Chilling Discoveries for Superior Athletic Performance

Unlock the hidden link between thermodynamics and your fitness routine as we sit down with Timmy Haman and delve into the cool world of palm cooling. Imagine if simply managing your body's heat could skyrocket your athletic performance—sounds like a superpower, right? Well, that's the reality Timmy stumbled upon, transforming from an overweight young adult into a fitness guru by tapping into the laws of science. Our discussion is peppered with eye-opening anecdotes, including how former NFL standout Greg Clark leveraged this method for his training, and a study revealing a jaw-dropping 144 percent boost in pull-up efficiency. Get ready to learn how a simple, yet innovative approach to your body temperature can turn your workout from good to great.

As we unravel the complex ballet of the body’s temperature regulation, you'll be fascinated to discover just how fine the line is between peak performance and overheating. Dive into the roles of brown fat and genetics in our ability to handle thermal stress, with personal tales hinting that our ancestors' climates might still echo in our comfort levels today. I put palm cooling to the test myself, with a plunge of my hands into icy water, and the results were nothing short of impressive—a testament to the power of staying cool under pressure. Join us for an enthralling conversation that could change the way you think about exercise and introduce you to the potential of the 'peak performance bar,' a tool designed to revolutionize temperature regulation for athletes everywhere.

Check out Prime Science by the Peak Performance Bar

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hello and welcome to Health and Fitness Redefined. I'm your host, anthony. Amen and welcome to another great episode. Guys, today we're going to talk about an interesting technique, diving through a little bit of thermodynamics. I know'm not, this isn't a physics podcast, but do personally about physics. Go over some interesting techniques, questions, very interested, uh theory, palm cooling technique, but I think it makes sense. So, without diving into the topic, let's welcome to the show, timmy harman. Timmy, it's a pleasure having you today hi, anthony.

Speaker 2: 0:40

yeah, it's a brilliant to be here and I'm really really psyched to talk about this subject. I find it very interesting. It's done great things for me, so, yeah, very happy to be on here.

Speaker 1: 0:50

Yeah, me too Excited to see what this is about, how we can dive into the topic a little more.

Speaker 2: 1:03

But before we really get into any of that, just tell the audience who you are and how you kind of stumbled into this world. Yeah, no sure. So basically my name is timmy and I'm originally from sweden. When I was a kid I did like a lot of people did fair amount of sports, played a bit of handball kind of became the main sport and around 15 16, they sent us to the gym to get a bit of experience of that. Then I ended up having a couple years of workouts, ended up working on cruise ships, came back from there, had actually been fired after having a bit too much fun and looked myself in the mirror.

Speaker 2: 1:35

I was 24 and I was just like overweight and yeah, I just felt crap really. So I felt like I need to get back to my more healthy younger days, started going back to the gym, working out, did good progress and so forth, and, you know, like studied engineering, so I'm interested in science, so read different things, different studies and, you know, get more and more into the nutritional area and all those things. And, yeah, kept on developing myself, making better progress. And a couple of years ago I was listening to a podcast where, uh, the human lab, which I'm sure a fair amount of you listeners might be aware of and came across this concept that was palm cooling and I was just like this is really, really interesting and yeah it, it has really helped me and yeah, it's a super can you say interesting concept where the how temperature really impacts your performance really impact your performance?

Speaker 1: 2:47

Yeah, I think it's. Let's talk about what it is right. So palm cooling just to kind of express the people. You're working out, you're there in the gym working out or you're going for a run. It's exactly what it sounds like. Yeah, exactly Ice on your palms, bring down the temperature in your hands in order to help increase performance, either in the next set, if you're doing more of a strength training routine, or increasing your cardiovascular side by helping naturally cool your body. But I mean, isn't this kind of I mean a lot of runners and I know from doing a bunch of Spartans that I've done in my life a lot of people will find like lakes or rivers and just douse their head in cold water to get that like kick of energy back to kind of hit the trails again. Isn't that very similar concept to that?

