AESTHETIC GODS POOL POSTING

Mediterranean posting hours.

Views of Bcharre, Lebanon.

Traditional Palestinian dress

How to start: You can begin by taking Scottish showers, starting the shower warm and ending it at the coldest temperature for a few seconds. Progressively increasing the time that you stay in the shower while it's cold. After a week try getting in the shower while it's cold, and taking your entire shower on the coldest temperature that your shower can go. Not only is this good for all of your biological processes, but also your mind. You are voluntarily facing discomfort. After you can do this, find a body of water near you, be it the ocean, lake, etc. and start going in during the winter months of the year. Make sure you don't push it and put yourself in a situation that could be unsafe, start by only going in for a few seconds and gradually increase your time in the water from that point on.

There's so much more to cover on this subject, but that's the basis. There's plenty of videos explaining how to do the breathing method Wim does himself, he's even wrote a book on the subject if you are interested in going in more depth. The point of this being, is there's no reason not to be doing this if you care about your health. The method involves 40 or so breaths of big inhales and shorter exhales. On the final exhale, you hold your breath for as long as you can. Repeat 3 times.

"We also found that when subjects practiced the breathing technique, epinephrine levels in the blood went very high. The results of this study, which we published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA (PNAS), demonstrated that the Wim Hof phenomenon is a real effect. It’s not that Wim is genetically different or anything like that. It’s that people who participate in the Wim Hof Method could voluntarily activate their sympathetic nervous systems (part of the autonomic nervous system) and thereby suppress their immune response." https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/20/7379.full.pdf

"What did you find when you studied the Wim Hof Method with intervention and control groups?" "In that study, subjects were healthy volunteers who had no previous experience with the Wim Hof method. Over a ten-day period, they went through a training with Wim, partly in Poland and partly in the Netherlands, in which they learned the three parts of the Wim Hof Method, including meditation, breathing exercises, and cold exposure. We also had another group of comparable healthy volunteers who were not trained in these interventions. When those ten days were up, we subjected both groups to the previously mentioned endotoxemia experiment. We injected members of each group with those same bacterial compounds to induce an inflammatory response, and lo and behold, what we saw was that the group trained by Wim had much lower levels of inflammatory mediators in the blood, as well as fewer and less intense symptoms, including fever."

"What Wim’s blood work did show was that his levels of the autonomic nervous system hormone epinephrine were very high. So we could hypothesize that very high levels of epinephrine could suppress the immune response. But because this was a case study of only one subject, the results cannot serve as scientific evidence to support that hypothesis. You need to have a controlled group study. That’s when Wim said: “Okay, you want to do this in group? That’s no problem. I’m not special. I can teach this to anybody.”

"We followed up on this by subjecting Wim to what we call an endotoxemia experiment, in which we inject the bacterial compound I talked about before into healthy volunteers. This is safe to do because it’s just the part of the bacterium the immune system recognizes and responds to; it is not whole and cannot replicate, so it cannot infect you. Instead, when we inject this compound into healthy volunteers, they get flulike symptoms for just a couple of hours, and we can measure the increase of inflammatory markers in the blood."

Immune System "In our case study of Wim, we first put him in this ice bath—something he does normally as well for his record attempts. (He holds the world record for length of time spent submerged in ice.) Before and after the ice bath, we took a sample of his blood and stimulated that blood in the laboratory with bacterial compounds to activate and observe the immune response in blood. What we saw was that his immune cells reacted much less to this bacterial compound in the sample taken after he was in the ice bath than in the one taken before, implying some suppression of the immune system involved with that exposure to cold. Testing his blood, we also found very high levels of hormones pointing towards activation of the autonomic nervous system in the post-ice-bath sample, which we thought could be a factor involved in this immune system suppression."

Reduce inflammation "It is fairly common knowledge that most ailments and illness that we experience begins with some sort of inflammation in the body. What is not common knowledge is that implementing the Wim Hof Method into your life can actually reduce levels of inflammation. The study by PNAS (the same study from the last section) found the following: Healthy volunteers practicing the learned techniques exhibited profound increases in the release of epinephrine, which in turn led to increased production of anti-inflammatory mediators and subsequent dampening of the pro-inflammatory cytokine response elicited by intravenous administration of bacterial endotoxin. This study could have important implications for the treatment of a variety of conditions associated with excessive or persistent inflammation, especially autoimmune diseases in which therapies that antagonize pro-inflammatory cytokines have shown great benefit.”

How to start You can begin by taking Scottish showers, starting the shower warm and ending it at the coldest tempature for a few seconds. Progressively increasing the time that you stay in the shower while it's cold. After a week try getting in the shower while it's cold, and taking your entire shower on the coldest temperature that your shower can go. Not only is this good for all of your biological processes, but also your mind. You are voluntarily facing discomfort. After you can do this, find a body of water near you, be it the ocean, lake, etc. and start going in during the winter months of the year. Make sure you don't push it and put yourself in a situation that could be unsafe, start by only going in for a few seconds and gradually increase your time in the water from that point on.

Cold exposure training and Wim Hof technique Your cardiovascular system is what pumps blood throughout your body, it's what delivers nutrients to all the right places when needed, toxins, acids, 02 and C02. "A proper working cardiovascular system means a good working infrastructure." "The interesting part of the Wim Hof Method is that the impact of cold exposure, as well as the WHM breathing, strains these little muscles in the veins to fully close (vasoconstrict) to keep the heat in, and to fully open up (vasodilate) to get the heat out of the body. When these muscles work properly, you are also giving a rest to you heart, as it doesn’t have to pump that hard!" Cold exposure training will help you lower blood pressure, resting heart rate, raise your immune system (more on this later) and so much more.

Atlas Mountains, Morocco 🇲🇦