
Body hacking trick: cooling the hands for better performance - aroberge
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2005/julaug/features/cool.html
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mipapage
Taking this very very low tech... I ran a 5 day running race in 40-50C heat
this summer. By grabbing ice cubes at the control points during each stage and
holding them in my hands - as opposed to putting them under my cap like most
runners - I was able to drop my heart rate by 3-6 beats per minute until the
ice melted.

The Swedish company Craft made an "ice glove" for triathlete Torbjørn
Sindballe who had trouble from the heat when running in Hawaii...

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lachyg
This isn't very encouraging....
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=CoreControl>

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lachyg
Can't edit anymore: Since finding this I've found one more study that doesn't
support the CoreControl, and I've found three that do support the CoreControl,
as well as 3 redditors that have said the support it.

Another thing to note is that the sample group in most of these studies is far
too small (9 people, come on!)

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Groxx
Interesting. I'll have to try this some time.

For people not willing to buy such a contraption (like me), though the vacuum
helps, try running cold water over the bottom of your wrists. It's a
fantastically-effective way to cool off, and very not-messy.

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nooneelse
A good hat and a wet handkerchief tied around each wrist is how I was taught
to make it through the 105°F days back on the farm as a boy.

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davidw
Anyone else want to yell "double blind!" at the bit about the track coach?

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gaius
I am more interested in the opposite of this: a portable, ruggedized hand-
warming device for divers suffering from hypothermia in the water.

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qohen
A Noah Shachtman piece in Wired about tech for soldiers spends some time on
this same device from Stanford and it describes how the device (in an earlier
form) could also be used for warming:

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore_pr.html>

Towards the end of the piece, the author describes being being in a bathtub
with cold water and, after it starts to affect him, the device is used to warm
him:

"But his stories get harder and harder to follow. I’ve started shivering again
--all across my legs and chest, muscles pulse to a manic rhythm. And then I
start having tremors. My thighs jackknife to my chest, unbidden. I moan, and
darkness closes in from the edges of my vision.

Then, just like on the treadmill, Grahn takes my wrist. He slips each of my
hands into a modified Glove prototype. This time, the metal hemispheres inside
are hot to the touch--113 degrees. After two minutes, I can think again. The
tent comes back into focus. You can stay this way indefinitely now. "You’re at
a thermal equilibrium; the heat going into these two hands is equivalent to
what’s going out of the rest of you," Grahn says. "Now you’re uncomfortable
again -- merely uncomfortable. That’s a huge difference when you’re talking
about survival." The water is still bitter, of course. But now I can take it.

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mhartl
Interesting. The article appears to be from 2005. I wonder what has happened
the last six years.

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davidw
They were going to try and bring the thing to the mass market, but they got
cold feet.

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carbocation
> "The drugs that render patients unconscious also make them hypothermic.
> That’s useful because chilled patients bleed less during surgery ..."

Coagulation is an enzymatic reaction. You might not be surprised, then, to
learn that low temperatures _retard_ , not enhance, coagulation. Cold
temperatures make the patient bleed more, not less. The article gets this part
exactly wrong.

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pavedwalden
Is it possible that this is counterbalanced by the circulatory system's
reaction to cold? For instance, perhaps surgery on the limbs is easier when
the body is reducing peripheral circulation as it does in someone experiencing
hypothermia.

~~~
carbocation
Empirically, my understanding is that no, the harm of cold temperatures
(decreased coagulation) is not counterbalanced by the gain (decreased
peripheral circulation). Patients undergoing surgery are coagulopathic, moreso
when they are cooled, and in fact they are often actively warmed now.

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pingswept
I think this might be bullshit. [Edit: maybe not. See thread below.] The
article is from 2005, and I can't find anything that is less than 3 years old
that describe the device working.

I was working as an engineer near Stanford when this cooling glove was
announced, and I remember hearing about the "$400,000 version by a name-brand
design firm that really never worked." It's possible that the professors just
gave up or moved on to something new after discovering that productization was
hard. It might also be that the rate at which you can cool a human body
through the small surface area of the hands without damaging the skin is too
small to be useful.

Anyone find any good evidence that this could work?

~~~
lachyg
There is a study as recent as last year
[http://www.avacore.com/sites/default/files/document/Kwon-
Sch...](http://www.avacore.com/sites/default/files/document/Kwon-Schneider-
palm-cooling-Bench-press-study-MSSE-2010.pdf). There are also a lot of sports
teams using it, and it is visible often on TV.

~~~
pingswept
That does appear to be a scientific paper from 2010 with real statistics in
it-- maybe it does work.

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delackner
Each time I see stories about this device I end up wanting to have access to
one at my local climbing gym REALLY BADLY. I hope they manage to bring the
price down enough that I might actually be able to pitch it to the gym.

~~~
hobolobo
And if you could combine this with a machine to remove lactic acid from your
forearms and make it small enough to fit into a chalkbag so that every time
you dipped, you got chalked up, cooled down, and stronger. Yeah, I think that
might work.

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tghw
Every time this comes up, it makes me want to do try making a DIY version...

