Here was a man who could – due to regular exposure – tolerate extremes that rudimentary science holds should kill a man. It wasn’t long before the ‘Iceman’ moniker stuck and Hof was performing extreme stunts to the delight of audiences across Europe.
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And it was his unyielding obsession with self-experimentation that brought him back to it every day for the rest of his life.Īfter over a decade spent developing his technique in near exile – jumping into icy water daily, studying everything from zen Buddhism to kung fu, Sikhism to yoga, even Sanskrit – Hof was thrown into the media limelight when a TV crew caught him saving the life of a man who’d fallen through thin ice into a lake. Meanwhile, it was his own curiosity that led him to take that first plunge into an icy lake as a young man. It was his twin brother’s globe-trotting adventurous spirit that nurtured in Hof an interest in alternative cultures and extreme behaviours. Your gut feelings, your instincts become buried.” Be willing to face the cold, he says, and you too can access that quiescent realm within yourself.īorn in Sittard, Holland, 1959, Hof is one of nine siblings. “With work and life, your true depth can become an alien thing to you. “I want people to find their inner depth,” he says. But Hof reckons that he can teach anyone to do as he does – which is to master body and mind by controlling the breath and transcending perceived limits. High-performers like best-selling author Tim Ferris and MMA champ Alistair Overeem chalk up their extra edge to his teachings. Across the world, elite athletes, coaches and body hackers part with serious cash to learn from the Dutchman. It isn’t that he’s unaware of his popular renown it’s simply that snappy hashtags and raising YouTube views aren’t all that important to him. He is genuinely surprised to learn from our photographer that he has as many Instagram followers as he does. The attention Hof has attracted for his exploits might have distracted a lesser man, but in his meditated state any media hype flows over him like a babbling brook around an impervious rock. Nevertheless, Hof is looking forward to his daily swim. The outdoor pool in Hof’s garden is anything but inviting. In the absence of snow, we’re privy to a lesser-seen side of Hof – the familial, domestic version, far removed from white mountain caps and heart-stopping ice lakes. I jumped in and it brought me to the right here, right now.”Īt this time of year the ice has long since receded from the Dutch hinterland that Hof calls home, but cloud fleece on the horizon threatens rain. “It was like finding the thing that you’re looking for without knowing what it is exactly. “I jumped into cold water when I was young, and that was that,” he says plainly. As he limbers up for his daily exercise with a mixture of yoga and calisthenics moves, he recounts the moment his frigid monomania began. Men’s Health has visited Hof at his modest home, a short drive from Amsterdam. But should we be giving credence to a self-taught medical radical over decades of established research? And, should you be brave enough to follow Hof’s lead into his boundary-pushing blizzard, would you emerge a master of your body and mind? Or will your health simply be left out in the cold? They have also given Hof a reputation as a maverick outlier of biology.
The results of the experiment continue to shake our understanding of the human body and its capabilities. And it was Hof, the established poster boy for extremophiles, who first postulated the existence of this innate ability to influence the immune system at will. It was Hof’s formula of severe cold exposure and modified breathing – the so-called Wim Hof Method – that the test group had learned. On hand beside nurses, physiologists and scientists was self-experimenting civilian Wim Hof. Having observed the subjects, it was concluded that, yes, they could. In essence, the researchers wanted to know if regular men could fight off pathogens with their minds.
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The aim was to discern whether, despite the prevailing science, we might have written into our biological code an almost superhuman ability to control immune responses on demand.
The second – the test group – was virtually the same except for one difference: for 10 days they undertook an intense programme of meditation, breathing techniques and cold exposure. The subjects had been randomly split into two groups the first comprised healthy individuals and was the control group against which the other was to be measured. In 2013, scientists at the Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands injected volunteers with a dead strain of e.coli to promote a flu-like immune response.
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