Speaker 2: 3:35

yeah, no, it definitely would so like if we kind of bring this back a bit. So how this works, because our body is, as most people are aware, a very, very advanced machine and it put in a lot of different protection mechanisms for things. That is dangerous and if we overheat we can die, and actually we don't need to increase our temperature too much or a lot before it started getting to dangerous territory. So our body has kind of simply put in a lot of defense mechanisms to ensure we do not overheat, and a part of that is that in our muscles there is an enzyme called kinase pure eight advanced name, and this one is heat sensitive and it this is a very key part of producing the atp. Uh, does your listeners kind of know what atp is? Or should we go into, yeah, what produces the atp in your muscles? And when the muscle heat up, the energy production goes down and it goes down very quickly and the same. Actually, this impacts how you feel mentally, because when it's really warm and when your body really heats up, what ensures that you don't want to kind of push yourself to overexhaustion and overheating? Because, once again, that's a kind of a dangerous area where, yeah, you, you can die and your muscles can cook. So if we can cool down our body systematically, we can perform for longer.

Speaker 2: 5:19

And they they've done both studies and anecdotal things around this, and one of the most interesting studies that I heard about or first at the Human man Lab podcast was a pull-up study where they had trained individuals coming in and they did 10 sets of pull-ups basically as many pull-ups as they could, resting for three minutes. Pull-ups, basically as many pull-ups as they could, resting for three minutes. Pull-ups for 10 sets. And then they came back and they did palm cooling between each set and they increased over these six weeks the amount of pull-ups they can do by 144 percent. And I mean anybody who's done a bit of strength training knows that that type of gain is just like insane, it's like fantastic.

Speaker 2: 6:12

Another thing that wasn't like scientific study but they had a NFL player in, because when they did this it's from a guy guy called dr heller at stanford university and some of their like former stanford football players started hearing about this. So they had one guy in, uh, greg clark, that used to pay tight end for uh, san francisco 49ers, and they asked him like what are you really good at? And he went like I'm good at dips, like I can do a lot of dips, and he could. He could do 40 dips. So that had him do five sets, or he did as many as he could. Basically sit in 40 and then rested three minutes, dropped down and he could do a total of like I think it was 103 reps on those five sets. And of the five sets he felt like I'm I'm tired, I don't want to do anything more.

Speaker 2: 7:07

And then they had him come in three days later, started cooling the palms of his hands between every set. First one he did actually 42. There was a couple of people watching so he could squeeze out a bit more. But then the next set he could do like 13 reps more than last time. And third set, fourth, that fifth set he could do more on each set. And he could then for those five sets do 135 reps. That's like a 30 increase just by palm cooling. And after five he felt like I'm not tired, I can continue. So he could do nine sets instead of the just five before. He felt like I'm too done to continue. He could increase the amount of workload. Who can do so much? They had him in for five weeks in total, did this twice a week and at the end of it, with the increase of sets total amount of sets and reps per set he increased 201%. And that's an NFL player at like peak physical condition, so like fantastic gains you can get for that.

Speaker 2: 8:23

And the reason why the cold the palms of the hands is that there is three parts of our body that has different type of blood vessels. It's the palms of our hands, uh, the like above the beard line in our face and below our feet. This is called glabrous skin. And it's called glabrous skin because we don't have any hair follicles in this one. I know most people think that they don't have hair all over their body, but even though we might not have hair all over our body, like there is hair follicles in all other areas of our body, even if we don't see the hair on all other areas of our body, even if we don't see the hair.

Speaker 2: 9:05

And what really makes an impact here is the different type of blood vessels we have, because those ones are tighter and instead of going through thin capillaries on the way to the heart, which kind of slows down the blood flow, it goes straight to the veins, which means that you have a shorter period and it goes quicker from these extremities to your heart. So if you really want to cool down or also actually heat up your body, these are the most effective surfaces. And if you think about this, like some of the like, we have certain things a bit instinctive If we are cold, we come out and we're cold, we're going to start rubbing our hands together and that is one of the most effective ways to actually heat up. And I think we've learned that a bit evolutionary, that that actually works. And if we come to it, say like, if we're a bit cold, there is an open fire, we're going to start kind of putting our hands to it, and I think that's another thing that we also have like a bit learned through our ancestors.

