What Wim Hof above all wants to demonstrate, and to have people experience for themselves, is that anyone can do what he does: mindset is so much more powerful a factor than you might think! To accomplish this, Hof has set up the WHM Academy, where he trains people up to become official ‘Wim Hof instructors’.
“The cold is my warm friend” “What I do, anyone can do” This gets your body slowly used to temperature differentials, and you’ll find that you can stay under the cold jets a little longer each morning. Going all at once to cover yourself in ice for 113 minutes would be overdoing it, but having a daily cold shower is a good start. Once you’ve done the breathing and mindfulness exercises, your body is all set to face the cold. By ensuring that you breathe well, deeply and powerfully, you are steeling your body for both physical and mental challenges. The breathing techniques are particularly crucial if you, like Hof, want to be an iceman. The approach that Wim Hof takes is based on three basic elements: respiration, mindset and meditation exercises. “Make the cold your friend, and your power will be immense” How the Wim Hof method works As well as stimulating good circulation, having sufficient oxygen in your blood helps heal wounds, regularise the heartbeat, avoid infections, fight cancerous cells, reduce respiratory infections and asthma, and it gives a general sense of contentment because the central nervous system is stabilised. Besides being caused by shallow breathing, oxygen deprivation can also be caused by chronic stress, an unhealthy diet or a lack of exercise. The better the oxygen saturation of your blood, the healthier your body is. In addition, it enriches the body with more oxygen. More oxygen is good news for health, since practically all diseases are linked to low oxygen saturation in the blood. Deep, measured respiration enables the body better to endure low temperatures. To cope with extreme cold, Hof focuses on his breathing. If you train your immune system by regularly exposing yourself to greatly fluctuating temperatures, you make it stronger and more robust. Present across the whole body, the immune system is there to be constantly on the alert for, and to neutralise, foreign bodies that invade you. The great advantage of this is that it eases the strain on your heart. Better circulation of your blood also boosts your immune system. The effect of that is that your heart doesn’t have to pump as hard in fact, up to 20 or 30 times less per minute. This gives you a superior circulation, which results in improved blood flow. The cold trains the veins in your cardiovascular system, and the more often you train them, the better they can contract. Hof says regular exposure to cold brings many benefits with it. Anyone else’s body would have developed life-threatening hypothermia in these conditions. The world record in which he spent seven minutes shy of two hours in an ice bath is an unprecedented achievement, the more so since his body temperature remained in the ideal range around 37☌ the whole time. Normally, all these are controlled by the autonomous nervous system and there’s not much we can do to influence them - unless your name is Wim Hof, that is. Hof has taught himself to use exposure to extreme cold to regulate his own heartbeat, respiration and circulation. What motivates someone to do this kind of thing, and above all, how does he pull it off time and again? The cold as a boost to the immune system These are mind-boggling feats, particularly given the extreme conditions that Wim Hof exposes himself to. In 2011, he broke his own endurance record by staying submerged in an ice bath for no fewer than 113 minutes, and the same year, he ran a marathon - a marathon in the Namibian desert, that is, in searing temperatures of 40☌, without drinking a drop of water. Two years later - again clad in shorts - he ran a half-marathon north of the Arctic Circle, with no training, in temperatures of -20☌ to -30☌. To take just one example, in 2007 he scaled Mount Everest in a pair of shorts.
Currently, he holds 21 official Guinness World Records, each one of which is beyond the imagination of most of us. Who is this 58-year-old Dutchman, also known as ‘The Iceman’? A man of many records Whatever your own opinion of him might be, it’s hard not to hang on this man’s every word as soon as he starts speaking. To some, Wim Hof is a visionary to others, he’s a dangerous daredevil. World record holder, adventurer, daredevil, inspirer