Have you heard of Wim Hof? 

It’s actually someone’s name!  He’s a Dutch endurance athlete who made a name for himself by pushing the limits of physical endurance.  He has developed a system of breathing and cold water immersion that can do wonders

for your health and decrease your sensitivity to stress.

Using his method Wim Hof has accumulated almost 20 world records, including the longest ice bath, climbing a snowy mountain wearing only shorts, running marathons around the polar circle and the longest swim under the arctic ice. 

The method consists of three components:

• Breathing
• Concentration
• Cold exposure

These three components by themselves offer nothing particularly novel.  People have been meditating for 1000s of years and interestingly there are many anecdotal stories of Tibetan monks enduring the cold with similar techniques in the Himalayan Mountains. 

However, Hof really started to get some attention because of the records he broke. When you have someone who is clearly very different from the average man it’s easy to label them as one of a kind, an outlier of sorts.  In a weird twist of fate Hof has an identical twin brother.  This meant that it was easy for researchers to investigate Hof’s body to see if he was just somehow born with a physical anomaly to withstand cold, or if he had trained himself to do it.  As it turns out his brother is physically very similar to Wim yet does not possess the ability to endure 75 minutes in ice or swim in the arctic.  With this in mind scientists have concluded that somehow using the combination of breath, concentration and cold exposure Hof has trained himself to do this.

He’s somewhat of a showman and he started to claim publicly that he could control his autonomic nervous system, which is generally accepted to be out of conscious control.  For example, most studies where people have claimed to be able to control their heart rate or their sweat have been disappointing.

However, Hof was determined he could.  So in order to prove it he immersed himself in ice for 75 mins, this not only gained him a world record but something else, perhaps more profound happened that day as well.  

Normal body temperature is around 98.6 F (37 C). Hypothermia, a condition where the body becomes too cold occurs as your body temperature falls below 95 F (35 C).  There are different stages of hyperthermia from mild to moderate and severe.  Moderate hypothermia is classified as a core body temperature between 82 F (27.7C) and 90 F (32C).  Wim’s core temperature fell to 88F (31C) and he didn’t show the signs of hypothermia, he did not even shiver or move.  Remarkably, his temperature rose again to 94 °F within the next 20 minutes. Current medical understanding of hypothermia states that once the core temperature falls below 90 °F (32C), it is not possible for the body to warm itself again. That is why it is important to provide an external source of heat.  However, Hof proved he was able to raise his core temperature from 88 °F to 94 °F by using his Method.  What’s more is that the researchers measured a 300% increase in his metabolism which directly increased the amount of heat he produced.  Let me put that in context. 

In the medical textbook ‘Stats Pearls’ the authors claim that:

“In adults, it is rare to increase the rate of heat production by more than 10% to 15% by chemical thermogenesis.” 

Or in other words, they have never heard of a feat like this.

That was not enough for Hof, he took it further though and claimed that he could also regulate his immune system and teach other people to do it!

In 2011 researchers in Holland decided to give him a chance to prove his claims with ‘normal’ people (1). They allowed Hof to train 12 volunteers over 10 days in his method.  At the end of the 10 days they injected the participants, and a control group, with an inactive form of E-coli.   This is an established experiment that results in anyone who received the injection feeling like they have an instant flu.  

The lead author of the experiment, Peter Pickkers, describes the procedure in more detail;

“We administer endotoxin, a dead cell-wall component of bacteria, to healthy volunteers. The immune system reacts as if real live bacteria have entered the body and mounts an immune response characterized by the production of inflammatory mediators and flu-like symptoms like fever, chills and headache. These experiments are completely safe and have been performed on more than 240 subjects in our centre.”  

Essentially after the injection of the endotoxin people get these flu like symptoms which is caused by the immune system overreacting, not the bacteria.  This is important to know, because a lot of what we feel when we are sick is actually a result of our immune system’s response, not the pathogen (virus or bacteria).  Our immune systems are so powerful that they can really make us feel sick, in some cases they can actually get out of control and damage us. This is what happens in conditions known as autoimmune disease. 

During the experiment Pickkers and his colleagues noticed that the subjects trained by Hof didn’t get as many symptoms as the untrained control group.  When they examined the blood of the people in the study they recorded that the ones who were trained produced about 50% lower levels of several proteins associated with inflammation, and 200% higher levels of inflammation-fighting mediators.  This showed that after just 10 days of training it was possible to modulate the immune system.  These results opened the door for more investigation to see if Hof’s method can help with persistent inflammation especially autoimmune diseases. 

The endotoxin study started to get the scientific community interested in the method. Meanwhile Hof continued pushing the boundaries of what was possible especially when he took a group of volunteers up Kilimanjaro.

Scott Carney, author of the book ‘What Doesn’t Kill Us” was on that expedition.  Carney actually made a name for himself as an investigative journalist disproving guru type figures like Wim Hof.  His motive for going on the expedition was to challenge Wim Hof and show him up to be a fraud.  In his words

“I thought that Wim Hof was a charlatan. And even if he had some special powers, some abilities that he had developed, the fact that he was saying he could teach other people to master them, it just sounded like people were gonna die”

Wim’s plan was to take 24 people up to the top of the mountain in under 30 hours.  There were a few things about this that were different.  Firstly, the group consisted of people who had varying ages and diseases with no mountain experience. Secondly conventional wisdom states that it should take 5-10 days in order to adjust to the extreme cold and elevation.  Even with that knowledge a handful of climbers die every year on Kilimanjaro.  This was the sort of ‘train wreck’ that Carney was looking for.  He wanted to be there when Hof endangered lives so he could document it and expose him.

