Body hacking trick: cooling the hands for better performance
stanfordalumni.org
stanfordalumni.org
The Swedish company Craft made an "ice glove" for triathlete Torbjørn Sindballe who had trouble from the heat when running in Hawaii...
Another thing to note is that the sample group in most of these studies is far too small (9 people, come on!)
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.
On nights where it's too warm and sticky to sleep, this technique always helps me.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'd love to have one of these.
What's really annoying here in Tokyo is that, during the winter, the thermostat in every office, train, and department store is set to about thirty-five million degrees centigrade.
I have to strip off pretty much everything I'm wearing whenever I transition from the outside to the inside, and then put it all back on again when I do the reverse. Amazingly annoying.
What's helped me out a lot are Marmot's Gore-Tex jackets. Because they're breathable and have vents, I can just unzip a bit and cool down rapidly. Admittedly, they don't look as good with a dress shirt as a nicely-fitted suit, but it's a compromise that keeps me from bursting into flame.
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.
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.
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
Luckily, I shower every day, and my feet don't generally sweat or smell too badly.
It doesn't need a vacuum, but it does help. They don't seem to mention why.
Disclaimer: Assumptions, not medically/biologically trained.