In this episode of “Fitness Simplified Podcast”, Brooke Davis interviews Janelle Strayer, the founder of Vitality, a wellness studio specializing in cryotherapy and sauna benefits, and cold plunging. Janelle shares her journey from aspiring doctor to wellness entrepreneur, highlighting the transformative effects of cold therapy on her mental and physical health. The conversation delves into the physiological cryotherapy and sauna benefits, the impact on cortisol and stress levels, and practical advice on incorporating these modalities into daily routines. Janelle also discusses the science behind brown fat and its role in metabolism, as well as the importance of understanding contraindications for these therapies.
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Contents
[Brooke]
Welcome to the Fitness Simplified podcast. I’m Brooke Davis, Women’s Functional Nutritionist and Fitness Specialist with Elysian Women’s Wellness, and I’m here to simplify your fitness. Hello, hello, everyone.
Welcome back to the Fitness Simplified podcast. I’m Brooke Davis, Functional Nutritionist and Women’s Fitness Specialist with Elysian Women’s Wellness. Today on the Fitness Simplified podcast, we are super excited to welcome Janelle Strayer, the innovative mind behind Vitality, a studio that provides cryotherapy, sauna, and cold plunging.
With a background in pre-med and massage therapy, Janelle brings a unique perspective to holistic health. So grab a cozy spot and let’s dive into how these therapies can actually fit into your approach to health and wellness. Janelle, thank you so much for coming on today.
I am super excited to have this chat and share all of the wealth of information that you have about these modalities.
[Janelle]
Well, thank you for asking me to be on. I was very excited. I’m excited for our health and wellness fair that we’re going to be doing together too, so I actually get to meet you in person.
I’ve been following you for a while.
[Brooke]
Yeah, me too. I know. I’m really excited for that.
So to start, I would just love to hear a little bit about what drove you to start your business and maybe a little into your journey of health and wellness.
[Janelle]
Okay. Yeah. Originally went to school.
I thought I was going to be a doctor. I thought I could not be successful in life unless I was a doctor, a surgeon of some sort. And so I ended up wanting to do physical therapy, so I got into pre-med with health and fitness at SOU was my original degree.
And then I was waiting for George Fox’s physical therapy program to come out, and that was for another year. So I ended up getting a job just to pass time, and I ended up getting into surgery and really loved it. So I ended up not going to physical therapy school.
I did that for about five years, and then I switched to anesthesia at the hospital and really loved that, the adrenaline and the excitement. You get to be around a lot of surgeons, a lot of medical issues. I kind of fell out of love with the system, and obviously the hospital and surgeries are there for a reason, but they’re not really caring for you, and they speak on a lot of things that they don’t have a lot of knowledge about.
And I always had a side job working in coffee or something like that, so I got a side job as a massage therapist. During COVID, I just went on my own, and I was able to support me and my son with just my massage career. And during COVID, obviously it was hard for everybody, so I started doing the 75-day hard and cold therapy.
It changed my life. I wasn’t mentally in the best place. Physically, my body hurt from upping my massages that I was doing every week, and I didn’t realize how much it changed my life mentally, and I just became a kind of a different person.
I’m just a really calm person. My stress level was lower. Being a single mom can be hard.
So I was fixing up a house and got really into real estate and investment properties, and I just kind of wanted to offer this to everybody. So I’m super passionate about cold therapy, and then I wanted just to add it to massage. I always give people an ice pack when they leave for massage and tell them to go home and ice and drink lots of water so they’re not sore.
And so I was like, well, I’ll just add this. It’s a little simple cryotherapy. Go home.
Feel better. And then there was no cryo in the valley, small valley, and it just blew up and kind of took on a mind of its own. And now I’m sitting here two and a half years later as a business owner.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I just make it up every day.
But yeah, we’ve expanded. I said I would never get a sauna. I have two of them now.
Compression therapy, I thought it was gimmicky. Now it’s like one of my loves of my life. And then I was all about cryo, and everybody wanted a cold plunge.
I was like, I’ll never get a cold plunge. We have a cold plunge now. So that’s my story in a nutshell.
[Brooke]
Awesome. Awesome. I love that.
And yeah, I can resonate so much with so much of it. And I think a lot of other people can too. But I was similarly when I was like, okay, I’m going to go be a PT.
I want to get into the physical world and help people. And then realized how much school it was and how much it costs. And then I actually worked for some chiropractic PT and the red tape behind it all.
They make it so hard to actually help people. You’re strapped with so much debt that you are stuck into this system of helping people in order to pay off that debt. I can resonate very well with that in terms of transitioning.
