TEMPER YOUR BODY LIKE STEEL!

To keep your soul and body bold,

Expose your frame to heat and cold,

Both will be young and strong, they will –

Just temper them like stainless steel.

“The Athletes’ March” by Lebedev-Kumach

 Cold that heals

Cold and heat therapy turned Suvorov from a weak boy into a general whose army successfully crossed the Alps in winter.

Cold and heat therapy, such as the sauna or cold showers, is an amazing way to rehabilitate the body and relieve your spirit of stress and depression. This therapy turned Suvorov from a puny teenager into a legendary general whose army successfully crossed the Alps in winter (1799).

Porfiriy Ivanov at 70

Porfiriy Ivanov, the Russian cold and heat therapy guru, used exposure to cold water as a remedy for a fatal illness and helped thousands of his followers. His system of physical and spiritual rehabilitation called “Baby” consists of just 12 paragraphs on a single page. It reads: “Oh my dearest children, all your maladies come from opulence, from warm housing, copious meals, and idleness. Be not afraid of cold –it mobilizes the body’s defense forces. Cold produces health “hormones” in the body. Victory is more important than the small joys of life.  Victory must become your lifestyle, do not ever become a loser… Why would you need medical treatment when you  can and must simply prevent the disease from invading your body?”

The power of cold

The body has a natural capacity for resistance and adaptation. Cold is the easiest way to launch these mechanisms.

What is the healing power of cold? The body has a natural capacity for resistance and adaptation. However, like any other capacity, it weakens if not used, stimulated and trained. The core of our adaptation mechanism is the triggering of cortisone secretion by the adrenal glands (so named because of their location on top of the kidneys).

Yogis in Tibet take part in an intriguing competition.  They sit on the ground half-naked. Each man wraps himself in a sheet soaked in icy water and must dry it on his body. As soon as the sheet has become dry, it is again dipped in the water and placed on the yogi's body to be dried as before. The one who has dried the largest number of sheets is acknowledged as the winner. 

These glands of course produce the famous adrenalin that makes the person feel nervous. This hormone of stress and anxiety increases the heartbeat rate, elevates blood pressure, and prepares the body for defense. If additional action is required, the adrenal glands start releasing cortisone, a steroid hormone that physicians sometimes use for injection to suppress serious joint inflammation or to alleviate the suffocating pulmonary edema in patients with asthma. However, this hormone is produced naturally by our body, and the easiest natural way to trigger its production is cold therapy.

What is cold therapy?

Cold therapy is an evidence-based systematic use of the cold to increase the resilience of the body.

Cold therapy is an evidence-based systematic use of the cold to increase the resilience of the body. This technique must be applied gradually, on a regular and patient-specific basis. If too vigorous, cold therapy may harm an unprepared patient, so the intensity of treatment should increase slowly, and daily procedures should never be skipped. The best way to start cold therapy is with cold water treatment.

Mourners at Porfiriy Ivanov’s funeral noted that his body showed no signs of rigor mortis and had the golden skin color of a living person.

There are three stages of the body’s reaction to cold water. At first, small blood vessels under the skin go into spasms. In the second stage, these vessels adapt to cold and expand, causing the skin to redden, arterial blood pressure to drop, and adrenal glands to start producing cortisone. At this stage, the patient feels better and becomes more active. The third stage starts if you overdo this therapy. The adaptive capacity of the body gets exhausted: blood vessels go into spasm again, the skin becomes bluish, and the body starts shivering. After systematic cold water therapy, the first stage becomes shorter and the second stage arrives faster. Just make sure the third one never comes!

Water is the ideal medium for cold therapy

The administration of the cold by means of plain old water is not difficult to measure and control. Do you prefer to proceed slowly and carefully? Start with local or partial cold therapy rather than an ice-cold shower. I would recommend “freezing” your feet first. Do it separately for each foot, observing the reddening of the skin. If this reaction is slow to come, speed it up by briskly rubbing your feet with a towel. The colder the water, the shorter the time of contact with it should be. Once you get used to cold therapy applied to your feet and start enjoying it, you can extend it to other parts of your body, starting with your arms, shoulders, the back of your head, and neck. When you come to love it – continue by pouring the ice-cold staff on your face, chest, back, and thighs.

Once you get used to cold therapy applied to your feet and start enjoying it, you can extend it to other parts of your body, commencing with arms, shoulders, the back of your head and neck.

After you have mastered this technique, you may wish to try more intense methods of cold therapy involving at least a short exposure of the naked body to snow, or water or air at below 32oF.

If you made friends with cold water, feel perfectly safe to stroll barefoot in the snow for a few minutes or use snow for a vigorous rub of your arms, neck and shoulders. A person who has once enjoyed the surge of amazing inner warmth after cold therapy, has had a great nap outdoors in winter, and has learned how to breathe freely, would never give up this incredible natural remedy for anything.

There are hardly any contraindications to initial cold therapy. Before moving on to more intense techniques, however, better consult a physician who uses cold therapy himself. I completely agree with Porfiriy Ivanov’s words: “Victory must become your lifestyle, do not ever become a loser… Why would you need medical treatment when you  can and must simply prevent the disease from invading your body?”

Cold treatment improves resistance to infections, suppresses inflammation and allergies, soothes the nervous system, and propels your energy and metabolism to the next level. Hence it is good for anyone suffering from pain and stiffness of the joints, an allergy, chronic sinusitis, anxiety, loss of sleep, or depression. Do not let disease into your system. Teach it to produce “the health hormone”. Be a winner!