Lit Method Founder Talks How a 4-Minute Cold Plunge Made Him Do His Own Thing

I was on a business trip in Asia when LIT was focusing on designing precision equipment for athletes, when I was convinced to try my first cold plunge. Being from LA, my coworkers knew how much I hate the cold and were laughing at me for the first 30 seconds. The laughter died down much sooner rather than later because I ended up sitting there for four minutes. When I came out, I knew that that cold dip would change my whole life.

FROM A MENTAL RESET TO A REBRAND

As a certified trainer with an athletic competitive background, I have always advocated and appreciated how mental health is reflected in fitness. During my very first cold diving experience, the moment I felt my body changing and getting used to the 37 degree water, I started to feel very calm. That was not the norm for me at the time. My wife was pregnant with our first child, we had just moved and I was traveling a lot for work, so a lot was happening at once.

I had more energy that day than I probably had in a year. My clarity and focus were sharper, I no longer needed caffeine to function, my stress decreased, I felt fantastic. I knew that if something could give me a new life like that, our clients would feel the same. From the moment I noticed I was feeling “Zen-like” until I stepped out four minutes later, I knew ENLIGHTENED was going to be entering the cold plunge world, and I was ready to go all in.

On the flight back home I started thinking about the current cold plunge companies on the market and how clear it was that they are capitalizing on the momentum of this trend but don’t actually care if they are helping people or not. We decided that using our background as fitness trainers would be an immeasurable benefit for consumers to learn more about the practice of cold diving, and we were all in favor of educating people on how to do cold diving and why.

When I got home from that trip, we made it official to move forward with LIT as an all-in-one longevity wellness company that designs products with built-in support that helps people feel and function at their best.

MAKE COLD DIVES COOL AND SAUNAS HOT

We recently moved to Utah – and it is very different from the weather in Los Angeles. It’s snowing, raining and the wind comes out of a movie here. Our goal was to make a cold plunge durable enough to survive in our backyard. We added marine-grade steel to the interior and exterior and installed insulation between the 3-inch thick walls so the water temperature stays exactly where you set it. If it is -10 degrees here, we want to keep the diving water temperature between 45 and 55 degrees. However, the built-in heating obviously needs to kick in and do some work, as we designed this based on our personal experience. The insulated walls are there for a reason and that is to be very aware of not using/wasting excess electricity.

Cold splashes have never been so clean either. The cold plunge of LIT are the only ones on the market that are free of chemicals. Unique to our immersions is that we have incorporated UVC light to kill bacteria in the water, meaning no harsh, chemically treated water is required and the pool does not need to be emptied regularly. The UVC light cleans and filters the entire cold dip in less than an hour. So it is safe for the next person to use within 10 minutes; a great feature for a multi-person household.

How, when and at what temperature you should take a cold dip depends on what you want to achieve from your cold dip: muscle recovery, sustained energy, focus and clarity, or a digestive aid.

Now on heat. The sauna of LIT have been redesigned based on my wife Taylor and my personal experience of living together. It’s safe to say that our sauna preferences are completely opposite.

Taylor likes lower heat and infrared mode, a light-based heat for lower temperature sessions and ideal for instant body heating, relaxation and muscle recovery. I love to sweat it out old-fashioned style with a traditional high-heat sauna experience. That said, I didn’t set out to create two different saunas for our home, tailor-made just for us.

So we decided to double that and build the inside with red cedar and a Hemlock exterior. We’ve always been very passionate about product design at LIT, so we wanted to create aesthetically beautiful cold plunge pools and saunas, while building product differentiators that we knew our customers would be equally passionate about.

People want to do contrast therapy and they like the idea. They just don’t know what to do, and they want to know how to do it the right way to get a return on their investment, not something that’s sitting there collecting dust because they’re intimidated by it.

I’m happy to share my routine with them, such as how I use hot versus cold contrast therapy with our saunas and plunge pools, and any specific lifestyle or fitness questions they have regarding the therapies, such as which one to use first. We can cover these types of topics in our LIT wellness newsletter coming out, which is a great way for us to be able to provide advice on a larger scale as fitness trainers. You can learn more about LIT’s products by subscribing to the newsletter and visiting orr website.

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