try this at home, there are many ice bath retailers in Australia offering a variety of prices.

So we're talking a 250% increase of dopamine in the brain and having been recorded up to a 530% increase of noradrenaline. That's huge. That's massive. Why is that beneficial? What does that mean? It means that it's going to increase your immunity, which is unbelievable. At this time, we're in lockdown right now. Everybody wants to be fighting off viruses, all kinds of viruses not just “the virus”. Everyone wants to be in great health. We want to be staving off the flu, staving off colds during winter. This therapy is going to help you to do that. It's increasing your T cells. It's increasing your NK cells. These are part of your body's immune support system. They're going to be going through picking apart any pathogens in your body and helping you to keep your immune system strong. Awesome.

So not only are we boosting immunity by doing this, but also the heat shock proteins are in charge of taking care of the protein in your genes. So your genes have all of these proteins that fold and unfold, and that's how DNA is kept going in your body. Long story short. And basically, sometimes they break down, and sometimes these cells stick around and your body has a system that goes through and cleans them all up. But sometimes when we do things like overeat or eat for extended periods of the day, or we're not particularly taking care of ourselves, the system in your body that is in charge of finding all of these genes that are broken and clearing them away so that we don't end up with disease sometimes doesn't work effectively. So if you increase the amount of heat shock proteins in your body, you're enabling that cleaning system of those broken genes to go through, scan the body, pick up all of those genes that are broken and clear them out as necessary.

So your heat shock proteins, elevate your body's ability to create new cells, fix damaged ones, regulate your immunity. Awesome. The cold shock proteins, which come from the ice bath, they're working to create energy in your body. So the energy in your body is created by a thing called ATP. I won't go into it because it gets pretty boring, but ATP is created by your mitochondria. Your mitochondria are what control your metabolism. Everybody knows what metabolism is, and you want to keep that nice and fast. They tend to slow as we grow older and we let our habits dictate the health of our mitochondria. And things like wearing these glasses, for example, help to keep them fast and working adequately into older age.

Apologies, folks. We're experiencing technical difficulties as the internet connection just dropped. I apologize for the inconvenience. Now, let's talk about ATP. ATP serves as the body's energy currency. The primary role of cold shock proteins is not only to support the mitochondria but also to convert unhealthy fat into beneficial fat. Allow me to explain further. Within your body, white adipose tissue typically accumulates in areas like the thighs, buttocks, and midsection. This type of fat is considered undesirable as it contributes to conditions such as heart disease and strokes. It's the wobbly fat that many people don't find aesthetically pleasing.

On the other hand, there's also good fat known as brown adipose tissue. This type of fat is predominantly located in the upper torso, including the top of the midsection and upper back. Brown fat contains numerous mitochondria and functions as a permanent energy system for the body. When your stomach runs out of fuel, a properly functioning body breaks down its unhealthy white fat, converting it into ATP to provide energy. That's where cold therapy comes in—it promotes the transformation of white fat into brown fat. As mentioned earlier, this process offers several benefits, including fat burning, improved circulation, and reduced inflammation.

If you aim to build muscle, you should incorporate cold therapy sessions separately from your workout routine. Additionally, suppose you want to alleviate inflammation caused by exercise and prepare for optimal performance the following day. In that case, it's best to schedule the cold therapy session as close to your workout. That's an unusual approach.

Lastly, let's discuss what you can expect during cold therapy. Brace yourself—it will be extremely cold, which can be shocking for your system. We spend about 90% of our lives in temperature-controlled environments, making us less adaptable to extreme temperatures. We constantly rely on external factors such as clothing, air conditioning, heaters, and blankets to regulate our body temperature. This lack of exposure to temperature variations weakens our ability to adapt. Consequently, we become uncomfortable in cold or hot conditions, lacking the flexibility to endure such extremes. This is especially significant in developing countries where our lives are well-equipped and catered to, leaving us less accustomed to temperature fluctuations.

You'll notice on extremely hot days some people get quite cranky, maybe a little bit unnecessarily. That's got to do with your poor temperature regulation abilities. All right. So putting yourself out there, stimulating a little bit of mental resilience, and trying to get into cold environments a little bit more is going to test and work that muscle for you. Why do I want to do that? "Who cares." You're probably saying. "I like being warm." Well, this is what helps your mitochondria, which helps keep your metabolism running efficiently as you get older, so it's assisting your cells to stay young. It is also effective because the more you do it, the better you get at it. Over time, the less you start to freak out because it tones our parasympathetic nervous system. What do I mean by that? You've all heard of fight or flight, which is where the bear is coming and you're like, "See you later. I'm out of here. I've got to run like the wind."

