Using Yoga to Enter a Cold Ocean

By
Antranik
– March 13, 2013Posted in: The Constant Awesome, Yoga

Dur­ing half the year in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the Pacific Ocean is pretty cold as the water gets in the low 50′s.  Just by going in knee deep, most peo­ples ankles already go numb.  And if you keep going in, it’s very pos­si­ble you may start hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing once the water hits your face.  So it’s very rare to see peo­ple in the water with­out wetsuits.

But I fig­ured out a pretty nice way of get­ting con­trol over all these things…

I basi­cally do 10–15 min­utes of yoga on the sand to warm my body up.  The trick is to really focus on inhal­ing when you do a move and exhal­ing when you do the next move. This will cause your breath­ing to be deep, slow and relaxed.  That’s the trick to cre­at­ing a har­mo­niously mov­ing med­i­ta­tion.  The phys­i­cal yoga moves are good enough to get the heart pump­ing more and warm­ing up the body but the breath­ing is what helps keep every­thing nice and steady.  Once your breath­ing is calm and cool and cen­tered for sev­eral min­utes, this effect con­tin­ues and helps to remain calm when you enter the water.

Con­trast this with run­ning (or any other car­dio exer­cise) that will def­i­nitely increase your body tem­per­a­ture but your breath­ing won’t be calm what­so­ever.  You’ll actu­ally be pant­ing and that can imme­di­ately turn to hyper­ven­ti­la­tion when cold water hits your face.

So once I go in the water, I get out after just a cou­ple min­utes, do some more yoga to warm back up, and then go back in. The sec­ond time always feels dra­mat­i­cally warmer than the first.  Then I repeat this again because the 3rd time feels dra­mat­i­cally warmer than the sec­ond. So much so that this is the time I could spend up to 10–30 min­utes in the SoCal water in the win­ter time and not feel cold at all. I even just lie on my back and totally sur­ren­der to the ocean keep­ing myself calm cool and collected.

Hope that helps.

- Antranik

Related: How to check if the beach water is safe to enter

Related: Phys­i­ol­ogy behind the Reg­u­la­tion of Body Tem­per­a­ture


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  3. Say­ing you’re not flex­i­ble enough for YOGA is like say­ing you’re too dirty to take a BATH.
  4. Yoga at Home!
  5. How come peo­ple from very cold cli­mates can visit LA in the win­ter and walk around in shirts and shorts?