What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

by Scott Carney

Nature gave us the ability to heal ourselves. Conscious breathing and environmental conditioning are two tools that everyone can use to control their immune system, better their moods, and increase their energy.

Conscious breathing and mental focus can jump-start a chemical change to alkalize the body, while immersion in cold water creates a mental and physical mirror for seeing ourselves in a state of fight-or-flight. Feeling that change is powerful.

“Breathe, motherfucker.”

The underlying hypothesis of this expedition is that when humans outsource comfort and endurance they inadvertently make their bodies weaker, and that simply reintroducing some common environmental stresses to their daily routines can bring back some of that evolutionary vigor.

With no challenge to overcome, frontier to press, or threat to flee from, the humans of this millennium are overstuffed, overheated, and understimulated.

Effortless comfort has made us fat, lazy, and increasingly in ill health.

Human biology needs stress—not the sort of stress that damages muscle, gets us eaten by a bear, or degrades our physiques—but the sort of environmental and physical oscillations that invigorates our nervous systems.

a plunge into ice-cold water not only triggers a number of processes to warm the body, but also tweaks insulin production, tightens the circulatory system, and heightens mental awareness.

By incorporating environmental training into your daily routine, you will achieve big results in very little time. It only takes a matter of weeks for the human body to acclimatize to a dazzling array of conditions.

Once you arrive at high altitude, your body automatically produces more red blood cells to compensate for lower oxygen saturation. Move to an oppressively hot environment and your body will sweat out fewer salts over time and produce lower volumes of urine. Heat will also stimulate your cardiovascular system to become more efficient and increase evaporation and cooling. Yet no environmental extreme induces as many changes in human physiology as the cold does.

The scientists learned that Hof, then 51, had built up so much brown fat over the course of his training that he could produce five times more heat energy than the typical 20-year-old—most likely because he repeatedly exposed himself to cold.

If you happen to be prone to panic attacks, then submerge your face in ice water at the peak of the attack, which will signal your body to prepare for going underwater and disrupt the heart palpitations.

Wim Hof Basic Breathing Preparation: Lie down comfortably on the floor, preferably on an empty stomach before breakfast. Power Breaths: Take thirty full-lung breaths: first filling the belly, diaphragm, and lungs. The inhales are forceful and powerful, but exhales should be natural and without force. Keep the pace quick and steady with your eyes closed. You may feel light headed, see colors or feel a tingling sensation in your hands and feet. Exhale and Hold: After completing 30 breaths take one more full-lung breath and let it out completely, but without force. Hold you breath with your eyes closed until you feel the sensation to gasp. Recovery: Take a half-lung inhale and hold for about 10 seconds. These three steps constitute one round. Do a minimum of three rounds for full effect. May be repeated for up to an hour. Power Pushups: To close out the practice finish with 30 power breaths. Instead of a simple exhale turn over and start doing pushups while holding your breath with empty lungs. You should notice an improvement in performance.

POWER PUSHUPS Start while lying with your back on the floor, then do one more cycle of about 40 breaths. Make the last 10 even a little faster. Then take a giant breath in, turn over, and immediately start doing pushups while holding your breath. Try not to think about anything else other than the count.

Another—more powerful—way to do these exercises is to start doing pushups after an exhalation with empty lungs. When you feel the urge, take a breath and continue until you are exhausted. These two methods work on slightly different parts of the nervous system.

The sympathetic system only starts to kick in closer to the moment when you are struggling to stop yourself from gasping, and it is often best to train with breath-out holds. Breath-in holds are better for getting to your absolute maximum number of pushups or retention duration, but are less efficient at cracking into your nervous system.

The process is as follows: Relax your body and clench the muscles in your feet. Then clench your calves, then thighs. Work the contractions up your body until every part of you is tight from the bottom to the top. Clench your stomach, your chest, fingers, biceps, and jaw. Tighten the muscles behind your ears and imagine all of this pressure that you’ve built up going out the top of your head like you were rolling out pizza dough. Whenever I do this I end up making all sorts of grunting noises and squint my face into awkward contortions. It feels like I’m going to pop. But I never have. Once you finally have to breathe, take in a half lungful of air and hold it for about 10 to 15 seconds. This is the recovery breath, and it feels awesome.

While you’re in this moment of shock and pain, you have two basic goals. First, you need to control your breathing and keep calm. The sensations that most closely match the feeling of burning will dissipate if you focus your mind on the pain. Try to relax instead of tightly clenching up every muscle. Enduring the snow is the same exact mental trick as trying to delay a sneeze or resist being ticklish. Once you feel reasonably calm, the second thing you need to master is suppressing your impulse to shiver. After the initial shock of the cold recedes, your body will soon click on an instinctual program to warm itself through muscle movement. It’s up to you to keep that at bay. Shivering will certainly use up a lot of calories, and for this reason it can be useful if you want to lose weight. But your goal here is to command your nervous system to submit to your will. If your body can’t shiver itself warm again or rely on the insulating properties of your white fat, its only remaining option is to start ramping up your metabolism. This is to say, you will begin passively generating brown fat and building up your stores of mitochondria if you can suppress your shiver response.

Indeed, research dating back almost 20 years shows that high-intensity training in hot conditions for just 5 to 8 days will greatly increase a person’s ability to survive in the heat long-term. The stress from the workouts is a sort of wedge that speeds an array of physiological changes.

Hyperventilation decreases CO2 and increases overall oxygen in the bloodstream while moving blood pH from acidic to alkaline. During retention (with lungs full of air) you sequentially tighten all the muscles from your extremities toward the place where you want to move the blood supply. The process is a little bit like wringing out a wet rag from one end to another and pushing the water out. It’s hard to say exactly what you’re physically moving inside the brain when you’re targeting a headache; perhaps it’s the smooth muscles in its vasculature, or perhaps you’re just thinking at a particular spot. In my experience, after a few seconds of using this method minor headaches vanish and major ones decrease their intensity.

Exposure to cold helps reconfigure the cardiovascular system and combat autoimmune malfunctions. It is also a pretty darned good method for simply losing weight.

just as our own bodies have grown weaker as a result of clinging to comfort and using our gadgets to appease our inner drive for homeostasis, the alterations we’ve made to the planet through technology have undermined its fundamental equilibrium.