And then of course, just business wise, just feeling like you’re making it up as you go. And here’s the thing, and we’re just doing it.
[Janelle]
Well, like what you were saying, it’s like when I worked in physical therapy too, but I’m sure with the profession you’re in now, you’re like, you didn’t have to have surgery, or you don’t have to have this procedure. You don’t have to be doing this. Like if you would just work out and change your lifestyle, change your diet, your life could be so much better.
And that’s just like the most simple, basic thing that nobody wants to accept. Here, let me give you this gift. Like your life will be better if you just do this small little thing.
Work out and eat right, and your life will be better.
[Brooke]
Yeah, the preventative side of it. And I’m so grateful that I’m here because even working in that setting, I worked for a really great chiropractic office. And so they were a lot more preventative than most.
Obviously, somebody’s there because they’re injured. Trying to avoid the next step of having to go get help in that regard was also great. But yeah, the preventative healthcare is the way to go.
And that is true healthcare, not disease care at that point, which is kind of the dynamic of that. So awesome. Thank you for sharing that.
That was great. You have all the things right now in terms of what you provide, right? You have the heat, you have the cold, and the cryo, the saunas have become super popular in wellness at this point, especially.
So can you explain just a little bit behind some of these therapies and really how they benefit the body on a physiological level?
[Janelle]
Well, for one, I guess let’s start out with basics. I mean, when we didn’t have climate control, we were constantly in extreme heat and extreme cold. So our body actually really needs that.
And that is, we can go work out our muscles, but our heart is such a muscle. That’s why you need to do cardio. But stressing your body with different extreme heats and cold also stresses your heart in a really good way.
So that’s working it out. So what you’re doing is you’re putting yourself into extreme cold, either that be a cold shower, cold plunge, cryo, whatever one you choose. You’re getting a lot of the same benefits just on different levels.
But you’re putting your body into fight or flight. So all your blood rushes to your vital organs, and then it detoxes all that blood. And when you warm back up, it’s pushing out oxygenated blood, which then can help your body recover, repair cells, and you’re energized.
But a lot of other things are happening too. So you’re releasing neurotransmitters and hormones. You’re resetting your bodies.
You’ve got cold shock proteins that are working that are resetting your cells. Norepinephrine is released. So that’s your natural painkiller.
It’s obviously an anti-inflammatory. When you put cold on something, we all know that that decreases inflammation. But it’s also decreasing your stress and lowering cortisol.
So it kind of works in a bunch of different ways, but that is the main physiological thing that’s happening is it’s pushing all your blood to your vital organs. And then with the sauna, that’s kind of the opposite. You’ve got your heat shock proteins.
So it’s relaxing your muscles. So you’re decreasing stress. It’s working your heart.
So it’s lowering blood pressure. It’s strengthening your heart in just a different way. And then you’ve got your heat shock proteins, which are really cool.
If you ever study up on heat shock proteins, what it’s doing is it repairs your cancer cells or any bad cells in your body. Or if they’re not repairable, it actually pushes them out through your kidneys. So that’s a really nice thing too.
And it’s a good detox.
[Brooke]
Wow, that’s amazing. I did not know that.
[Janelle]
Yeah. Yeah. So that’s kind of like the basics of what it’s physiologically doing in your body.
[Brooke]
Cool. And then actually, so maybe a little rewind. Cryo, what exactly is it temperature wise? The difference between that and maybe just cold plunging.
Let’s get into that a little bit.
[Janelle]
All right. So we’ve got kind of three levels. You’ve got your cold showers.
[Brooke]
Those are the worst.
[Janelle]
You are not… They are the worst. And I think they’re for those of you who have.
I think you’re a crazy person if you could do a cold shower, because I cannot. Terrible. Because you’re like dodging it the whole time.
And yeah, it’s terrible. So what cold showers are good for is it does decrease stress a little bit, cortisol, not a ton. It does activate your brown fat, which we can talk a little bit more about, which is awesome.
That helps with metabolism, diabetes, all those things. You are not going to get out of a cold shower though and feel the way that you feel like it’s not going to increase your dopamine, all these things. It just isn’t.
You’re not going to get out of a cold shower and be like, yeah, I’m on top of the world. Let’s go work out. And then next you have a cold plunge.
Cold plunges are amazing. I think it’s just how you use them, when you use them. You’re getting that deep cold from the water.
So your organs are getting cold. Your joints are getting cold. Your muscles are getting cold.
Everything is getting really tight and cold. I wouldn’t work out after this. You’d have to warm your body back up naturally.
