Kneejerk 43/180

🦞 Lobster claws 🦞

Dear Diary,

As part of my ongoing investigation into deep breathing and the Wim Hof method’s effects, today we’ll take a look at tetany.

Tetany is something I frequently experience during WHM breathing. It is when your fingers cramp up into “🦞 lobster claws 🦞”.

It feels absolutely mortifying because you lose any control over your extremities for a while.

It turns out that when you hyperoxygenate your blood, your body gets rid of CO2 faster than it can be produced. Now, that might sound good, but CO2 is also a very important component of your biology. Specifically, with less CO2 in the blood and more O2, your blood becomes more alkaline - it loses acidity - meaning the PH factor goes up. With a higher PH factor, lots of things happen (more on that in future posts), including reducing cellular calcium (source, another).

It seems that this makes cells more prone to letting sodium in, which results in them being more excitable (source, another) to the point of basically activating themselves without impulses from you. The muscles become so sensitive they auto trigger.

While scary, this condition is nothing to worry about - it goes away a few minutes after normal breathing resumes. But is it preventable?

Some research (here, here, here, here, here, here) indicates that a low potassium or magnesium amount in blood can make you more prone to experiencing tetany, but since I take some pretty strong Mg doses every day, I think I can exclude that suspect.

There is some evidence of PTH (Parathyroid hormone) being responsible for it too (here, here), which is responsible for calcium and Vitamin D levels in the blood. Given that I take Calcium and Vitamin D in pretty significant doses, I think these can be safely eliminated too - unless too much Ca is also a problem because it gets ionized when the blood is alkaline, therefore being more prone to letting sodium in.

In fact, active Vitamin D is (aka calcitrol) is responsible for dictating how much Ca your gut can absorb from food. Since I take Vitamin D in heavy doses, and I take concentrated Ca daily, it stands to reason I hyper-absorb it and therefore actually have too much Calcium. Since Calcium is the primary ingredient in helping muscles squeeze together, I may have just over-primed my nerves with it which, when ionized, results in very easily triggered tetany.

I am going to schedule a full blood panel for later this week or the next to test this theory and check my levels. It is kind of counterintuitive since it’s usually a lack of Ca causing tetany, but worth testing for 🤷‍♂️ Doctors here are not much help with these matters, most have stopped education when they left university and won’t even entertain the idea that breathing has an effect on anything.

Nutrition

• Breakfast

  • none

• Lunch

  • chocolates. I am trash.

• Dinner

  • Philly cheesesteak

  • L-glutamine + supplements etc

Habits

Experiments

• WHM continues, I do regular daily exercises as challenged by the app, plus can do cold showers of 75 seconds now. Will continue increasing for as long as it feels comfortable, until I feel safe enough to switch to the cold plunge.