Cooling specific body parts like the palms, soles of the feet, or face is a better recovery strategy after endurance training than full body cold water immersion.

“getting into a cool bath or cooling the palms, the bottoms of the feet or the face, in my opinion, based on the science would be better than completely immersing the body in the ice bath or the cold shower.”

“you could do your pull ups or your sprints and then cool your palms, and then try and go with colder water the next round or warmer water the next round or do both feet and palms and face.”

“So I mentioned before that you want to cool the palms or the bottoms of the feet although that's a little harder to do or the face but not so much that the blood vessels constrict because then you won't be able to pass cool into the body because those pipes got smaller and therefore you can't pass cool into the body.”

“The cooling of the palms, which is really just a route to cool your core in an efficient way, the most efficient way, in fact is about improving performance.”

“In the episode on supercharge your physical performance, I talked all about how by using cooling specifically of the palms or the bottoms of the feet or the cheeks of the face using particular methods, you can adjust the temperature of the body and of muscle in a way that allows you to do more work, to do more reps, to run further, to keep going and to persist.”

“So the word got over, I think, to the 49ers camp. And one of their players, Greg Clark, who was a tight end at the time. He had been tight end at Stanford. He decided, or I don't know if he was asked, or what, to come over and check it out. So Greg came over and we said, "Greg, what are you good at? What activity do you like to do?" He said, "Dips. I can do a lot of dips. I can do 40 dips in a first set. And I can probably do five sets. That's a usual workout for me."”

“So again, as it relates to hyperthermia, if someone is overheating by all means, try and get them out of that heat, get them to stop exercising, you can die from hyperthermia, try and cool the bottoms of the feet, the palms of their hands and the upper portion of their face.”

“So how this translates to the real world is that if ever you are hyperthermic or someone else's hyperthermic, one way to cool them down quickly is to cool these palmer glabrous, soles of the feet glabrous and upper portion of the face glabrous portions of the body using cool rags, using ice packs or using any number of different cold objects or temperatures.”

“The effects of glabrous skin cooling on physical performance are truly remarkable provided the glabrous skin cooling is done correctly. And I want to point out that the main degree of effect is on volume or the ability to do more work.”

“Now I'd like to emphasize the topic that we touched on at the beginning of the episode, which are those glabrous skin surfaces, the hands, the upper face, and the bottoms of the feet through which heat is especially good at leaving the body. Another way of putting that is that one can cool the body much more efficiently through the glabrous skin surfaces.”

“And the basic takeaway of this study is that by cooling the glabrous skin, the subjects were able to sustain this walking on these inclined treadmills for much longer than were the people who received traditional cooling. And also the return to baseline temperature was much faster in the glabrous skin cooling group.”

“So how this translates to the real world is that if ever you are hyperthermic or someone else's hyperthermic, one way to cool them down quickly is to cool these palmer glabrous, soles of the feet glabrous and upper portion of the face glabrous portions of”

“One key thing, if you're going to use glabrous skin cooling, is that whatever you use to cool those surfaces cannot be so cold that it causes vasoconstriction. Because as I mentioned earlier, the arterio-venous anastomoses these portals of arteries directly to veins that exist only in these glabrous skin surfaces, the way that they're able to cool the body and essentially pass cool into the body although that's not really what they're doing, they're actually extracting heat from the body to be technical, they're extracting heat from the body, the only way they can do that is if those veins don't collapse and veins will collapse if they are made very, very cold.”

“And you may be asking, how can you just put your hand into one glove and have this work? Well, that's how powerful these glabrous skin surfaces are. Even just by cooling one palm, the core body temperature drops radically.”

“There is a way to more quickly heat or cool the body, and that's through specific elements of your shell, meaning particular skin surfaces.”

“The key thing is to get the palms of your hands, the bottoms of your feet, and the upper half of your face in contact with a cold surface or fluid that is cold enough to cool the blood and the core of your body, but not so cold that it constricts the veins just below the palms of your hands, the bottoms of your feet, or the upper half of your face.”

“Heller and colleagues have done experiments where they do palmar cooling under these environments. And that's wonderful because not only does it enable people to go further and faster for much longer. That's been shown statistically significant every time, but it also protects the brain and body against hyperthermia, overheating, coma, nerve injury, nerve death, and actual death.”

“Getting into an ice bath first, sure, it will cool you down, but that's not going to be as effective as cooling the palms, the bottoms of the feet, and the face.”

“In other words, you can heat up best at the face, the palms, and the bottoms of the feet, and you can cool down best at the face, the palms, and the bottoms of the feet than you can anywhere else on your body. These three compartments of your body, palms, bottoms of feet, and face are your best leverage points for manipulating temperature to vastly improve physical performance.”

“So, uh, the word got over, I think, to the 49ers camp and, uh, one of their players, Greg Clark, who was a tight end at the time, he had been tight end at Stanford, he decided to come over and check it out.”