Do a warm up before you go work out again. Otherwise, you’ll strain your muscles. I wouldn’t do this right after a workout either, if you’re trying to get muscle gains, because it will actually get rid of some muscle gains.
And then when you put it in your day, you should put, if you’re going to do it in the morning, right when you wake up, just do like a minute and a half. Just get that shock and get all those good hormones. If you’re going to do it at night, that’s when you can kind of do your longer one, because it kind of tires you out.
It takes a long time to warm your body back up. So it’s using a lot of energy. It’s burning a lot of energy.
So it kind of makes you tired. And then cryotherapy, which I put on this huge pedestal, it’s just a rock star. I mean, if you’ve got an injury though, deep cold is where you need to go at night before you go to bed.
That’ll really help with healing. If you’ve got a surgery, an injury, something like that. But cryo, you can put in any time of your day.
It just gets the dermis of your skin cold. So it really just tricks your body into thinking that you’re cold, but you don’t get that deep down cold. So I’ve had runners come in here and they do it right before a run.
And they’re like, I’m faster. My heart rate is lower. Like I’m just more effective.
Your muscles, you want to go work out right after because your muscles are just re-oxygenated and your endorphins are high, your dopamine is high, and you’re going to get a really good workout. So it’s about negative, depending on where we put you in the day, but it’s about negative 220 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve had two different machines.
I’ve had a nitrogen one and then an electric one. I love them both the same. They’re great.
But yeah, it just kind of gets the outside of your skin cold. You warm up super quickly and then you can go about your day. You don’t have to get wet.
It’s kind of like the princess of cold therapy.
[Brooke]
Awesome. Those are amazing. Yeah, cool. I was not aware of the differences between that and cryo. That’s really cool explanations.
Also, the cold shower, man, you like, like you said, people who do cold showers are my heroes because I the submersion of the cold water like I can do all day like I jump in my creek in the snow like fine. You turn me in a cold shower and I’m like, I can’t do it.
[Janelle]
I don’t know if hero is the right word. I just think there’s something not masochistic.
[Brooke]
I don’t know.
[Janelle]
I’m just kidding. I’m kidding to all people who take cold showers like good for you. I cannot stand there and do that.
[Brooke]
Totally, totally. Yeah. Don’t just like splash me with cold water.
Yeah, the explanations of that was great. I was not aware of the benefits of the differences of them. Honestly, I thought cold plunging and cryo – cryo was just like a faster cold plunge.
So that’s very good to know. So, you know, you mentioned cortisol a little bit, but you know, there’s kind of, I would say conflicting studies as far as what I have found in terms of if you have high cortisol stress is high, that the cold plunging can just be another added stressor. And then there are others that say it’s more of like a modulator.
So based on I mean, what you said about what you were dealing with prior to like doing the 75 hard, that kind of thing. And then, of course, what you have experienced owning your business, tell us more about what you have seen and what you feel like the impacts are on cortisol and stress response overall.
[Janelle]
Yeah. So I get what people are saying when they come out with this. They probably don’t do cold plunge, my opinion, because if you’ve ever done it and you’ve ever done it for a long time, you know how great it feels.
So, yes, I’ve seen people come out with these things that don’t do cryo because your cortisol is low because you’re already stressed and you shouldn’t add another stress to your life. There’s so much to unpack there. But it’s like, OK, for instance, the reason why our adrenals are fatigued or our cortisol is low is for a lot of reasons.
Either we’re not detoxing, we’re eating the wrong foods, we’re increasing our seed oils, our sugars, all these things that increase disease, increase inflammation. And now we’ve just stressed our body. So we’re internally stressing our body.
We’re using chemicals, colognes, all these things that are outside, you know, EMFs, all the things, right? That stresses our body. And then now take into account that we’re Americans, right?
And we’re just like, I’m attested to this too. It’s like, you just go, go, go all the time. You’re like super mom.
And then you’re also running a business and you’re here and you’re there. And you’ve got that stress. So you take all these stresses that are just part of your life.
And that’s why we’re having this huge epidemic with our adrenals being fatigued and our cortisol not functioning correctly. So taking three minutes of your day to put yourself in a controlled setting, decrease your inflammation and increase so many benefits, it’s actually going to help you. Our adrenals, cortisol is actually our biggest anti-inflammatory in our body.
So when you go into fight or flight, your body releases cortisol and then that attaches to every receptor in your body to decrease inflammation. Well, if you’re overusing it, your body is now not accepting those receptors anymore. Your biggest anti-inflammatory in your body, which is going to prevent you from having any disease is now not working.
So that along with depression and all the other things that adrenals will affect. Now you need to start decreasing your inflammation another way. So either that be by an anti-inflammatory diet, full therapy, sauna, all these things.
