AMA #16: Exploring hot and cold therapy

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, Ask Me Anything, or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to Ask Me Anything or AMA episode number 16 In today's episode, we do a real deep dive discussion into all things hot and cold therapy. Now coming into this call, we actually intended to cover many more questions.
We probably only covered by topic 20% of what we intended to cover. But once we got into the groove of going into this, we just decided that we were going to stay with hot and cold and we basically ran out of time. Now this is a topic we get asked about all the time. And frankly, it's a topic we've spent a lot of time doing research on. We did our first internal report on this back in 2013 or 2014, and then did an enormous rehash of it in December of 19, January of 20 And it's sort of on the heels of that that Bob and I basically try to offer as much insight as we have into the ins and outs of hot and cold therapy. Again, if you're really not interested in this topic, I'm going to be honest with you, I don't think there's a lot in this episode, you're going to find that interesting. But that said, I would encourage you to give it a thought because this is something that my mind has changed quite a bit on over the past couple of years. I think the data have become much stronger, at least in favor of one of these therapies. So without further delay, I hope you will enjoy AMA number 16
Bob, how are you, man?

**Bob Kaplan** (2:06)
Doing well, Peter. How are you?

**Peter Attia** (2:08)
Well, it's great to be doing another AMA. I feel like we haven't done one in a while. We missed our last cycle.
Since we last spoke, as you know, I've had this move which has created a little bit of stress in the short term, joy in the long term.

**Bob Kaplan** (2:25)
Moving super easy, right?

**Peter Attia** (2:26)
Yeah, have you ever had to do a move with kids? I know you've moved across the country a bunch of times as a young man, but have you had to do the family?

**Bob Kaplan** (2:36)
No, totally different. I remember a family business, I had to get secret clearance. So you had to do this whole form, and it said, where have you lived in the last 10 to 20 years? And it covered college years.
And so I probably did 10 to 20 moves in 10 to 20 years, but never with the kids, totally different situation where I probably could pack everything up into one of those little pods versus kids and moving from house to house. How's that working for you?

**Peter Attia** (3:03)
No, I mean, it's fine now, but it was really challenging, much more so than I expected. And I remember about two months before the move, everybody saying things, including my therapist saying, just to set your expectations. A move like of this nature is among the three most stressful events to a marriage. And I was like, come on, what are you talking about? They're like, yep, it's on par with divorce, death and something else. And I was like, that is not even possible.
I don't know what kind of mental midgets you're dealing with here, but there's no way that's going to be stressful. And in the weeks leading up to the move, all of a sudden, my body just started hurting. My QLs were totally fired up. I just didn't feel good when I was lifting.
Everything in my body felt horrible.
And amazingly, after the move was done, all of that stuff almost overnight changed. And that was kind of an aha moment of, it's such a cliche to say we hold stress in our body, but we do. I can't actually mechanistically explain what it is about stress and why higher levels of cortisol or catecholamines or things like that would actually lead to physical pain in my body, but there's no question about it. So, glad it's over.

**Bob Kaplan** (4:21)
That was actually one of the questions was around that. How has your move been?

**Peter Attia** (4:27)
I haven't even seen the questions.