What Doesn't Kill Us

by Scott Carney

BROWN FAT ACTIVATION It seems to take about a week of training before your body recruits enough brown fat (BAT) for it to have a meaningful impact on your metabolism. If you don’t live in a cold climate, it is more than likely that you are going to start out with near-zero BAT. Over time, however, your stores will grow, and that brown fat will passively suck white fat from your bloodstream and burn it for body heat. However, there are moments when you want more than just a little heat over a long period of time. What if you want to get warm right now? 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. Remember what happened to Wim in the sauna in Poland...