That actually does help when your adrenals are fatigued. I have personally reversed people’s cortisol. So they’ve had reverse cortisol.
So where you have higher cortisol at night, you can’t sleep. And then you have really low cortisol in the morning and it’s reversed. Also, I just think as Americans, I’ll even say to myself, like we’re just not very tough.
I mean, we’re kind of wusses and we have to be talked to nicely and we don’t want to be offended. We’re just not super tough these days. So I think putting yourself into a position that is hard and uncomfortable, you are now retraining your neuropathways in your brain to just deal with the suck and just suck it up.
And now life doesn’t seem so stressful because you’re better at dealing with that. And then also you’re enhancing your sleep. This really helps with sleep.
So every time, I mean, if you’re not sleeping, your stress level is going to be higher. So now if we’re getting a better night’s sleep, that’s even better. Metabolism is better.
Now you’re losing weight, which you’re going to feel better. I mean, there’s just so many things that it helps with that is going to lower your stress. You’re detoxing, that’s going to lower your stress, all the things.
So I kindly disagree with people who feel that it is not good to do.
[Brooke]
Yeah, no, that’s a great perspective for sure. And I love the get comfortable being uncomfortable. And so, you know, I love to start my day like morning cold plunge.
It feels so good. I actually get kind of sad when the creek is like warm in the summertime because I can’t do that. And it’s, it’s meditative.
And you are, you know, taking that way, I usually go try and go like three to five minutes, but and you’re just taking it to like, slow down and control your breathing and do nothing but sit there. I think there’s something really powerful, you know, mentally and obviously physically about that. So love to hear that.
[Janelle]
We always steer away from the uncomfortable. And so even I mean, even me, I’ve been doing this for five years, cold plunges for five years now. And I’m like, the other day, I was like, I want to do it.
I am not this. I do not want to do this today. But whatever, you feel great after.
[Brooke]
Um, yeah, totally. Okay, so moving into kind of the anti inflammatory aspect of it, right. And the stress relieving, you mentioned a little bit, let’s go into the kind of the specifics of when best times to do cold, best times to do heat, and all of that just kind of in its own little schedule.
You had mentioned it kind of piece by piece, but I want to hear like, a daily schedule or something or like a weekly schedule kind of thing.
[Janelle]
Sure. I’m gonna try and make it not confusing. But so there’s different, I guess you got to pick your category of who you are.
One, if you’re just crazy lifestyle, literally just put it in when you can. So the recommended amount by the newest study with Susannah Soberg is 11 minutes of cold and 57 minutes of heat. And that is the standard to keep your brown fat high, keep your metabolism good, insulin and heart disease
[Brooke]
Per week?
[Janelle]
Per week, yeah.
[Brooke]
Okay. Okay.
[Janelle}
Sometimes you can supplement with that cold shower just to get that cold to kind of help push you through if you need an extra minute here or there. So that’s just standard. So if you have a crazy lifestyle, don’t even worry about when you put it in, just get it in.
If you want to do them together, always do hot first and then cold second. So that’s kind of basic. Then if we have certain things we want to treat, if you work out, so what you would want to do is depending on if you’re doing cryo or cold plunge, I would recommend before and not after, not at least right after.
If you’re going to do it after, do it at least several hours after. It will still decrease muscle gains up to like, well, like 40.
[Brooke]
Okay. I’ve seen, I’ve seen up to 42 hours even in some studies.
[Janelle]
Yeah. So I have, and I keep, every time I see a study, it honestly increases. So I mean, I don’t even know what to say on that.
Cause I mean, when you put it in your day, then I, like most people that are bodybuilding doing hypertrophy training, I mean, they’re working out every day. So when are you going to fit?
I want to kind of see like realistically what amount of muscle gains are we losing? I don’t know.
So the thing is like your inflammation is the highest right after your workout and just letting that, that good inflammation come down on its own. I would say the six to 12 hours is a good range too, but who knows? So that’s why I kind of say before I would do it before and then go work out.
Um, you’ll get good recovery. You get all the things. If you are someone who has bad sleep and you want to go with, with your circadian rhythm.
So we are warm during the day and then we cool down while we’re sleeping. You want to kind of keep that. So you’re going to want to do sauna at night and then you’re going to cool down just like you would naturally do in your circadian rhythm.
And in the morning you’re always colder and then you warm up when you start to move around. So you’d want to start with colds and then warm up. So that is someone who has a, has a bad circadian rhythm and they want to kind of improve their sleep.
I would do that. Cold in the morning, sauna at night. Yeah.
