The first look into the Wim Hof method

Wim Hof, often reffered as the Iceman, is a person, who holds 20 world records. In 2007 he climbed 6.7 km (22.000 ft) altitude at Mount Everest wearing nothing but shorts and shoes. In 2009 he reached the top of the Mount Kilimanjaro just in his shorts and completed a marathon above the arctic cirlce in Finland, with temperatures close to – 20 °C (−4 °F). In 2011 he styed immersed in ice for 1 hour and 52 minutes and ran a full marathon in the Namib Desert without drinking a singel drop of water. In recent years Wim Hof developed a method, through which anyone will be able to achieve these burried evolutionary “superpowers”. He sees himself as a normal person and clayms that anyone can reach the same results, with sufficient training and commitment.

His mission is to spread the knowledge to the World and enable everyone to become “Happy, healty and strong.”

Combining techniques of breathing with cold exposure Wim Hof method integrates key elements of most therapeutic techniques – the power of breathing, encouraging activity through exercise and expanding beyond your limits of comfort – through the help of the cold. Cold serving as your “True mirror” is your best training environment. If you can control your internal mechanism in the extreme cold, you can control them anywhere. He claims that through his breathing technique,exerciese and progressive cold training he can dive deep into his autonomic nervous system and older structures of the brain, enabling him to control his immune and endocrine systems.

Now he is working closely with the scientific community around the world to prove that his techniques work. We decided to dive into his method, compare it to similar ones and write an honest review of our experience when we integrated it into our lifestyle.

Core elements of the method

1. THE POWER OF BREATHING

Breathing is one of the basic mechanisms that enable us to live. It is the form of interaction with the environment that we are not aware of most of the time. Controlled breathing not only keeps your mind and body functioning at their best performance, it also promotes feelings of relaxation and lower your blood pressure. Many experts from different disciplines encourage using the breath as a way of increasing your awareness, mindfulness and Zen. In scientific terms, a controlled breathing techniques can lower the level of your stress hormones and influence your nervous systems throgh the regulation of oxygen, CO2 and pH levels in your body.

There are many different techniques of breathing, but most practices combine these techniques:

1. Balanced breathing – inhale and exhale last the same amount of time (example counting down from 10 seconds)
2. Abdominal breathing – Taking a deep slow breaths through the nose and expanding your abdominal area, exhaling through the mouth like blowing a candle (the goal is to make your inhale and exhale as long as possible)
3. Pranayama breathing – Using the brath to affect your constelation of mind-body energy. It is used to learn how to control your energy and calm your body and mind. There are many different techniques of Pranayama breathing, but the most common one is Ujjayi Breath – inhaling through the nose and exhaling with open mouth, just like you would like to bedew a glass with your breath, forming a wave-like sound.
4. Power breathing – Inhale deeply and follow with a forceless passive exhalation (do not force to push the air out) – recommended 30-40 deep breaths. When doing this please sit and get comfortable.

The combination that is best for you – As always we encourage you to dive deep into each one of these techniques and explore what is best for you. Try to combine different methods and form your own technique of breathing. Most of the time we combine the Abdominal breathing technique with the concept of Power breathing, incorporating more “mind” and focus into the process of breathing. 

In our exploration we found a really good short video made by TEDx Talks where Max Strom describes the importance of intentional breathing practice and its relevance in our modern society.