‘Can I get out now please?': Could Wim Hof help me unleash my body's inner power?
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Loading... - Amelia Martin
- 13 Apr 2022
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“Take a deep breath in,” bellows the Iceman, Wim Hof. “And let it go. Fully in … and letting go. Get into your rhythm, fully in, letting go …”
Lying on his sofa, I do what he says: a big breath in, then release, 20 more, nine more, four, here comes the last.
“And stop, close your mouth, easy does it, just stay relaxed and witness. You are without air in your lungs, we will do one minute.”
And we – I – do, hold my breath for a minute. “Three, two, one, fully in, squeeze it a little bit to your head, this is bringing cerebrospinal fluid to the brain, letting go. Now we go again.”
So off we go again: 40 full breaths, exhale, then hold it, this time for a minute and a half. Hof says my blood chemistry is changing. I feel a bit tingly, hear a slight ringing noise, but I can do it, a minute and a half, he times it on his phone. I’ve never held my breath for that long.
We do another round of breathing, then I hold it for two minutes. He says there’s more adrenaline rushing through my system than there would be if I was doing a bungee jump. “This is real science,” he says. I had put it to him that some of his claims are quite bold, and that he has his critics. We’ll come back to that. Right now I’m just focusing on my breathing.
And one more time, two and a half minutes without breathing. He talks as I hold it, and says my body is bringing down inflammation. I told him I had some osteoarthritis in my hand; this will help, he says, optimistically. I also told him I’d had depression. He says this helps depression as well. “You’re dealing with the chemical residue that causes the anxiety, you are cleansing the shit. And, yes, it improves the virility as well.” I don’t think I said I had any issues with my virility, did I?
I’m feeling relaxed, calm, a little bit trippy. “Yes, I always say: ‘Get high on your own supply.’” He likes a catchphrase. “A cold shower a day keeps the doctor away,” is another; and “We go, no ego.”
That last one grates a little. I’m no expert but I’d say that Hof’s ego is in pretty good health. He is full of stories starring Wim Hof as the hero. My favourite is one about leading a group of people up a mountain in the Spanish Pyrenees. They got to the hut where they were spending the night; Hof realised they had forgotten to bring the food, so he went back down, made Spanish tortillas and brought them back up for the group. But still he was full of energy, so he ran on up to the top of the mountain, overtaking a mountain goat on the descent. “I think the animal respected my animalistic energy. Normally, it takes eight hours to go up and back, I did it in one hour and a quarter.” He actually out-mountain-goated a mountain goat.
Anyway, ego or no, now we go, to the garden, where he has a barrel of icy water ready …
Hof is a stuntman, an extreme athlete and now a wellness guru with a primetime TV show (Freeze the Fear With Wim Hof, on BBC One). He has set records for swimming under ice, for sitting in a box full of ice, for running barefoot on ice. He regularly climbs Kilimanjaro – and got a fair way up Everest – half naked. His techniques – which combine hypoxic breathing, cold water and willpower to make the Wim Hof Method or WHM – have been adopted by athletes, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and celebrities. He has trained Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Oprah Winfrey and Orlando Bloom. Now, it seems everyone is getting involved. “One hundred million people know my methods,” he boasts. There have been 40m downloads of his Breathing Bubble audiovisual guide. It has struck a chord during the Covid pandemic, he says, because it’s about tolerating discomfort. “I want to show the world there are ways to get hold of your own physiology.”
I’m spending the afternoon with him in the village of Stroe in the Netherlands, an hour from Amsterdam, where he does weekends and workshops of hypoxic breathing and ice baths. It’s a filthy day, cold and driving rain, but he comes out barefoot, in just a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, singing. He often breaks into song. At one point, he picks up one of his many guitars, this one a present from a fan who has inlaid it with ice crystals and a picture of Hof’s face. He plays and sings a song he wrote called Crazy Like a Monkey, although he’s forgotten some of the words. “Crazy like a money, yeah … fuck, yeah!” He plays well, and has a big powerful voice. Everything about Hof is big and powerful. And everywhere he goes he’s followed by his dog, Zina; he calls her “my brown shadow”.
Outside, he has created a kind of Disney paradise, with pools and rocks, palms and bamboo, plastic animals, flamingos, a lifesize rhinoceros. The noise from the busy motorway on the other side of the fence is a shame. There’s a tipi and a couple of yurts where guests can stay. He used to live in the house here, now he lives in Amsterdam with his second wife, Erin, and their four-year-old son, Eden, the youngest of his six children. He prefers it in Stroe, though. “Here, I jump from the rocks, I go into icy water, I do crazy stuff, I do my splits like a ballerina. I can’t do that stuff in an Amsterdam apartment. There, I have to behave, I’m not a behaving kind of guy,” he says. “I love her to death,” he adds quickly. Erin is 29 years younger than Hof, who’s 62. She was on one of his courses, that’s how they met. Read More...