Is touching on any of the other things? Um, heat and cold when it comes to an injury, right after an injury, you want to do cold, trying to stay away from heat. And then after several days, then you can kind of hot, cold, hot, cold type of thing.
Do I answer that? Yeah.
[Brooke]
Yeah. That’s a, that’s perfect. I love the sleep support because so many people have garbage sleep, you know, for a variety of reasons, a lot of which could be controlled better.
But, uh, when finding some more support, it’s sometimes having even like little hacks. They’re like, Oh yeah, this is, you know, I can do this. Yeah.
So I like that. And then what are some kind of overall contraindications for cryo and cold therapy? Like who absolutely should not do this?
[Janelle]
Okay. That’s a hard one. And it’s definitely controversial.
So in the beginning I was not as knowledgeable as I am now. Now I just studied all the time, but for there were, I had this massive list of contraindications and now I’m like, um, yeah. High blood pressure is the ultimate one.
If you have uncontrolled high blood pressure, the reason why is because cold therapy of any sort will bring your blood pressure up super high to a point or you can have something called walking amnesia. So you’ll be walking around and you’ll think you’re fine and that you won’t remember that day. You don’t really want to do cold therapy if you’re sitting at like 175 over 90, uh, because you’re just going to jack your blood pressure up way too high.
So that is like the gold standard. Don’t, don’t do it. If you have hypodermic renounce, I have a lot of people with renounce. I just double glove them or I put booties on them when they go in a cold plunge. They tend to do fine.
It actually kind of helps with their circulation and it actually ends up, yeah, it ends up kind of reversing what they have and it ends up helping them. So I used to stay away from them. Now I actually treat them.
Diabetes, that’s a huge controversial one. And I would say type 1 diabetes, if you have it under control and you understand your body and your levels, because hot and cold will help people throw off their insulin levels, but it actually does help them. And I have a lot of like a surgeon friend, he’s type 1 diabetic.
He comes in here all the time. Yeah, it’s really good for them. Type 2 diabetes, it’s like it could reverse your diabetes.
So I definitely, yeah, I definitely want them to come in. It’s going to increase your brown fat. It’s going to increase your metabolism.
You’re going to be less insulin sensitive. You’re going to lose weight. I mean, all the things.
You probably could reverse your type 2 diabetes if you started doing it. So I for sure want them to come in. So, oh, pregnancy.
That’s a controversial one too. I personally think cryo, if you’re going to pick one, I would pick cryo because it only gets the dermis of your skin cold, a cold plunge. I’m sure you’ve seen in Finland and wherever.
I mean, they’re just like getting, they’re breaking through the ice, these pregnant women and just getting in and, and there’s no, it’s never been an issue. It’s just, people don’t study it here in the US. If you want to do any studies on cryo or cold therapy, just do it in the UK for one, they’re just health conscious, they’re more health conscious.
They are just more educated and they’ve actually done the studies.
[Brooke]
I cold plunge. I’ve never done cryo, but I did cold plunge through pregnancy. I just lessened the amount of time that I was in.
And it wasn’t like new to me either. You know, and that I think goes along with a lot of the, like, whatever your body has the capacity for, whatever you’re capable for, you know, capable of, you can, you know, navigate obviously easier throughout pregnancy. So I know myself, my sister-in-law did.
[Janelle]
There’s nothing wrong with a two minute cold plunge. I mean, it’s giving you such great benefits, helping your body because you’re sore, you’re hormonal. I mean, it’s really balancing everything.
If you, I have a friend, he started doing sauna, cryo and cardio every day. His blood pressure went from like 180 over like 80 something to, he sent me a picture. It was like 117 over 65 after a month.
I’m like, wow. Yeah. So it’s like, I don’t want you to not come in, just get it controlled so I can actually treat you and then we can take you off medication.
[Brooke]
Right. Yeah. That’s amazing.
I love that. That like makes my heart so happy. Diving into what you’ve mentioned as far as brown fat, metabolism, and then the impacts of that on insulin glucose.
Talk a little bit more about that because that is, I would say, I mean, that’s a huge benefit of the cold therapy and something that obviously everybody wants. And so let’s, let’s dive into that.
[Janelle]
Okay. Okay. So brown fat, we were born with brown fat and it helps regulate temperature as a baby.
But we ended up losing it and we lose it mainly because we start to sweat and we’d start to regular temperature better, but also because of climate control. So our ancestors kept brown fat better than we do now. So we need to put ourselves into extreme situations to activate that mitochondria.
Mitochondria is brown. That’s why it’s brown fat and mitochondria goes into the white fat cells and it’ll actually turn them to brown fat cells. Brown fat burns calories, white fat burns energy.
