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

by Scott Carney

First there needs to be a clearly identifiable external stimulus. Second, that stimulus must trigger a predictable automatic biological response or reflex. Third, that physical response must elicit a feeling or sensation you can visualize or imagine independently of the external trigger.

Take a deep breath in and hold it until you feel the urge to breathe. Then release a little bit of air. With less CO2 in your lungs you will feel like you can hold your breath a little bit longer.

30 fast breaths. Each inhale should take about a second, but you should not force the exhale. Instead let it flow out naturally. Your breath should sound like you’re at the peak of a sprint just a few seconds shy of having to slow down. Pretty soon you’re going to feel a little dizzy; this is normal.

After about 30 breaths you will have radically increased your blood oxygen saturation and cleared out most of the CO2 in your system.

Hold on as long as you can and clench the muscles in your chest, arms, and legs. You’re probably making a pretty crazy face as you struggle against the urge to breathe. But when you can’t stand it anymore, slowly let the air out of your lungs. This gives you a little boost of time before you take any more air in.

repeat the cycle of hyperventilation and breath-holding for three or four cycles—or for a total of about 10 to 12 minutes.

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.

doing pushups after an exhalation with empty lungs. When you feel the urge, take a breath and continue until you are exhausted.

start with the basic breathing method for approximately 30 quick, deep breaths.

Keep your eyes closed and breathe hard enough that you begin to feel light-headed.

Now, instead of taking in a deep breath and holding it, let most of the air out of your lungs like you would at the end of a normal breath (by which I mean, don’t force it) and hold your breath with mostly empty lungs. Your body will quickly deplete the oxygen stores available in the lungs and have to rely solely on what is available in the bloodstream. When you get close to needing to gasp, you can extend your limits in two ways. The first is the same as with basic breathing, slowly letting out what is left of the air in your lungs. The second method will become critical later for controll...

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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 ...

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. Now start over from the beginning. Since your lungs start near empty, it won’t be possible to hold your breath as long as with the basic breathing technique.

Hof says that at 3 minutes you’ve cracked into your sympathetic nervous system.

Take 30 breaths while focusing on the light and as you begin to hold your breath.

Whatever the cold source, the goal is to give your system a little shock.

Start with taking 30-second cold showers and build up from there.

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.

the second thing you need to master is suppressing your impulse to shiver.

Another thing you can do is simply turn down the thermostat to below 66 degrees in the winter.

After a few weeks of training you can make BAT activate on command. The process for doing it is a familiar one. Once you’re already cold, clench the muscles in your feet and hands and then sequentially tighten every muscle above them. The method is essentially the same as the one you use during power breathing except that now, rather than simply pushing all the blood up to your head in general, you instead focus on a specific point on a small ridge on the backside of your skull where the temporal bone and occipital bone meet just behind your ears. Once you’ve pushed all of your muscles up to that point, you then squinch any muscles you have in your scalp and head and pressure downward to the same spot. Essentially you’re trying to pinch this area with muscle contractions. This is a somewhat advanced technique and the pressure could make a person pass out. So don’t force it.

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 ...