CoolMitt

I’ll admit, I find and try many products, but I have never used a product that helps boost athletic performance like this one.

Mark my words, this product will be used by every pro cyclist and on the sidelines of every professional sports team in the next 12 months. Most teams and riders won’t go on the record that they are using it, but I’ve received permission to share that the EF team is.  

The product is called CoolMitt and they have been producing a minimal number of these specialty devices for the Special Forces + a few pro athletes... but there is over a year waitlist. We negotiated a deal to help review and test the device in exchange for 30 units we can make available to Feed customers today. First come, first serve.

Here is the deal.  

I first learned about the technology in CoolMitt circa 2010 when this huge device showed up from Stanford researchers claiming they could instantly cool the body from the inside out. The device was huge, difficult to use, expensive, and unreliable. But damn, did it work.  

Then the technology disappeared for almost a decade as they tried to find a practical way to build it into a form usable by athletes.

CoolMitt™ is a portable, easy-to-use system that leverages the palms of the hands to dump heat – cooling the blood and rapidly reducing the core temperature from the inside out. The CoolMitt is a glove-like mitt that you slide onto one of your hands.

It is attached to a circulating pump by a couple of tubes. The device chills water to the ideal (cool-but-not-too-cold) temperature (the temperature is critical, read below) and circulates it throughout the mitt. Your palms act like radiators, and the CoolMitt pulls the heat from your blood and returns colder blood to your heart.

It's cooling you from the inside out. In as little as 90 seconds, it can have a meaningful effect on performance.

What does it do?

Your core body temperature is the limiter on your body’s engine. Once your body heats up, it has fail-safes that start slowing muscle activity. We even have an enzyme our bodies release when we get too hot that stops the production of ATP (energy).  

CoolMitt rapidly returns our core body temperature to the optimal range, and it does it so fast you can do it between intervals on the bike, run, or in the gym.

How does it help performance?

I’ll start with my personal experience. When I first got the device three weeks ago, I went on TrainerRoad and picked the most brutal workout I would never be able to complete, what TrainerRoad considers a breakthrough workout.  

It was a 2-hour ride of 5 to 7-minute threshold intervals with 2-minute breaks between them. Between each interval, I put my hand in the CoolMitt for just under 2-minutes.

There is zero chance I could finish this type of workout. I didn’t even think I could finish it with CoolMitt, but I did. I was even stronger in the 2nd hour than in the first hour.  

It blew my mind.

It was so over my normal abilities my legs were blown out for the next five days, but I finished a workout that I could NEVER EVER have completed by cooling between intervals.  My threshold power on the bike has been the same for years. 

After three weeks of training CoolMitt, I’ve had over a 5% increase in threshold power.  I repeated the same initial workout last week and it was easy to complete.

What does it feel like?

The secret to CoolMitt is the exact right temperature. The cooling on your hand has to be at precisely 12℃ without fluctuating.

If it is colder, you get vasoconstriction, and blood flow stops. That is why sticking your hands in an ice bucket doesn’t work.

Your hand slides into the glove, but it is a cooling pad on your hand’s palm that does the work. It feels cold on your hand, but not uncomfortably so.

The water flows through the pad as a vacuum, so it is “pulling” the heat from your palm.  This process quickly cools your blood, sending it directly to your heart and out to your muscles.  It works within seconds, and after 2-3 minutes, your performance will immediately improve, and you will feel energized.  Starting your next running/riding interval or lifting set in the gym, it’s like you are always on your first set.

This is where science is a bit hard to believe. I believe it, but to put it in perspective, it's the same (or better than) illegal doping.

Over ten years of studies have shown how this technique improves performance, so I’ll share the ones that caught my attention.

• Cyclists doing peak power intervals using CoolMitt between intervals can stay at peak or near peak power throughout the entire workout.

• Cyclists could go 40% longer in a max effort interval when actively using the CoolMitt while riding.

• When athletes doing bench press training over three weeks did 3 minutes of cooling between intervals, they increased work volume by 40% versus the control group not using cooling, only improving 13%.

I also noticed that the improvement for us “less” fit athletes is even more significant than for more fit athletes.

How can you use CoolMitt?

Here are three practical ways you can use CoolMitt

1) Intervals.

Whether running, riding, or in the gym to lift, you slide your hand in CoolMitt for 2 to 3 minutes and go again. This is more practical if you train indoors on a trainer or treadmill for these workouts.

2) Post-Workout Recovery.

Come home from a hot workout. You put your hand in it for 15 minutes to 30 minutes to supercharge your recovery.

3) Sleep.

The riders at the Tour are fighting over the CoolMitt at the team hotels (some of which don’t even have A/C), so they can cool before bed and get a deeper sleep and recovery.

My wife took ours and has been using it every night before bed! 

If you are interested, please order yours now. I took months to negotiate these 30 units, well 29 now, as I just bought another one for my daughter.

Why the hand?

According to the researchers who discovered these physiological controls for body temperature, Craig Heller and Dennis Grahn at Stanford, one of the most crucial discoveries they made was: how the hand plays a unique and vital role in thermoregulation. Surfaces of the skin with no hair have evolutionarily developed specialized blood vessels in non-hairy skin.

This includes a handful of areas on the human body, but none as efficient as those in the palm.

These special blood vessels, called AVAs or arteriovenous anastomoses, allow arterial blood (the non-oxygenated blood flowing back from the body to the heart to be cooled, and enormous amounts of heat can be pulled from places such as the palm.

What about an ice bath or ice cubes?

There is a fine line between helpful and harmful to performance. When you hear “hand cooling,” you’d probably expect your hand to feel cold. But this is not the case with the CoolMitt.

And there is a reason why simply putting an ice cube on your hand would not produce the same effect. It is too cold!

Being too cold causes peripheral vasoconstriction in order to draw more blood to our core in order to protect our internal organs. The effect on our peripheral limbs (arms and legs) is that they aren’t receiving as much blood, which hurts performance.

This fine line between maximizing the internal cooling of the muscles without inciting vasoconstriction was tricky to figure out. But the people behind this patented cooling Technology could figure out that it hovers around 12 degrees centigrade, which is the temperature the device is being set to.

An ice bath or other external cooling like ice vests will also cool you, but it is incredibly inefficient and almost always results in vasoconstriction that harms performance.Simply put, there is no other device that works like CoolMitt.

It is ridiculously simple to use. It is also battery-operated, and I find a charge lasts me a few days and is easy to take with you.

• Fill the bottom cooling container with ice and water.
• Fill the upper water vacuum container with water.
• Plug the mitt hoses into the back of the device.
• Turn it on.
• Slide your hand in the glove.
• Keep your hand relatively still and keep light but continuous pressure on the cooling pad