About a year ago I was living in Portland, Oregon and training clients in person. Alex responded to one of my ads and told me he had Crohns disease and wanted to get strong, but was having trouble. I said “ok bro meet me at the gym and we’ll start”.
Alex showed up – and I will not exaggerate saying that he looked like he had been starving for 5 years -with almost zero muscle mass or fat on him. And after he told me his story I understood why. His Crohn’s disease was so bad that he was simply not able to eat any significant amount of calories without having flare-ups. He had been going to the doctors for years, had taken medications and had stomach surgery and still had zero improvement.
Fortunately I was totally confident that I could help him recover quickly – I’ve had many friends with Crohn’s disease use the methods I’m about to tell you about. I also knew exactly why the doctors had failed – they did nothing to treat the underlying performance of the body and the inflammation. Drugs and surgery can really only temporarily solve issues – in order to really cure yourself from chronic injuries or illnesses you need to change the way your body performs. You can only do this by taking action.
The first step to helping Alex was to give him tools to get the inflammation down so he could eat enough food to power his body. His goal was to get big and strong and lift weights, but you can’t do that without calories. And he was not able to eat any calories because of the inflammation.
So I started him on the two most powerful techniques on the planet for controlling inflammation in the body.
- Cold/heat contrast showers. This is an absolute staple for anyone to take control of their health for any issue. It is so potent that if you master this skill you almost do not even need anything else. Here is an article I wrote on how you can get started with cold/hot contrast showers. https://icedragontraining.com/hot-cold-showers/
- The second one is something called Power Breathing. Now power breathing has a very potent effect on the body and must be practiced with absolute safety. DO NOT do this near water, do not do this while driving or riding some sort of vehicle. Do not do this in a place where if you lose consciousness you can be at risk. Only do this sitting down on a couch or with your back against the wall. Ideally do it in the same room as other people when you first start out. Here is the video of how to do Power Breathing. You will want to practice this multiple times a day until you can completely change the way that your body reacts to stress. https://www.tiktok.com/@nicksteinericedragon/video/7366575390569041198
After he had practiced this techniques daily and seen some improvement in his symptoms and his energy levels, it was time to get more calories in his system. This is absolutely necessary for making any sort of progress in the gym, so we didn’t even bother really touching weights until he could consistently get more calories in his system.
For someone who is untrained they often do not understand how disciplined you need to be in your life to maximize your diet. I’m extremely healthy and I almost never touch deep fried food or sugar. Anyone who’s done a bit of research knows that these are unhealthy for you. And not coincidentally these were the exact foods – along with spicy foods that caused his flareups.
So we eliminated all the foods that caused flareups and figured out which foods did not and were also calorie and protein dense. These foods included:
- Chicken
- Fish
- Rice
- Vegetables
- Eggs
- Peanut Butter
- Milk
Basically typically bodybuilding food. Add some fruit for Vitamin C and you have a perfect diet.
So we have him doing his breathing techniques and cold/hot contrast showers everyday, eating as many calories as he could (high in protein), and going on long walks to calm his nervous system. After only a couple weeks he was able to gain weight and start hitting the gym.
With the gym we worked on simple exercises – basic pushing and pulling motions, squats, and abs. As long as he continued with the breathwork and the cold showers he has little to no flareups and was making steady progress gaining weight and achieving confidence in his life.
I left Portland shortly after to move to Europe and fell out of contact with Alex. But he sent me a message recently.
I’m excited to see that after picture from Alex and how strong and powerful he can get.
If you’ve been dealing with Crohn’s disease for a long time you may not be able to believe that you could fix it within a few months by having discipline to stick to certain techniques, but hopefully this case study can show you that it may be possible.
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