So you want brown fat. It’s a good fat. And so with cold therapy, cold therapy activates brown fat probably 10 times more than sauna or working out, but sauna and working out both actually activate brown fat too.
So you kind of need them all. So once you activated it, you’ve increased the amount of brown fat that you have. If you continue to activate it, then you are burning 500 to 800 calories that day when you’ve activated it.
But also keeping it is the 11 minutes that we’re talking about, doing that a week. So you want to keep that brown fat and what that’s doing is it’s increasing your metabolism and it’s also making you insulin sensitive. So you’re not having all these glucose spikes.
I’ve been doing cold therapy now for five years and I love looking at my metabolic age and I’m going to be zero one day. No, I’m just kidding. But I’ll be 38 this year and I started out with a higher than my age metabolic rate and now I’m down to a 21 year old.
So it’s kind of fun.
[Brooke]
Nice. That’s amazing. So-
[Janelle]
Years though, working out though, that takes time. So I hear people come in and they do it for a month and I’m like, I haven’t lost any weight. I’m sure you hear that all the time too.
It’s just like, oh, okay, well, I’ve been doing this for a really long time. It’s just consistency and discipline. You just have to believe that it’s going to work, I guess.
[Brooke]
Yeah, the consistency is what most people struggle with. They can do the thing for a month, maybe two at the most, and especially if they are not seeing the results that they want. And that’s something that I really try and stress to clients, but really everybody that I talk with, is that doing the things that get you the results is not just about the results.
It’s going, they’re benefiting you regardless of what you’re seeing. You are getting benefits out of the actions that you’re taking to improve your health. Even if you are not instantly seeing it on the scale, most specifically, is what people are looking for, because there’s so many other mechanisms and ways to improve your health.
I mean, like your metabolic age, for example, and your VO2 max, your cardiovascular, like all of that stuff plays a role in the actions that you’re taking. A lot of it is unseen and we don’t have easy ways necessarily to measure that progress. Every little thing, every little action adds up and everything you’re doing does make an impact.
And so even if you’re not seeing it immediately or within the few weeks that you implement it, it’s not going to hurt you to keep doing it and it’s probably going to help you. So yeah, that’s definitely something I try and stress. I want to stay on that topic just a little bit.
So white fat is like the normal kind of adipose tissue that we have everywhere in our body. And the brown fat, it’s only certain parts of our body. So like the neck, around the heart, things like that.
And then the really cool thing about brown fat and the activation of it through the cold therapy is that it is using glucose to regulate temperature. And so when you get in that cold temperature, it is then using glucose and that is how it helps manage blood sugar and improve insulin resistance and all that stuff. So that is an amazing benefit of the cold therapy.
Temperature wise. So temperature for like cold plunging, obviously like you have the shower, which you can have a little control of, but what is like an ideal temperature for cold plunging?
[Janelle]
Yeah. So what’s funny about the shower though is it’s hard because especially, I mean, here we get cold and hot, but I mean, if you’re living in Southern California or something like that where you’re, you’re or Hawaii or wherever you’re staying hot longer, your cold shower is not going to do anything for you besides just torture you. Um, because you, even people think like floating down the river in the summer, they’re like, Oh, that’s like a cold plunge.
I’m like, no, it’s actually like 65 degrees and they’re like, Oh, it is. I’m like, yeah. So you need it to be under 52 degrees to be beneficial, but you’re an avid cold plunge user.
I don’t know what you keep yours at, but 52 kind of feels like a nice swim in the pool. It’s not super difficult to do. We have extremists here at Vitality.
So we keep ours really cold here at Vitality. We keep it at 41 degrees just right before it doesn’t freeze over because we get that. But at home, I keep mine at 45, I think, and that kind of, it’s a little easier.
It’s not burn-y. I feel, and I like to do my long ones at home anyway. So I like it to not burn so much.
Um, so I find that 45, I can do a pretty long one and be semi comfortable. Right. I don’t know.
What do you keep yours at?
[Brooke]
So I don’t have a cold plunge. I use our, our Creek in the winter time.
[Janelle]
Yeah. Well, it gets like 32 degrees.
[Brooke]
Yeah. So, yeah, I actually never checked the temperature. So now I’m curious to, I’m going to start doing that.
[Janelle]
Yeah, you should. It’s cold.
[Brooke]
I’ll tell you that. Yeah. Well, even, even in the summertime, like now, I mean, I doubt it’s under 52 at this point.