Speaker 1: 10:12

Yeah, I mean even that part of our body, right? So initially we start getting cold. Just as an example I'm getting cold thinking about it Our body is going to naturally start pulling the heat away from our hands, pulling the heat away from our feet, because it's going to try to protect our vital organs. So it's kind of drafting everything up on holding that heat internally. Which makes sense, it's keep the vital organs inside. And then, if you take it to the extreme what they noticed, especially with people that hike Everest and stuff, or if you've ever been in extreme cold climates you get really cold and then all of a sudden, after you reach a certain point, your body expunges all of the heat throughout the rest of your body and then people always talk about how now they're sweating and that's basically a sign that you're about to die, basically a sign that you're about to die If you ever get to that point you're in a really cold environment and you just feel like you need to strip your clothes off.

Speaker 1: 11:09

your body is going hypothermic and you're about to freeze to death, which is crazy to think about, how it just kind of pushes it all out and that's it. But interesting topic.

Speaker 2: 11:24

Yeah, for sure. So that's a bit about how it works and why we use the palms of our hands and, as I said, the performance increases they've done is, and it's huge. If you look at an NFL player that can increase his workout load by 200% in five weeks, it beats. They haven't done any direct kind of comparison study etc to steroids, but like, if you do look at what they the gains are one, two, three percent a week or something like that then this is much, much, much more than that and that's a bit of difference to how cold of temperatures you're exposing your hands to.

Speaker 1: 12:07

So, for example, is it 50 degree water, is it 40, 32 below freezing? Is it ice? And I'm talking obviously in Fahrenheit. I don't know if you're in London, but just, was there different specs of a difference if I expose my hands to just lukewarm water all the way down to solid ice?

Speaker 2: 12:26

yeah, so this is actually really, really important. It needs to be the right temperature, and maybe I should have calculated this in a fahrenheit, but it's about 15 16 degrees celsius, so 45, so 45 to 52-ish if I'm doing my math right.

Speaker 2: 12:45

Yeah, something like that. Because if you do too cold, you're going to have what's called vasoconstriction, which means that your blood vessels is going to constrict because this is too cold to be kind of comfortable and it's once again a little bit of a danger for the body to be kind of comfortable and it's once again a little bit of a danger for the body. So if it gets too cold, like if you just hold an ice cube or something like that, you're just going to have vasoconstriction. It's almost going to be counterproductive in that sense because the air, the normal air, would just cool you as well or better, because you don't have the vasoconstriction. So it is that kind of I'm not going to say too narrow type of temperature thing. But like you want it to be, you don't want to go below 15 degrees generally. One thing that or we could say that the studies they've done is about 15 degree type of cooling.

Speaker 2: 13:42

What I have experienced myself when I've done a lot of tests and we can get into a little bit of how I started testing this myself as well a lot of tests and we can get into a little bit of how I started testing this myself as well. But is that the the warmer you are, the longer into your workout you get, the colder the cooling can be? You can kind of make a comparison to that like if, if you're done a workout and it's cold outside, if you're like really your body's warm and you go outside, it's going to. If you're like really your body's warm and you go outside, it's going to feel okay, you're not going to feel super cold. But if you're actually a little bit chilly already and you go outside, you're going to feel it much more. So when you heat it up, your body kind of want to dump heat lack of better expression. So if you're really warm, it's going to be more effective and better at dumping this heat through the palms of your hands and other areas. But it is about 50 degrees.

Speaker 1: 14:37

I wonder if the same correlation can be drawn for if you're having a fever right? So you mentioned earlier that the specific it's by a degree. I mean you're going for just fahrenheit comparisons 98.5 degrees of the normal human body temperature. You get that to 100. So that's only 1.5 degree difference which is now considered a fever.

