If you pay an attention to the world of alternative health, or the many, many podcasts and video series in which men (and it’s always men) talk about self-optimisation, you’ve almost certainly heard of Wim Hof. Hof has spent decades extolling the virtues of hyperventilation regimes and cold water plunges, claiming all manner of health benefits and protective qualities. He has made a career of illustrating the power of “The Wim Hof Method” via a variety of endurance demonstrations, building himself a lucrative brand as motivational speaker and quasi-spiritual guru along the way.
Wim Hof was a wellness expert on the Goop Lab, Netflix’s Gwyneth Paltrow collab. He was the star of Vice documentary Inside the Superhuman World of the Iceman. He fronted the BBC series Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof. He’s appeared on shows with Ellen DeGeneres, Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Stephen Bartlett, Brian Rose, and almost every other wellness channel and hustle culture program around, feted as an expert in what the human body can do, because of the record-breaking things his body has done.
It is undeniable that Hof has been capable of record-breaking feats of cold-temperature endurance. In 1999 he broke the Guinness World Record for farthest swum under ice, managing 50m without a diving suit, breathing apparatus or flippers, in his second attempt. His first, the previous day, ended abruptly after he tried without goggles, only for his corneas to freeze, temporarily blinding him. A year later, he went for the record again, extending it to 57.50m.
Hof’s record breaking wasn’t done, nor was his habit of seeing which bits of his body would freeze in interesting ways. In 2007, he ran a half marathon, on ice… barefoot. Hof completed the run in 2 hours 16 minutes, and his Wikipedia page lists it as the only current Guinness record in Hof’s name… though, as we’ll come to, that does not appear to be true.
In 2015, Hof took a team of 18 inexperienced climbers to the top of Kilimanjaro in just over 31 hours, without even first acclimatising them to the height. Hof said they could avoid altitude sickness by training in the Wim Hof Method, which is a combination of breathing techniques, ice cold water plungers, and meditation, which he believes is the key to his feats of endurance.
Finally, Hof broke the record for the longest time in direct, full-body contact with ice, spending 44 minutes in a box of ice cubes in January 2010. The he broke it again. And again. And 13 more times. Which is undoubtedly impressive. But is it really evidence that the Wim Hof Method is good for your health? To answer that, we must first understand what his method actually entails.
The Wim Hof Method
Hof’s eponymous method consists of taking regular freezing-cold ice baths, plus a breathing phase where you take 30-40 deep breaths in very quick and forceful succession, inducing hyperventilation, at which point you hold your breath for a while, and then take a deep breath and hold it. This has to be repeated three to four times. Doing this regularly, according to Hof, can have the kind of health benefits and protective qualities that allows him to pull off record-breaking feats of cold water exposure.
Applications of the Wim Hof Method aren’t just limited to endurance feats. In interviews, Hof has claimed that it can cure headaches, which he says are caused by a lack of oxygen in the brain. He has also claimed that cold plunging and controlled breathing could be the answer for billions of people who suffer from high stress, anxiety, low motivation, inflammation, cardiovascular issues and other treatable conditions.
He told a journalist at the Guardian that his method will help treat osteoarthritis, and also depression. The Times reported that it can help with Parkinson’s, and according to Hof, will help you “live longer, never get ill or depressed”. In a 2014 interview in his native Netherlands, he intimated that he believed it could help cure cancer, saying:
I believe that every disease is an immune system that has gotten out of balance…
I absolutely think that, 95% of all diseases, including many forms of cancer, can be cured.
Unsurprisingly, the Wim Hof Method has been studied scientifically. In one study, Hof was injected with a harmless form of E. coli, which should cause flu-like symptoms, but he didn’t develop them, staying asymptomatic. So researchers took 30 participants, trained 18 of them in Hof’s breathing methods, and injected them with the same E. coli, noting that those 18 also escaped the worst of symptoms, compared to the other 12. But given that this was an incredibly small study with a wholly inadequate control arm, we can’t actually draw any conclusions from it.
However, even if this were a robust study, the findings might not be a surprise, because we already knew hyperventilation reduces the body’s inflammatory response via the release of adrenaline… but that isn’t always a good thing. The body has an inflammatory response for a reason, and you’re not always going to be in lab conditions getting injected with E. coli that’s designed to be harmless. And even if it were useful, the effect lasts while you’re currently hyperventilating – once your breathing returns to normal, your body goes back to normal. That’s what bodies do.
Unfortunately, it is not the only thing that bodies do when they hyperventilate – hyperventilation can also cause dizziness, and even passing out. Given that the Wim Hof method often involves people hyperventilating in or around ice water plunges, there’s a serious risk that proponents pass out in or into ice water. As of January 2024, journalist Scott Carney (who spent some time with Hof, and accompanied him up Kilimanjaro) had identified 21 reports of people dying while practicing the Wim Hof Method, mostly people passing out and drowning in various bodies of water of varying temperatures – and the total may even be higher. In June 2024, an exposé in the Sunday Times collated coroner’s reports from several of these deaths, citing a lawsuit in which the father of one victim argued that Hof and his company had been negligent.
Wim Hof and endurance
While the Sunday Times has much to say of the potential risks of the Wim Hof Method, they do not cover Hof’s claims as to his own remarkable feats of endurance. However, while interview after interview explains the many records Hof has broken, few interviews actually bother to follow up on those records to see where they currently stand.