Like you can still go swim in it and like semi enjoy it. But what happens when the water level lowers, it is a year round Creek, but it, uh, the, it, it’s spring fed. And so it actually gets really cold at a point in the summertime when the flow is so low that it’s mainly spring water.
So I am now I’m curious. I want to take the thermometer down there, see what it is.
[Janelle]
A little thermometer.
[Brooke]
Yeah. Totally. Awesome.
That is also good to know. So can you just kind of do a quick walkthrough of what a typical like cryo session looks like at your place? What people can expect, uh, during, after their treatment?
[Janelle]
Yeah. So cryo, this machine is super fun and easy. It’s electric and it’s really safe.
So I love it. I might actually let people run themselves, but really you just put gloves on, um, socks and some Crocs just to keep your extremities good. Um, you can wear a bra and underwear guys.
We tend to make them wear it for obvious reason. And then, um, yeah, you just get in like that. So it’s pretty easy.
Um, you can do a full body and the one that we have, if you want, or you can kind of keep your head out. We have a lot of claustrophobic people here along with myself. And so I kind of like my head being out, but so yeah, you’ll, you’ll just get changed.
Well, you’ll put you in the one that we have right now. It text, it actually monitors your temperature the whole time and it will let you out when you’re 41 degrees. So you get in around 80 degrees on your, the outside of your skin and we want to get you down to around 40 or you’ll do three minutes, either one.
[Brooke]
Okay. Okay. Timeline.
Okay. Awesome. Awesome.
[Janelle]
Awesome. So super quick. You’re just like in and out.
[Brooke]
Yeah. I’ve heard the, I’ve, I’ve heard, I’ve been suggested to wear a bra. The nips apparently take a little bit of beating.
[Janelle]
My guys, my guys did complain of that. They’re like my nipples. I’m like, would you like me to get you some pasties, any vitality pasties?
So yeah, sometimes I’ll cover those.
[Brooke]
Nice. Nice. Cool.
Okay. Good to know. Good to know.
And then you have a new kind of development, your little oasis shed. Can you share about that and what it is and the idea behind it?
[Janelle]
So it’s a shed, literally, no, it’s a cool, it’s a cute little building, but converting two troughs into hot tubs, cause I can’t make them normal. I have to have them fun and funky. So that’s actually what’s taking so long.
So I’m sorry. We’re supposed to open on Monday and now it’s going to be a little bit longer. And then there’s going to be a cold plunge, two hot tubs, and then just a standard infrared sauna in there.
It’ll be passive entry, which is kind of cool. So people can book it and then just scan in, let themselves in up till nine o’clock at night and you can bring up to four people. It’s kind of a way to give after hours and a community type of thing, something you can go do with your spouse or a friend or something fun like that.
And it’s going to be also over the weekend too. So that is fun. So hopefully we’re getting a different demographic that it’s hard.
I mean, our hours are from 5 a.m. until 3 p.m. But sometimes people have a hard time getting into those hours.
[Brooke]
Yeah. Myself included. I talked to you months ago about Trinity.
I was just telling Courtney today, I’m like, it’s been months. And at the point, you know, you’re an hour away from me. So that is a factor for sure.
But, you know, and anytime I get into it, I like have my kids and then it’s too late. And I’m like, all right, well, next time. So but I love that idea because, you know, gym memberships are usually the only place that you have access to that kind of thing if you have one that has it.
And then in town, actually, the club has separate for men and women, which I love. But also, like, it would be nice to be able to go sit in a sauna and hang out with my husband. And, you know, so I love that idea that it’s available more often.
Very cool.
[Janelle]
Definitely. It’s like a if you break the rules once, though, you’re kind of out on the like the after hours because we will have normal, like if you’re not a member, you can still use it. You just have to come use it during hours.
But yeah, there are two separate troughs. We tried to make it as this is not a party as possible.
[Brooke]
Right. Yeah. There’s always there is always going to be that person.
Yeah, we won’t get into that. Awesome. So, of course, we have the fair.
This won’t come out until after the fair, unfortunately. So if you do it again next year, we’ll blast it. But so we have a fair this weekend.
But do you have any other kind of upcoming specials, promotions at Vitality and then your podcast? Tell us where we can find you on that coming out soon.
[Janelle]
OK, yeah, specials, what are we in September? I mean, I don’t really have any specials coming out. Probably the next big one will be like Black Friday and we’ll probably do an open house when the Oasis shed opens.
So definitely follow us for that. And I’m sure we’ll be giving away a bunch of free stuff. I feel like I always just randomly come up with a special.
But now we’ve teamed up with you and your program. So now all your clients will get a discount. And then when they someone starts new with you, they’ll get a huge promotion with us.
