That year, it was not uncommon for my roommates to find me laying on the dirty carpet in the middle of our room, meditating, deep breathing, or otherwise engaged in some new form of woo-woo. But on a particularly chilly winter day, I made a request that surprised even the ever-stoic Andrew.
“Why?” he asked after a long pause.
As usual, my answer was more-or-less unintelligible as I fumbled through a mix of science, speculation, and anecdotes from people I had never met. Never one to humor me easily, I was surprised when he just shrugged and began to don his winter gear.
“I just want to go sledding.”
A little background. If there is a sickness going around, I catch it every time. While I have been blessed to have never contracted anything serious, I have always been a cold magnet. To make matters worse, I spent my early college years living with 60 other men. Even after Stubbs gave an impassioned speech about getting sick from eating off of toilet forks, it was not uncommon for our dirty bathroom and kitchen rags to end up in the same bucket. Jess on the other hand (wife now, girlfriend then) rarely gets sick, and if she does it is short-lived. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that I stumbled across the Wim Hof method. One of the dozens of videos on YouTube, with click-bait titles like NEVER GET SICK AGAIN!!?11?! caught my eye and I was quickly down the rabbit hole. As a former asthmatic, I was shocked when I successfully held my breath for 2 full minutes after trying the technique. I was even more shocked when I was able to crank out 50 push ups during a breath hold when I was only able to eke out a weak 20 the day before. Quack or not, this crazy dutch dude was teaching me things about the human body.
If you are unfamiliar with Hof and his methods, one of the key features of his teaching is cold exposure. Wim set a world record in 2000 for farthest swim under ice (188.6 ft), currently holds the world record for fastest half marathon barefoot on ice and snow (2:16:34), and for longest time in direct full-body contact with ice (2:08:47), has summited Kilimanjaro within 2 days wearing only shorts and shoes, and has run a marathon in the Namib Desert without water. While Hof claims that many of the benefits of his techniques can be achieved through breathing and meditation alone, he espouses that cold exposure offers additional benefit and can amplify some of the effects achieved by the breathing. The benefits include control over body heat production, influence over the endocrine system (elevating adrenaline levels, etc.), fat loss, improved circulation, and immune system suppression resulting in reduced symptoms of several diseases. While I intensely dislike being cold, I couldn’t ignore all of the stories I was seeing online of people reversing serious diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, and, more commonly, going years without catching the common cold. I sucked it up and dove in (quite literally).
Back to the sledding.
It had been a couple weeks since I had started incorporating the Wim Hof method into my morning routine (Wake up, hyperventilate in a closet, meditate while holding my breath, take a freezing cold shower, brush my teeth, get dressed – you know the drill) and I was eager to test my newfound abilities in the real world. I began the breathing as I strapped on my boots and ignored Andrew’s “you are such a weirdo” looks as we exited the warm indoors. It was butt-cold and windy too, a perfect day for shirtless sledding. I kept my jacket on as we trekked the quarter mile to the sledding hill and felt my body temperature climbing with every breath.
I took a couple rides down the hill on our crappy sled. There were several other people on the hill with us and I began to loose my nerve – I wasn’t exactly Hercules under the winter coat and I didn’t relish the idea of flashing the world with my pasty 1-pack and frosty nipples. But I was already sweating through my coat from the breathing; if Wim could climb Kilimanjaro like this, I could at least conquer Slayter hill. I shed the layers and the hat and let the winter wind do its thing. Despite my usually poor circulation, my hands and ears stayed warm. I didn’t shiver; I didn’t get goosebumps. For the next 30 minutes I continued to sled and roll in the snow, conscious of the cold, but never uncomfortable; it felt as though an invisible force field let it touch my skin but go no further. A stranger took our picture for us and we called it a day.
I continued to practice the Wim Hof method daily for a few weeks after that and occasionally when I needed a boost in the years that followed. While I can offer no cohesive scientific explanation, and I cannot prove the effects, I have another story to add to the countless others. In the two years following my first experience with the Wim Hof method, I didn’t catch a single cold, flu, or otherwise. In the same period, Jess got sick several times – an event that had signaled my own fate with certainty in the past – and yet I never caught it… until today. I write this from my couch on my first sick day in two years. Jess has been out sick for a few days now (an extremely rare occurrence) and I finally have a shadow of her cold. You know what my morning routine looked like today.
If you want to learn Wim and his methods, you can find a Superhuman Academy Podcast interview with him HERE.