Before the climb Carney decided to ask some climbing authorities what they thought of the proposed expedition to see if this would be a good or bad idea.  The US military said that most of the group were almost guaranteed to come down with acute mountain sickness, which can prove fatal, estimating that about 25% of the group would need to be airlifted to safety.  The Dutch Mountaineering Association weren’t so optimistic,  stating that there would be 100% fatalities!

As you could imagine it was with some trepidation that Carney set off on the climb, but the others in the group were excited and happy to be there.  Halfway up the mountain it was clear that Hof was pushing too hard.  Not content with just taking people up the mountain he wanted to get a personal speed record as well.  This led to a split in the group with Hof and Carney creating a faster group and actually making it to the top in a record 28 hours.  The surprising thing is that Carney, who is a self proclaimed normal person, did it just in a pair of shorts and hiking boots, his bare chest was warm against the -20C extreme cold. 

You might be surprised to hear that the rest of the group, bar two, under the leadership of other experienced guides made it to the top with no problems, all with an extraordinarily fast time, under 48 hours. According to the website https://www.ultimatekilimanjaro.com the route that Hof and his followers took has a 41% success rate under normal climbing conditions.

This begs the question: what does Wim Hof know that the US military and the Dutch Mountaineering Association doesn’t?

His method can be broken down like this:

• Take 30-40 deep breaths followed by an exhale and a breath hold.
• When you feel the urge to breath in take a deep recovery breath and hold for 15 seconds
• Repeat the cycle 3 to 4 times, and don’t be surprised if you feel lightheaded or tingly. 
• Let your breathing normalize.

Breathing like this floods the body with oxygen which allows the cells to produce more energy.  When you breathe out you rid the body of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) this slightly alters the pH of the blood to be more alkali which buffers lactic acid, the bi-product of exercise, which stops our muscles from working. During the E-coli experiment the blood pH went from an average of  7.4 up to 7.75. 

Essentially, the combination of more oxygen and less CO2 makes the production of energy more efficient. 

The breath hold puts the body into the ‘fight or flight’ response because there is a CO2 build up when you hold your breath and the body doesn’t like that.  In fact it wants to get rid of the CO2 as fast as possible.  Ultimately the method is doing the opposite of most meditation or relaxation techniques because it creates a stress response and produces cortisol and adrenaline.  These are both important in fighting inflammation in the body. The stress response is what differentiates the method from ‘regular’ meditation but the concentration involved still allows it to be classified as mindfulness.  

If the breath work and concentration are the foundations of the practice the cold exposure is the house that sits on top. 

During another  study Pickers et al (2011) discovered that when Hof combined the breath work with cold exposure he showed no inflammatory markers in his blood after the E-coli administration and the levels of cytokines were still low even after 6 days. 

For those who want to get geeky there were a couple of inflammatory proteins that caught the attention of the researchers because their production was significantly depressed.  TNF-α (Tumor necrosis factor-alpha) is an inflammatory protein that plays a major role in the body’s inflammation processes.  It is considered a decisive factor in the development of inflammation related diseases such as arthritis and Crohn’s disease.  The other one was IL-6 (Interleukin-6) which is a protein that can trigger flu-like symptoms, particularly among individuals with autoimmune diseases and infections.   Conversely as well as an increase in cortisol and adrenaline there was an increase in the  production of more anti-inflammatory proteins (cytokine IL-10).

The interesting part is this, the researchers also took Hof’s blood after he did the breathing and cold exposure without being injected with the toxin and noticed he did not have a change in his blood proteins and inflammatory markers.  This led them to conclude that the breathing and cold exposure did not change the immune response unnecessarily, but only when it was challenged. 

Further research has been done to see if the method can help people who have inflammatory diseases.  In another study by Pickers et al 2018 they chose axial spondyloarthritis, which they describe as a prototypical chronic inflammatory condition.  The study showed that not only was the method safe but also the participants showed a decline in the inflammatory markers of ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) and C-reactive protein (CRP).  These are both well established markers of inflammation that are commonly raised in people who have an autoimmune condition, 

In addition, various measures of disease activity and quality of life were measured and found to improve following the adoption of breathing and cold exposure. The results suggest that the method does not only enable healthy individuals to voluntarily initiate the immune response in acute inflammation but also it is possible for people with chronic inflammation to influence the body’s response and also change their symptoms of the disease. 

Currently research is being conducted into how the method can affect pain and inflammation in other conditions and how it changes the brain with regards to helping with mental health and stress resilience.

Interestingly there are countless testimonials or case studies that can be found in books and on the internet about how this method helped everything from migraines to Parkinson’s.  Remember the group who climbed Kilimanjaro?  None of them were experienced climbers and there were individuals who had Cancer, Rheumatoid arthritis, Asthma, Crohn’s disease, and Multiple Sclerosis.

For me, I do it for the breathing practice and mental focus it brings.  I’ve noticed an increase in my ability to run without my ‘lungs’ letting me down, which can be explained by increasing the efficiency of the oxygen uptake and the increase in the elasticity of my lungs and rib cage.  I can now go into freezing water without freaking out, which when done before bed helps me sleep and I haven’t had a cold or been ill for over as long as I can remember practicing the method.

Generally I have the water temperature somewhere between 1-6 degrees C.
I go in for about 3 minutes.  Wim says that more than that isn’t 100% necessary to reap the benefits.  Personally I like to go in before bed, but some days I go twice a day, morning and night.

Oh – he’s a picture of a friend of mine going in for the first time….yup…some people find it easier than others.  He wanted me to share it just to show that there can be a learning curve with cold water exposure….

 

(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034215/

 

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