Because when you first start working out or doing anything new, your body hurts. So we want to support them here, at least your clients here in the Valley, which you have a lot. Everyone loves you.
So we do have that special now going on and Dirty Business. So this is this is our Dirty Business podcast room. And that is our new podcast coming out.
And we’re probably going to launch it actually today, I think. Obviously, this will be later. So, yeah, we’re on YouTube and Spotify as of right now called Dirty Business Podcast.
And that’s with me and my friend Mo Burton. And she does she’s a social media manager. So it’s fun to have her on my on my team.
[Brooke]
Awesome. And the podcast is going to be mostly kind of the business aspect of things. What are you going to dive into?
[Janelle]
Yeah, we try not to go too crazy on the women’s side because we kind of support all men and women. But obviously we are women. And so there are pieces of the podcast that are going to be about, you know, how to navigate, pretty much how to start a business, the loneliness of being a business, clients, all the pieces of owning a business, kind of just the dirty business, right?
The kind of getting down and gritty, the things that people don’t talk about. Everyone is on social media just like, oh, life is great. And that was just the one day that month that they put makeup on and decided to film a bunch of stuff on social media.
Right. Exactly. So, you know, being a woman, I came out with this planner mostly for myself, this like and people like it.
I’ll probably update it for next year because there’s little quirks that I want to make to it, too. But as women, I’m sorry, but we’re not equal to men and we are special in our own way and we’re unique in our own way. And we need to honor that.
And we need to really honor our bodies. Like we are not supposed to push on different times in our cycle. We are not supposed to cold plunge hard at different times of our cycle.
And really don’t shut your business down at different times in your cycle, either. Because, man, I want to shut it down once a month. I’m like, I am the worst.
So, I mean, we do talk a little bit about all of that stuff and try to come up with fun, good and make it lighthearted. And hopefully people can understand where we’re coming from or get a good laugh or at least feel not so lonely in this business that can feel kind of lonely. So that’s what it’s going to be about.
[Brooke]
Cool. I’m excited personally for that.
[Janelle]
And you have to come on when we start having people. You’ll have to come on and be with us.
[Brooke]
And share my woes. All right.
Sounds good. Perfect. All right.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Janelle. This was so good.
So much great information. So much applicable information, which is what we love here and a just really great way to improve and build on any health and wellness journey. Anybody who is listening, make sure you check out Vitality in Medford or Central Point?
[Janelle]
I’m in Medford.
[Brooke]
OK. In Medford.
And all the information will be linked in the show notes to follow you, contact you, all the good stuff and reach out to you and go soak and freeze and all the good stuff. So yeah, thank you.
[Janelle]
Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
[Brooke]
A little addition. You can also experience cryotherapy and sauna benefits in Grants Pass at Axis Chiropractic.
Janelle has a cryo machine there so you can go to their website and book and they have a little bit more flexible extended hours. You can experience cryotherapy and sauna benefits for yourself. So that is available to you. If you have any questions, suggestions for future topics or just want to chat, feel free to reach out to us on Instagram at @Brooke_Elysian and Facebook linked in the show notes or via our website Elysian Women’s Wellness dot com.
And if you enjoyed what you heard today about cryotherapy and sauna benefits , we’d be thrilled if you could take a half second to leave us a five star review. Not only will you be helping others find our show, but you’ll also be entered into our monthly hundred dollar giveaway for no reviews. New episodes drop every Monday, so make sure to hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more.
Thanks for listening. See you soon.
Coach Brooke Davis Links:
Website: elysianwomen.org
LinkedIn: Brooke Davis – Owner – Davis Fitness
Facebook: Brooke Davis, CPT
Instagram: Brooke Davis (@brooke_elysian)
Free Community: Women’s Fitness Simplified: Lean down, tone up, build confidence!
Book a Discovery Call: https://scheduler.zoom.us/brooke-davis-mjzn71/discovery-call
Check out Janelle’s podcast here!: https://www.youtube.com/@DirtyBusiness.Podcast
Follow Vitality Health & Wellness on Instagram: @vitalityhealth.andwellness
Women’s Functional Nutritionist & Fitness Specialist along with CEO of Elysian Women’s Wellness.
God, family, fitness – in that order. Fitness isn’t my job, it’s my passion. My favorite things include traveling the world, being a mama and making a difference.
14 years of experience in the wellness industry has brought me to an understanding that when you’re ready – you’ll do it. So when you are, we’re here to keep you simply well.
The last “program” you’ll ever buy. Your individualized training & nutrition plan that teaches the why & how to create lasting changes with me by your side every step of the way!
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