Rest and digest are your parasympathetic nervous system. So everything that your body needs to go through, your digestion, relaxation, being calm, crying, yawning. All of those cannot happen unless you're in rest and digest. And being in the cold... It might sound counterintuitive, but being in the cold allows you to tap in and tone your parasympathetic nervous system to be able to come on when you want it to come on. So if you're walking around in modern life, just constantly hitting those cortisol highs, super-duper stressed. Going from stress, to stress, to stress, to stress. It's probably because your parasympathetic nervous system, AKA rest and digest, isn't well-toned to be able to switch on when you need the stress to switch off. And the way that you bring it about and help to tone it is by putting yourself in cold temperatures because that allows you to tap into your relaxation phase.

Now you might be going, "Elle, what on earth are you talking about? I can tell you if I jump into an ice bath there's not going to be anything calm about it." And there won't be, to begin with, but I promise you to get in there, you just temper a little bit at first, it is going to be unpleasant. I'm not going to lie. But that's where the breathing comes in. So you learn how to deep breathe, into your diaphragm, expand out your belly rather than shallow breathing into your chest, and elongate that exhale out nice and long and smooth. And usually at double the length that you're breathing in. So say you breathe in for five counts, try to breathe out for 10. Just enacting that cycle of breathing and concentrating on that whilst you're in the cold water is going to help you to tap into that parasympathetic nervous response.

You'll find all of a sudden everything starts to settle. Your skin in the water, if you stay still will acclimatize. And if you're wearing a heart rate monitor, which I have often done when I've been doing it, you'll start to see your heart rate drop considerably. And not in a worrying way, but in a soothing and calming way. And it's nice. I'm not going to lie. You're lying back there. You're silenced of everything that was going on. You're no longer thinking about what you did, where you got to be, where you got to go. You're concentrating so hard on just being in the moment because the cold makes you. All of a sudden, everything is just quiet. And in this day and age, what a gift that is. I highly recommend giving this a go if you haven't. I know it sounds intimidating, but that's why the benefit of the hot tub is in there.

Okay. So 60 to 90 seconds in that cold tank is all you need to start experiencing those endorphins and feel-good chemicals. You can build up over time. It's setting you up for the rest of the day, if you're doing it before exercise - some even claim they feel impervious going into training after having an ice bath before their session as it releases those endorphins (nature’s pain killers) that are going to allow you to lift longer and heavier before you hit threshold. If you’re jumping in after your session, later in the day, it's setting you up for an awesome sleep at night. And now with this beneficial ability to jump straight into the hot water tub, as part of our contrast therapy room, means that if you are suffering considerably and you're not quite yet used to the ice bath, you know that you're only a few seconds away from being in immediate, comfortable heat. It lowers the barrier to entry for people who are a little bit intimidated by trying the cold bath. The hot water is there. It's your friend. You can jump in it at any time.

Sometimes after a relaxing infrared sauna session, we like to jump into the contrast therapy tubs. The benefits of infrared sauna are also fantastic for your body’s recovery.

How to do contrast therapy?

In terms of the protocol that we've written. We do want you to begin cold, moving to hot for some relief. We've said four minutes, but you can stay in the heat for as long as you like. There's no cap in there. I did have a question from somebody saying, "How long is too long in the heat?" All of the studies that I read said there is not too long. So you're all good to stay in there. With the cold, you want to be able to temper yourself to get used to being in the cold longer over time. No heroic feats. You don't need to Instagram you being a legend and staying in for 15 minutes, just work your way up. Because the thing is, as you tone your parasympathetic nervous system, you'll be able to control your gasping response when you get into the water. And it's easy and pleasurable, and you'll want to stay in a little bit longer each time you do it.

So when you're first starting, you might just want to stay in for 60 seconds. If you get to 60 seconds and you go, "Oh, I've got a couple more deep breaths in me." go for it. What we do recommend is trying to stay in at the very least until that initial spike of the gasping reflex calms down. So once you've leveled out in the water and you're like, "Oh, this is okay. I can do this. I'm a champ." Then you can get out. That's a good rule of thumb, to begin with. Gradually over time, increase, move either your hot experience down and your cold up, or keep the hot the same and just increase your cold exposure as you go.

How often should you do contrast therapy?

In terms of how often per week are benefits found, studies discussing contrast therapy, usually using sauna suggest a decrease in cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality by 50%, so that means your risk of death by all things can be halved by doing hot/cold therapy three to four times a week. That's all. I think that that's a pretty significant number, especially considering if you're a member here at Fast Twitch, you already get it included in your membership! All you have to do is find an extra, what? 10 minutes of your session time to log it in and to jump in the water.

