Imagine being a football player on the defensive line. He has practiced over and over getting his system into a state of anticipation. As soon as the ball is snapped, he then explodes. The actual play completes the two pieces of excitability, the first being the anticipation and the second being the actual explosion. At the end of the play and especially at the end of the game, his muscles themselves were strained and his sugar delivery system was also strained. During his recovery both his muscles and his nutrition delivery system will recover in a stronger form.

The principles for the football player to become more explosive apply everywhere. Suppose that the offense ran the same play every time. After a while the lineman would just know right where to go and tackle the guy every time, and with less effort every time. He would actually become less and less excitable. But that never happens because the entire point of the offensive is to be unexpected, so the defense is always dealing with unpredictability. That is why the defensive player will keep getting more and more excitable as long as he plays football. That also means his memory will keep getting better. His energy will keep getting better as well. All because of excitability training.

Keep in mind that there are two pieces of excitability. The actual anticipation and the explosion. In order feel more alert, you don’t have to actually explode. You just have to be in a state of anticipation. If ,however, you only train anticipation and not explosion, your excitability will eventually decrease. Notice that during the anticipation sugar is automatically going to flood the system. Eventually the body would have to reduce the capacity of the flow of the sugar which we go into in our article about deconditioning. It is simple however. Repetitive anticipation without activity floods the body with sugar, and the body just learns to divert the sugar to fat cells, or via some other mechanism.

Cold water therapy is an almost perfect example of training the physiology of anticipation. This one treatment illustrates a major theme of how our bodies work. We need to keep out internal temperature at a certain temperature for it to function. When exposed to a temperature below that point, the blood vessels to the skin and limbs constrict in an effort to protect the blood in the vital organs from being exposed to the cold. This is sort of an aside, but once the temperature of the skin drops below 15˚ celsius (59˚ F) the blood vessels dilate again to protect the skin from frostbite.

The second major effect of the cold is that blood is shunted to the brain. But it is not just that blood is shunted to the brain, but at the same time sugar is mobilized from the liver, and the end result is that the brain is now very alert. This generic reaction occurs whenever physically threatened and enables you to be very strong and remember everything later as if in slow motion. It is your memory more than anything else that requires some degree of excitability and it is the most common reason we use excitability training. For now, just understand that a state of hypervigilance requires a certain type of fitness that can easily be trained in the same way it can easily be untrained.

Like every FAD, cold therapy is guaranteed to help a lot of people and cause even more damage because good marketing requires information to be presented in an incomplete way. The goal is for you to understand how excitability works, and understand that there are probably more people whose excitability is way too high and at the same time there are people whose excitability is way too low. The first step is to understand which one you are.

Cold could be a symbol for any threat. At any point there are threats all around you. Two people could sit on a couch. One might fall asleep after 30 seconds while the other one is worried about the couch breaking and gets more and more awake by the minute. One will end up anxious their whole life while the other will end up losing their memory. Either person could train themselves to interpret the environment more accurately.

Here is how it is supposed to work and we will use the two most common ways we would increase excitability. The first is with cold water and the second is with strength/explosive training. Suppose you go in the shower at 80 degrees. It will feel cold, but for some people if they did this repetitively it would eventually become relaxing. They get so strong at shunting their blood around to keep their temperature consistent, and and the same time the receptors in their skin get used to the temperature. The end result is actually a person who is less excitable to being expose to cold. They, instead of before being the type who is worried sitting on the couch will become a person who might now fall asleep on the couch. Of course it would take quite a bit of training and it would be pretty difficult to change quickly.

To understand that excitability is really not much about cold water, let’s look at a simple example of weight lifting. Imagine getting all pumped up to lift 20 lbs. Your body, when anticipating lifting the weight, would react in the same way it did with cold water. The effect is that sugary blood would squirt to the brain. But what if you practiced for several months lifting 20 lbs. As you get stronger, the 20 lbs would actually be easy and now you are actually less excitable than when you started. In fact that is exactly what we do with people who are too excitable. We could even say that when you are repetitively lifting something relative light you are putting yourself in a physiology of endurance, not excitability.

When training excitabilty, you have to keep lowering the temperature. You should start at 85 degrees just to be safe in the same way when you exercising the more vulnerable you are be sure to not do anything too drastic. If after a few minutes of 85 degrees you get used to the temperature, it means you can lower the temperature to 84, and so on. As you get stronger, it becomes slightly more difficult to train excitability but you can just keep going colder. At a certain temperature you would not be able to adapt so you can use it indefinitely and for some people suffering from their brain going to sleep after no adventure for decades, they will need all the help they can get.

Weight lifting is a more complete way to train excitabilty than cold therapy. That is because excitability has two parts. The first part has to do with being alert. The second part is actually doing something like tackling the quarterback or jumping in the air. If you only train the alert part and not the movement part you end up getting good at flooding the body with sugar without getting good at actually eating the sugar. It is really that simple.