Are you cold? Surprisingly, freezing a little more can help. And come into the sauna afterwards, it has exciting effects on the body.
Written by: Guro Thobru.
The Siberian wind sweeps in cold drafts through the air and numbers your fingers in seconds if you dare to take them out of the mitten to take a picture of the falling snow or the moon lighting up the dark blue sky. You shiver on your way, and despite your bubble jacket and lined shoes, you're shivering with cold. Is there nothing that helps? Sure there is! A completely free trend that is healthy in every way. For your health, psyche, environment and social life. But also for those who are constantly a little cold in winter.
Researchers at the University of Tromsø (UiT) have reviewed 104 articles on the effects of ice bathing on health and written an article summarizing the most important findings. One finding has aroused particular interest, and we will return to it shortly.
First, it should be mentioned that all mammals have two types of fatty tissue, brown and white. We have most of the white. It is distributed all over the body, mostly in the abdomen and hips. There is much less brown adipose tissue in an adult human, because the primary task of this fat is to ensure that infants and hibernating animals stay warm and do not get cold.
Susanna Søberg is a metabolism researcher and author of the book "Winter Swimming". During her doctoral thesis, she was the practical leader of a study at the University of Copenhagen that looked at temperature regulation in cold baths combined with a sauna.
According to the study, it appears that winter bathing combined with sauna visits enables the body to adapt to extreme temperatures: both low and high, according to forskning.no.
Regular bathing in the cold water, followed by a trip to the sauna, affects how the brown fat burns energy and produces heat. In one part of the study, participants held a hand down in cold water for three minutes. Both the regular cold water bathers and the control group reacted to the low temperature, but the winter bathers tolerated it better.
Another part of the study, with cold exposure before heat exposure, showed that brown fat fine-tunes body temperature to a comfortable state. However, this study did not show that participants had more brown fat.
"We expected the winter swimmers to have more brown adipose tissue than the control participants. But it turned out that they had better body temperature regulation instead," Camilla Schéele, associate professor and group leader at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR) at the University of Copenhagen, tells videnskap.dk.
As an extension of her studies, Susanna Søberg has come up with an exciting method that shows good results for staying warm through the winter, 11/57. It involves ice bathing and exposure to sauna heat 2-3 times a week, with 11 minutes in the cold water and 57 minutes in the sauna in total per week:
Sources: Aftenposten, Research.no, Videnskap.dk and @susanna_soeberg
Do you want to be better equipped against the cold and sleep better? Book a sauna! Firewood and ice bath included.
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