An ice adventure

Getting frozen in Austria

It’s cold. Really cold. My thighs go tingly and feel as if I’ve just had tiny bits of broken glass put in them. I try to ignore the strange stabbing sensations, just as my arms start shivering with a mind of their own. Then my chest starts to vibrate as my body tries to keep itself warm: even my nose shivers. The sound of Guns’n’Roses echoes around the frozen chamber as icy billows of freezing fog cloud the room. Which is understandable really, because it’s minus 110 degrees inside.

I have to keep walking or things turn dangerous; a voice crackling through the speakers from the outside world tells me I have to keep the body moving but stop talking. Stay away from the metal walls, she barks at me; breathe slowly through the nose. It’s not so easy to do when you’re eight minutes away from freezing to death and your body doesn’t know what the hell’s going on.

I’m in a cryotherapy chamber in a hotel in the upmarket Austrian ski resort of Seefeld, the first place in Europe that offers guests the chance to be frozen to within an inch of your life.

Freezing for fitness

Cryotherapy is the latest alternative treatment seen by devotees as a miraculous pain relief for all sorts of ailments ranging from rheumatism, arthritis, sciatica, asthma, MS, muscle stiffness. Some medics insist it helps the mind too and can treat depression, insomnia and stress.

Cryotherapy was developed 30 years ago in Japan to aid post-surgery rehabilitation, working with the theory that patients could stand more intensive physiotherapy after a session in the chamber.

These days it’s used by sportsmen (ex-boxer Frank Bruno, Eastern European athletes and Bolton Wanderers have got their own chamber) as a more technical, and potentially dangerous version of ice packs and ice baths.

In such extreme cold, our molecules immediately shrink and when we emerge, breathless, red and thankful to have survived, they expand again to four times their size, making the blood flow faster, reducing pain and swelling in the joints. Exposure to cold also reduces inflammation, and numbs the area, and because cold signals travel faster than pain signals, this helps blot out the pain.

Another theory, according to the hotel’s Doctor Georg Kettenhuber is that because the body’s nerve receptors are so confused (they stop differentiating temperatures below -60c), repeated exposure eventually re-programmes them so that chronic pain sufferers’ synapses are tricked into realising that they don’t have to respond to pain.

Chill seeker

Before we enter the first of the three chambers (a tropical minus 10), our blood pressure is tested and a list of medical no-nos are run through: heart conditions, thrombosis, kidney disease, anaemia, epilepsy, pregnancy and claustrophobia. Unfortunately, I can’t spot general timidity on the page, so I elegantly undress to my shorts, socks and trainers, gloves, face mask and ear muffs.

Any exposed extremities run the risk of frostbite, jewellery is banned in case it freezes to the skin and I dab the rest of myself dry; left-over tears or sweat will turn to ice immediately. In case you still can’t imagine minus 110 degrees, a food freezer is minus 20C and the coldest temperature recorded on earth was a startlingly chilly minus 89.2C in Antarctica. Put it this way: the day I jump in the freezer, an astronaut from the Austrian Space Forum is here, trying out Europe’s first Mars spacesuit. It’s cold.

After a 30 second stint in the minus ten room it’s off to the next one, a particularly bracing minus 60 frozen by liquid nitrogen before the final three minutes of minus 110. Three minutes only chills the body’s outer layers. Give it a bit longer and your organs will freeze up. Eight minutes and you’ll be dead.

Although I felt immensely reinvigorated when I came out, Dr Kettenhuber – who recently treated the Greek football team and is hosting the Austrians later this the year – recommends two sessions a day for a fortnight to see the best results.

Austrian alternatives

Getting frozen might sound like a pretty alternative – and extreme therapy. It turns out that this corner of Austria is brimful of unusual medical therapies. An hour’s drive away on the other side of the magnificent Alpine national park of Karwendel, is the Hotel Wiesenhof, a homely wooden hotel just by the shores of Lake Achensee. Run by Johannes Entner and his wife Alexandra, the place has been in the family for generations until the ill-health of Mr Entner senior took the hotel in a new direction.

Since suffering (and surviving) seven heart attacks and undergoing almost as many bypass operations, Mr Entner and his son have decided to focus on cardio health with special programmes designed to work on the heart.

Every night you can have a choice of a different pillow filled with mountain flowers to ease your sleep in the golden pine bedrooms before you wander downstairs in the morning for a swim gazing up at the mountains or a soak in a Shale Oil bath. Johannes has recently installed a sound bed, a strange wooden contraption with 52 harp like strings tuned to C sharp which are strummed underneath the platform to let ‘energising and soothing vibrations’ run through your body. A favourite treatment with guests is the hot hay bed, where you lie floating on water, wrapped in plastic sheets and hot hay.

‘Local farmers would lie in the bales of hot, damp hay when they had bad backs after working in the fields all day’ explained Johannes.

The theory is that the heated, ticklish hay helps sweat out toxins as you lie serenely and oddly floating in the water. Itchy? Perhaps. But at least you’re not getting frost on you nipples to the sound of Guns’n’Roses.

For more information, visit: www.wiesenhof.at and www.alpenmedhotel.com