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jakeonthemove
Why not? Doesn't seem to complicated - you'll just have to find the best
temperature for you and a way to keep it stable - a thermostat and/or variable
amount of insulation should do the trick...

~~~
tghw
They even state the temperature, between 18 C and 22 C. I'm thinking if you
could find a plastic top for a gumball machine (or something like it) you
would have a pretty good start. The vacuum could be done manually with a pump
of some sort.

For the cooling part, you'd need to drill two large holes for a pipe to go
through, which the hand would hold onto. Then maybe just have a water and ice
reservoir that sits on top of the whole thing? That way, you wouldn't need any
electric pumps or anything.

Then, the only thing left is sealing the wrist joint. One of those big rubber
exercise bands might be enough to seal it off.

~~~
watmough
Start with a foot-bath. Probably just as effective if you are not
commercializing it, and it would leave your hands free.

~~~
lachyg
How important do you think the vacuum really is? Wouldn't it make sense for a
DIY unit to just cool water to 10C and then to submerge your hands or feat in
that? That would be a much more efficient method of heat transfer.

~~~
tghw
The vacuum is the key to the whole thing. The blood vessels in your
extremities are very good at contracting when they get cold, to help preserve
your core temperature. The vacuum draws them back to the surface, meaning you
can cool much more blood more quickly.

~~~
dlytle
I made a half-arsed attempt at replicating this a while back. The stuff I
noted for my next attempt:

As your vacuum increases, the hand/wrist will be pulled further into the
chamber. You have to have something to hold inside the chamber that is
anchored to the chamber, or a container where having the fist jammed up
against the back wall is reasonably comfortable. (My original attempt: using
juice concentrate cans rather than flowing water through a handle. I wanted to
avoid flowing water if at all possible.)

Due to the whole "arm getting pulled inside" thing, the wrist seal is more
troublesome than I hoped. My next try is going to use a dry diving suit wrist-
seal.

You want as small an interior volume as possible if using a manual air pump.
It's much more time consuming than you'd think to hand-pump the air out and
achieve the desired vacuum. I wouldn't want to risk using an automatic air
pump in this case, myself, so I'm sticking with the hand pump while reducing
the interior space of the container.

Let me know if you have success with this; or, heck, even if you don't,
because you'll probably have some good advice as a result.

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jakeonthemove
"When a hot body core issues a command to open the radiators and dump heat,
the palm can override that command and order the radiators to shut down based
on local conditions, i.e., if the palm touches a cold surface" - Damn, I was
thinking that you could cool down by touching anything cold, apparently that
won't work because the radiator shuts down if the outside conditions are too
cold (so touching ice won't work)... Pretty interesting research, though -
implementing something like this in some sort of "power suit" would be great.

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bane
I'm a person who almost constantly feels hot. I think unconsciously I realized
that if I roll the sleeves up on my long sleeve oxfords (when I have to wear
them) I feel _much_ more comfortable, but could never figure out why it made
such a difference. I suppose it just helped expose more area near my hands and
cool me off.

I'd love to have one of these.

~~~
aantix
Do you generally have normal blood pressure readings?

I continue to have blood pressure issues, but in the early days when it was
less controlled one of my symptoms was that I was extremely warm blooded.

Now the my BP has been lowered somewhat, I find that I generally feel cooler
and am more sensitive to cold environments.

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bane
No, normal BP. However, as I've gotten older it isn't as bad (and I've started
to become more sensitive to cold), but I still find myself hot and sweaty when
everybody around me is often fine or cold.

When I was young, it wasn't even a big deal to go out for a while in the
middle of winter in a t-shirt, I didn't even own a proper winter coat until I
was far into my 20s.

~~~
aidenn0
Out of curiousity, where did you grow up? It makes a big difference for the
temperature in the winters!

~~~
bane
Good point, middle of the U.S. East Coast, winters get pretty cold, snow, that
sort of thing.

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rjprins
This is way over-engineered. Just put your hands in cold water..

Also, this fact about cooling the body for better performance is well known in
professional sports. An example product that is being used there:
<http://www.icydip.com>

~~~
dlytle
The problem with that is that the blood vessels clamp down in response to
cold. The vacuum prevents that, and seriously improves the efficiency of the
cooling process.

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watmough
I noticed the article talked about dogs cooling through their feet. I used to
work in a hot office, and the best solution to cooling down was to take my
shoes off and have a fan under the desk.

Luckily, I shower every day, and my feet don't generally sweat or smell too
badly.

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keeptrying
These are used on all NFL sidelines if you keep a look out for them.

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squozzer
Strange -- because after I play video games for a while, I have to warm my
hands to regain my reflexes -- which aren't very good anyway.

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tomahhy
Why does it need a vacuum?

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ehsanu1
_when externally applied heat shocked open the radiators in the cold palms of
anesthesia patients, warmed blood was returned straight to the heart, and the
body was reheated from the inside out. Applying a mild vacuum to the hand
intensified this effect._

It doesn't _need_ a vacuum, but it does help. They don't seem to mention why.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Applying a vacuum to an area causes blood to well in that area, suck on your
hand and you'll see the area you suck on blush. So presumably you're making
capillaries open up and increase heat transference over the skin threshold.
Opening all the capillaries in an area will increase the volume of blood in
that area too, so greater volume and greater heat gradient (over a small
distance).

 _Disclaimer: Assumptions, not medically/biologically trained._