Speaker 2: 15:00

But then if you get up to like 104, 105, that's hospitalization, that's six degrees of difference Exactly, and that's kind of like telling you how afraid the body is of overheating and how much it really tries to make sure that this doesn't happen. Because, as you're saying, like just a couple of degrees of the body heat increase, like it isn't much. If you look about it like 98 to 105 and you're like you're close to dying, like that is a pretty small spectrum. So, yeah, it kind of shows how dangerous this is for the body and how important these defense mechanisms are to keep us alive in the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 15:48

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I want to talk about kind of different mechanics about it. We mentioned a little pre-show, but this is literally a topic I've thought about. When I get the funding for it, I want to do a research study on it. So I think genetics play a role in our heat and cold tolerance, and I don't mean just where you're born, I mean what your ethnicity is in general. And I use myself and I know that's a horrible study as an example, for N equals one. But I looked at my wife and my wife is Irish like Slovakian, irish like Slovakian. That's where all her genetics come from. And then mine are Sicilian.

Speaker 1: 16:36

Those are two polar opposite climates, right. You have one that's hot and dry and one that's cold. So you put us both outside in 50 degree weather 40 degree weather like just above freezing and say let's go for a run. 40 degree weather like just above freezing, and say let's go for a run, I'm dying after a 10th of a mile, and she feels rejuvenated and excited and wants to go on America. You flip that temperature to, let's say, 85 degrees Fahrenheit. She goes a 10th of a mile and is dying. I feel like I'm on cloud nine and just I'm able to go 85 90. I was telling you pre I actually went for a run during a heat warning and I never run. This is how much I love the heat.

Speaker 1: 17:19

it was 100 degrees, 80 humidity and I felt great like the first 10 minutes. It was a little hard to get going, but all of a sudden my body went boom, woke up, ran two, three miles in the woods and I was ecstatic. Yeah, it's interesting how the body responds to different climates.

Speaker 2: 17:40

It is for sure. So when it comes to the normal kind of heat thing, do you know what brown fat is? Yes, yeah, so obviously, when it comes to the kind of overarching tolerance of heat or cold, like I normally do, the comparison like I'm originally the same from Sweden, if you think about it, and same as like northern US, canada, etc. Like 200 years ago there was no central heating, there was no like people lived outside. Ago there was no central heating, there was no like people lived outside.

Speaker 2: 18:11

How did they survive when it's 35 fahrenheit or celsius below, or like I mean zero or or even colder?

Speaker 2: 18:17

Well, we're evolutionary, adapted to that in a completely different way than we expose ourselves today.

Speaker 2: 18:25

But because we don't expose ourselves today, we kind of lost a lot of the ability to actually manage those temperatures as humans. And I think I mean all around a lot of things about the round brown fat obviously helps you keep warm, but it also actually helps you to manage when you're overheating, generally, like it improves your overarching ability to manage different temperatures. So I think, kind of comparing you and your wife, it could be that partly she has exposed herself historically more, um, and I don't know, the only study that I have seen, or something where I have seen where it's kind of like evolutionary difference, because you would kind of expect a big evolutionary difference if someone's brought up in Africa or like have ancestors from Africa, versus where I'm from, from Sweden, because it's much colder, but there isn isn't the small studies that I've seen about that. There hasn't even a lot of difference. I saw something about people from like malaysia that had as much, if not even more, brown fat than people from europe, which is not what you would expect, considering from it from a climate perspective.

Speaker 1: 19:46

But yeah, yeah, pretty, it's interesting, it's got to be something that dictates your cold and heat tolerance. That everyone always says, oh, it's build-up to it. Right, I've tried building up to the cold. I live in New York, I'm more cold than warm and it's just chronically.

Speaker 2: 20:05

Just trying to be outside. Yeah, it could be that you have lost all your brown fat. You can't kind of like rebuild that one, because often I mean you can, with cold exposure and different things you eat etc. You can increase the amount of brown or beige fat you have. But yeah, it might be that you don't have that ability. Yeah, it might be that you don't have that ability. I would be interesting to see any research if there is people who kind of like can't even accumulate any further brown fat to manage that better. But it's super interesting that you're thriving in the heat, where most people would kind of really struggle with that yeah, I literally will.