Those benefits are insane. You often don't see that kind of an effect in science, that huge, to have all-cause mortality halved. That's pretty significant. And that's a huge reason why so many people are going crazy for sauna and ice bath therapy. And it's cool that we have this technology now at our fingers. I did have another question from somebody about how long you should be spending in the magnesium tank. The magnesium tank is there because of magnesium soaking everybody knows you can take magnesium in a tablet form, but it's found to be far better absorbed into your body transdermally. So that means through your skin because you can bypass your gastrointestinal tract. The type of bath salts that we've got in the water is trace mineral elements and heavy magnesium. So the benefit of that is that it helps to push and distribute blood sugar into your body.

So if you're ever in that stage where you're worried about your blood sugar levels, obviously I always recommend talking to your GP before doing anything that you don't normally do. But it can help to regulate your blood sugar levels, which is huge. It decreases muscle aches and pains. It leaves you with softer skin because it strengthens your skin barrier, which is pretty damn cool. Because who doesn't want softer skin? It aids in relaxation and anti-stress. What else? It balances your electrolytes. Because as I said, absorbing it transdermally, through the skin is better received from your body than taking a tablet form. Why? The difficulty with taking magnesium in tablet form is it can give you the runs. So you want to be avoiding that if possible. And then lastly, it's great for reducing cramps in the body. So by balancing those electrolytes, getting that magnesium in, and reducing the cramps, it's pretty much a triple threat approach.

So somebody did ask about the magnesium tank and said, "How long should you be spending in there?" With the magnesium tank, it's a cumulative effect. So the amount of time spent soaking in the water is going to be more beneficial. Because it is slightly cold but not as cold as the ice bath, I would recommend trying to stay in there for about 90 seconds to two minutes. So it would be best to start in the ice bath, go to the magnesium bath for 90 seconds-2mins, and end in the hot tub for 4 minutes or so. And then if you're cycling that through four to six times, gradually your exposure over four to six times will amount to between 8 to 12 minutes, depending upon how many rounds you do of that magnesium soaking.

And if you're doing that a couple of times a week, that's going to go to significantly change the levels of electrolytes in your body. And you might find that you'll be sleeping better, that you may have less restless leg syndrome at night or cramps. You might just have a better effect on mood because magnesium plays in over 300 different biochemical reactions in your body. That's what magnesium is responsible for. It's an incredible mineral. We need it. We often don't get it in our diets in adequate amounts. Not to mention reports that discuss the depletion of magnesium levels in the soil over time, so we can't even really expect to get enough from our homegrown food it seems either, which is why everybody's pretty much supplementing. Okay. So just finishing up here. We've gone through why it's beneficial, why we need to practice being flexible with our temperature regulation and who can benefit from doing this contrast therapy at Fast Twitch.

I've already demonstrated that even though we know it to be great for athletes, it's also great for everybody... Just everybody. Everybody can benefit. What to expect. I've gone through that as well. Tips and tricks. So when I mentioned breathing before, you do want to try to practice getting in control of that breathing and using it as a focal point to get you through when you're beginning. And to help that extreme response that most people have when they're in that cold environment. Now, this links well with the Wim Hof experience that we were meant to be having on the 25th of July. Unfortunately, we're now in lockdown, but if anybody's super interested in getting the most out of their contrast bath therapy, I highly recommend filling out the information on our web page to come down and do that when it's back on. The date's going to be changed. I'm not too sure when that will be, but please, please, please come on down and have a look. Very inspiring stuff to see what your body is capable of doing when you are taught well!

Kym Burls is the representative for Wim Hof here in Adelaide. He's going to be taking us through how to use breathing to be more focused, get into that meditative state, be in cold temperatures, affect our immunity, get better sleep, reduce inflammation, burn calories, increase circulation, increase our pain tolerance. All of these awesome things from a professional who knows how to teach us to breathe, so that we can get through these tough things and practice resilience. And the better part about it is that if you go to the trouble of learning these breathing techniques, you'll be able to apply them to other parts of your life as well. So just being able to be in control of your nervous system, whenever you are in that fight or flight response and you don't want to be, you'll be able to tap in and out whenever it suits you. And being in control of that, really is priceless, especially in this modern-day age. So we've got that coming for you guys very soon - stay tuned!

What else? I did have a couple of questions. I'm just going to make sure that I have addressed them all for you guys. So I had, "I don't like cold water. It hurts. Is there any way to make it nicer?" No, it's called hardening up, and being okay with being uncomfortable. Life is uncomfortable sometimes. And sometimes the strength in grinning, bearing it, and having grit and having resilience, both mental and physical is one of the most powerful things that you can practice. So yeah, it is a little bit unpleasant, but you know what? It's not going to kill you. It's only a minute. And actually, the time goes quickly. And after a while, I promise you, you will get addicted if you give it a go. So now that we've got the hot tub in there and you know that you can jump in and be out of your misery at any time, that lowers that barrier to entry. So much easier.

If you’re interested in trying ice baths or contrast therapy in Adelaide, see our full Fast Twitch recovery and wellness suite