Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think
- A new study on mice shows that exercise helps them shiver longer.
- Brown fat did not seem to be the deciding factor in the mice’s ability to combat the cold.
- The combination of exercise and brown fat is a more likely reason why we can endure extreme temperatures.
Scott Carney was skeptical when he first visited Wim Hof. Ice baths, hyperventilation, long breath holds, and scaling world-class mountains shirtless sounded suspect. Yet once he experienced the results of Hof’s unique training method, he was hooked. As he writes in What Doesn’t Kill Us:
There is an entire hidden world of human biological responses that lies beyond our conscious minds that is intrinsically linked to the environment.
“Hacking” your biology, as one popular sentiment goes, means discovering those hidden responses. In Hof’s method, this includes, at the entry level, daily ice baths or showers and a sequence of hyperventilations and breath retentions. If you’ve ever heard Hof speak, you know he treats breathing as the gateway to seemingly inhuman feats.
But why the cold? As Carney argues, humans were, for a very long time, adapted to their environments. Automation and industry have changed that. We generally no longer need to kill or grow our food, build our own shelter, or flee from predators. Our tightly wound energy for physiological responses sits dormant. Exercising is one release, though the ways we often exercise—repetitive movements on machines—does not honor our diverse physiological ancestry.
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