Speaker 1: 20:48

In the summer, like when the gym's closed, I turn the AC off, let the gym get up to like 80 85 degrees and I'm just like let's go wow, okay, I couldn't train in that environment at all.

Speaker 2: 21:02

I'd just be like exhausted on the floor.

Speaker 1: 21:04

It's it's fun, man, when you you just start pouring sweat and then your body just regulates itself and you just get this like crazy, like kind of like the pump. You just see this crazy burst of energy that you didn't feel like you've had before and you just keep going and going and going and going. It's a lot of fun, definitely a lot of fun. I I something that I know. It's a lot of fun, definitely a lot of fun. I something that I know it's totally unique and different from most people. I just last summer I ran 10k up in Pennsylvania and Palmerton. It was 95 80 percent humidity. Most people were tapping out because of the heat. I mean, the race itself was hard, but what defeated me wasn't I finished, wasn't the heat, it was the sunburn, because I didn't wear a shirt. The sunburn eventually got me. Maybe you got to feel a little fatigued, but like the heat itself, I was watching all these people that run these races often are dying and I'm just like, like this doesn't bother me at all.

Speaker 2: 22:11

Yeah, so I mean like, obviously, when we're talking about the palm cooling bit here, you do you do kind of a pain to be a bit of an outliner, and from your experience you are an outliner as well. Uh, is that what you're saying in this?

Speaker 1: 22:25

yeah, I think so. I think I'm just different. Right, it's not for everybody. I mean, maybe there's something genetically different. I would love to figure that out. I will see if there's something in our dna that dictates how much of a tolerance we have to heat and cold extremes, because it's it's mind-blowing. Like I was talking about the cold before, I did a spartan race on long island and they there's no mountains, so their challenge is that it's in late November, so temperatures are 35 degrees 40, so you're talking like 3 to 6 degrees Celsius, and I couldn't do it.

Speaker 1: 23:04

Like everyone was ahead of me, I was dragging everyone down. I would try to like get moving and just be out of breath and it was crazy, just the difference of how much the cold affected me more than it affected everybody else.

Speaker 2: 23:23

Yeah, that is super interesting because, like I mean I would it would be really interesting to see how palm cooling if it kind of maybe I mean simply doesn't work for you, where it does for a lot of other people like I. Yeah, there is tons of both anecdotal stories and, as I said, the studies. They've even done studies on obese people and had them walk on treadmills and it made them really good benefits compared to the placebo group or the control group.

Speaker 1: 23:54

So, yeah, it would be very interesting to have you try that and see if for you it kind of kind of maybe works out counterproductive for some genetic weird reason yeah, I mean, maybe it has something to do with body fat, right, maybe that's the correlation, maybe it's how much body fat somebody has on them, comparatively, because the more fat you're storing and the more weight you have, the higher your temperature is going to go, because fat is does produce heat yeah, no, definitely that was kind of like the hypothesis, so to speak, in that study that they study that for a lot of people that are overweight, obviously they're more insulated, they heat up quicker and they're not kind of used to exercise, get going with exercise and so forth, and therefore seeing if this can really help could be very beneficial to get people to start exercise.

Speaker 2: 24:52

When they're in in that position and the um, the results were really good, like their waist circumference decreased two inches and they could increase the heart rate they worked with from 130, 35 to 155, or something like that, and the control group didn't have any of those benefits comparably over like six weeks. So obviously that kind of insulation of fat there makes a difference. But then, if we look at it, the nfl player like greg clark, I mean I I haven't seen a photo of him then, but I think we can assume his body fat wasn't like sky high, um. So yeah, it does seem like you might be a bit of an outliner in how you just thrive in the heat.

Speaker 1: 25:46

Yeah, my wife thinks it's weird too, so it's okay. So it's definitely interesting how it's different for everybody.

Speaker 2: 25:58

But what are some things that you've done yourself? Yeah, so obviously, when I read about these studies and I just spent 15 years in the gym and I heard about this and I was like this seems crazy, like it's such big changes for people, and I was like I got to try this one way. And the people who came up with this, they had a product that you could kind of have a weight list for, but it was $1,500 for one hand. You need both, so there's three grand. And I was like I want to try this, but not that much.