Take, for example, Hof’s record of swimming 57.50m under frozen water. Hof no longer holds that record – the current holder is Czech free diver David Vencl, who in 2021 managed 80.99m… without the aid of an eponymous breathing ‘method’. Similarly, Hof’s barefoot ice half marathon record of 2 hours 16 minutes has been smashed by Josef Salek, Jonas Felde Sevaldrud, and most recently Karim El Hayani – the latter completed the feat in just 1 hour 36 minutes in 2021… without self-identifying as a super human.
Furthermore, while Hof held the record at 44 minutes spent in full-body contact with ice in January 2010, the current record is held by Lukasz Szpunar, who managed a colossal 4 hours 2 minutes, hours beyond Hof’s best attempt. But there are no Netflix or BBC documentaries about Szpunar and his mystical ability to endure the cold.
As for taking a group of inexperienced climbers up Kilimanjaro, the devil is in the details. The team didn’t reach the top – they went as high as Gilman’s Point, significantly short of the summit. And six participants had to turn around before making it to the top, because they got altitude sickness – around a third of the group. On top of those were the climbers who, while not reported to suffer from altitude sickness, were so exhausted by the climb they had to be brought back down by car… including Wim Hof himself.
This is important, because part of the usual climbing duration for Kilimanjaro involves giving yourself time and space for a safe descent – if you’re not factoring in being well enough to come back down the mountain safely, you can obviously move much faster. You can also undertake parts of the climb at riskier times, when it would usually be too dark to do it safely. If anything, then, Hof’s 31-hour climb was slow – in 2014, the record for climbing Kilimanjaro was set by Ecuadorian climber Karl Egloff at just 6 hours 42 minutes. Egloff actually went all the way to the top of the mountain – but you haven’t heard of him, and hustle-culture podcasts aren’t telling wide-eyed tales of his otherworldly ability to climb mountains.
It is not the only mountaineering claim of Hof’s that warrants scrutiny. In 2007, according to his legend, he climbed Mount Everest wearing just shorts and sandals. By which he means, he undertook the start of the journey bare chested while his team accompanied him with all of the regular mountaineering gear, which he would put on when not actively moving.
This is obviously more impressive than any attempt I’ve made at the mountain, but, crucially, the risk on the lower and middle slopes of the mountain isn’t actually exposure to the cold – in good weather, you can reach as high as 6,400m and it can still be around 20°C. The highest temperature ever recorded at that altitude on the mountain is a sweltering 37°C.
In fact, given the temperatures, dehydration is more of a risk during that stretch, because climbers are usually carrying the equipment they’ll need for higher up the mountain, when it starts to get seriously cold (unless, like Hof, they have a team to do that for them). The website EverTrek explains that, in April and May, it is “not uncommon to see climbers wearing t-shirts all the way up to Camp 3”, an elevation of 7,200m. Hof’s climb took place in May.
When Hof and his support team got to 6,700m, he decided to switch to mountaineering boots, to allow him to use crampons for the trickier sections. He then abandoned the attempt at 7,400m – 200m past Camp 3 – due to what he called a recurring foot injury… which, as he told The Times in an interview, was actually frostbite:
“So I had a deep mental conversation with my foot and it reported frostbite. I appreciated it was the right thing to turn back,” he said. “Extreme cold is a teacher. The lessons come to you through the body. You just listen.”
Again, I have never even attempted to climb Everest, so to have achieved even that distance is impressive… but when Hof tells the tale, he describes it as climbing Mount Everest in a pair of shorts, and the people who buy into his guru-like mystique picture him reaching the summit in his underwear.
What we should recognise here is that while Hof’s feats of endurance are impressive, they’ve also been spun into a legendary reputation that’s afforded him a guru-like mystical quality, and one that he’s gone all-out to cultivate and preserve… even as his actual records have been comprehensively smashed by people who don’t present themselves as mystical, and don’t get invited onto podcasts to explain how we can all hyperventilate ourselves free of illness.
If Hof’s records being comprehensively beaten by people who boast no mystical spiritual fortitude were not problematic enough for his legacy, there’s a final nail that might hold that coffin fast. Wim has eight siblings, one of which is his brother, Andre. His twin brother, Andre. His identical twin brother, Andre.
Andre, from what we know, has a very different lifestyle to Wim, and doesn’t do punishing endurance training, extreme exercises, or cold water plunges. But despite all of that, his tolerance for cold temperatures is comparable to Wim’s. As best as we can tell, Wim and Andre are genetically better suited to enduring extreme colds than the average person, regardless of how much time they spend in cold water plungers and hyperventilation.
If Wim Hof’s – and indeed, Andre Hof’s – ability to endure cold temperatures comes from a genetic advantage, then it cannot be taught. Equally, if Hof’s remarkable feats of record-breaking endurance can be matched, and substantially bettered, by athletes who don’t employ hyperventilation regimes and cold water exposures, then any benefits of the Wim Hof Method are called into question – a troubling conclusion, if the Sunday Times is right about how many deaths and injuries have befallen those trying to emulate achievements that were at least partly due quirks of Hof’s genes.
Wim Hof is no stranger to giving interviews, in fact he may be one of the most-interviewed wellness gurus on the planet over the past 5 or 10 years. It is therefore a shame that, in all of those many conversations, his interviewers have chosen to fawn over his self-concocted legend, rather than asking the kinds of questions that would-be followers of the Wim Hof Method clearly need to hear.