Speaker 2: 26:26

So I basically took bucket of water and brought that one to the gym or the bucket, fill it up with water and then I had ice that I fed in this bucket to make sure that it kept around 15 degrees and celsius, but yeah, 45, 50 fahrenheit, and had a temperature meter in it and I sat and I wanted to kind of mimic what around 15 degrees Celsius, but, yeah, 45, 50 Fahrenheit, and had a temperature meter in it and I sat and I wanted to kind of mimic what they were doing. So I did pull-ups and a couple of other exercises, rested for three minutes, put my hands in the water, wiped them off and so forth and I actually increased on shoulder press where I did the best at 48% in five weeks and I'm 40 plus 15 years of bit over 15 years and of experience in the gym and I was like I haven't seen this kind of game since I was a newbie. But I'll be honest, it was pretty tiresome to have a water bucket and sitting there and putting your hands and wiping yourself like I mean, the pts at my gym they were just like call me the iceman, and people came up to me like what are you doing, mate? Um, so I I couldn't like I didn't, couldn't defend myself to really continue exactly doing that. But I had, um, I had some ice packs because I've created a brown fat activating vest, so I brought that.

Speaker 2: 27:46

One had some towels and stuff, but I realized that that wasn't optimal because the towel really takes away, like it's a very insulating material. But it kind of worked and I got some gains from it. But then I just felt like I need to do something further with this. So that's when I started creating or like really thinking like, can I do something further with this? So that's when I started creating or like really thinking like, can I do something that is really effective and easy to use, and that's when I created what I call the peak performance bar, which is a simply a metal bar that you hold in your hands, fill it up with water and you have ice sticks that you put in it to keep the right temperature, and it works really really good, like it's yeah.

Speaker 1: 28:31

That's so interesting. So it's just a bar you just hold, instead of having a giant bucket of water and everyone staring at you.

Speaker 2: 28:37

Yeah, exactly, there's just a bar like this that I put, hold my hands like this and yeah, keeps me cool and it's significantly easier than my yeah, my water bucket and ice and yeah, that was, that was tedious, I'm not gonna lie, yeah I can definitely, definitely see that.

Speaker 1: 28:55

So, yeah, that's definitely something interesting. I think it's something worth trying out for people just to get an idea of, hey, does this work, does this not work? I mean, if you're looking especially in the athlete side of it, if you're trying to get that one percent better, there's always things you can do to improve one percent?

Speaker 2: 29:13

yeah, exactly and and I think overarching, just thinking about what, how temperature impacts, you like, because as we've seen in in these studies, like there is a lot of and it's not like I mean, if you're a top athlete, yeah, you're looking for the one percent, but I mean I'm more of a recreational style athlete and but it can really make much more than one percent on, I think, on all these levels if we're looking in comparing to what's been done in the past yeah, definitely, definitely agree, timmy.

Speaker 1: 29:45

I want to ask you the final questions. I said we're just going to wrap this show up, so the first question is if you were to summarize this episode in one or two sentences, what would be your take-home message?

Speaker 2: 29:55

my take-home message would be temperature has a huge impact on your performance, and keeping cool is very effective to improve your performance, and the best way to do that is cooling the palms of your hands. Definitely, definitely agree. Take a message.

Speaker 1: 30:11

And then the second question is how can people find you and get a hold of you?

Speaker 2: 30:17

Yeah, so if they want to get a hold of us, go to our website primesciencecouk, so primesciencecouk, so primesciencecouk, or just Google Prime Science, or on Instagram, primesciencehealth. That's where you can find most of us, and we're going to expand a bit on the social media. It will be primesciencehealth in other platforms as well, when we get the time to do that.

Speaker 1: 30:44

I absolutely love it. Timmy, thank you for coming on today and thank you, guys, for listening to this week's episode of Health to Fitness Redefined. Don't forget, hit that subscribe button and join us next week, as you're in this ever-changing field, and remember fitness is medicine. Until next time, thank you. Outro Music.