Doctor Dissects the Wim Hof Method - Cold Hard Science Analysis

[Music] the iceman cometh the two most common video requests that i get are to turn a medical eye onto the keto diet or the wim hof method and whilst both of those things interest me thus far i haven't made a video about either because i didn't feel i could add anything to the already existing very large volume of information that's available on youtube and the internet but then two things happened number one i made the acquaintance of scott carney best-selling author who knows the wim hof method inside and out and number two curiosity stream allowed me to use some of their footage from a documentary series about humans who push themselves to the limit including amongst others wim hof they are supporting this video so please go and check out the rest of the series and also stick around for the message at the end of this video so i figured this was a golden opportunity to make my first video which is a direct response to something you guys have asked for but what could i say that hasn't already been said i don't have the talent the budget or the good looks to compete with all the other wim hof videos already available on youtube but what i do have is a very particular set of skills skills i've acquired over a long career being a nerd yes less krav maga and killing criminals more looking at spreadsheets and reading scientific papers which if you think about it is actually a lot cooler there's no shortage of first-person accounts online of people meeting the iceman himself and their experiences with the wim hof method but one of the messages that i try to get over in this if it ducks like a quack series is that anecdotes while entertaining and interesting do not constitute scientific evidence and that's what i'm after in this video the vice or yes theory videos about the wim hof method are fantastically watchable and very entertaining but they are full of grossly inaccurate scientific statements if you want a scientifically accurate and compellingly written account of not only the wim hof method but the grand philosophy behind it then i highly recommend having a listen to scott carney's what doesn't kill us and i'm very pleased he'll be speaking to us shortly there are some youtube videos out there that purport to look at the science of the wim hof method but they really just regurgitate the press releases from the official organization without turning a critical eye on the data themselves websites that talk about hacking the body are invariably full of pseudoscience so this video is an in-depth unnecessarily detailed and most importantly critical look at the science of the wim hof method for those of you that haven't watched the channel before my name is rohin and i'm a medical doctor and university researcher with an interest in the extremes to which humans can push their physiology winter is coming this one will be long this video is going to be way longer than my usual one so i'm time stamping the video in the description below so you can skip to particular areas that might interest you more than others i'm going to structure this video based on the benefits excelled on the wim hof method website and use the official wim hof method explained ebook a nicely packaged if somewhat fluffy 32-page guide to the science behind the technique obviously i wasn't just going to believe everything they said so i've read pretty much every scientific paper in the area certainly everyone referenced so that you don't have to i'll start with an important point this is an attempt to analyze the wim hof method not wim hof himself almost all the scientific literature is about whim but you might as well read or watch something about lebron james or usain bolt because these are elite athletes doing things that very few of us can do and despite the assertions that wim makes on a regular basis that anybody can do what he does the fact that he holds so many world records suggests this isn't really true so obviously i'll take a look at those studies and see what's going on inside wim's body but then ask the key question that using the science available to us will this work for you or for me i'll begin with scott carney explaining the general concept behind the wim hof method which is what drew him in initially and certainly what drew me in as well as someone with an interest in evolutionary science if you think of humans as like natural creatures that we come out we emerge 300 000 years ago in certain types of environmental conditions uh and our bodies uh in that time sort of like this pre like technologically advanced time we were dealing with constantly varying environments and because our brains are sort of wired for comfort and our technological abilities have allowed us to modulate the environments about us so that we can um you know essentially keep a homeostat or pretty close to a homeostatic state like what and by by this i mean your body doesn't have to do any extra work um and you can sort of stay in this median area of of of comfort all the time that that has factored out the variations that we evolved with and created uh essentially a weaker physiology um and that if you assume that through evolution that change was constant now um that that constant has been taken out in in in favor of stasis and this is making our bodies uh less robust because what happens is when you narrow that range of area where you can that where you feel comfortable um you narrow your ability to thrive in extra environments and then certain systems that are used to um to adapt to variations become underused and um you know uh go essentially dormant you know that they're they're underutilized and that makes your physiology weaker you know i don't know why i found this idea so compelling you'd be forgiven for thinking i've got a bit of an obsession with hypothermia i've made two videos about the cold effects on the body and one about breath holding and breathing and these form two of the three pillars of the wim hof method the third being meditation none of these are new ideas people have been practicing elements of the wim hof method probably for thousands of years the wim hof method draws heavily on yoga specifically dumbo or chandali yoga which uses breathing to generate heat and pranayama which is a whole practice of deep breathing in the wim hof method specifically it is cyclical hyperventilation so this is breathing heavily then followed by hypoventilation or breath holding this causes initially a drop in carbon dioxide when you blow that out whilst you're hyperventilating which is called hypocapnia and then hypoxia which is low oxygen which is caused by the breath hold rishi munis or yogis have been meditating at top mountains in the himalaya wearing nothing but a loin cloth for hundreds of years but i think what sets whim apart is that he has happily invited scientists in to study him and this makes a welcome change from a lot of the other gurus who are out there and unwilling to back up what they say because in the absence of scientific study you have people like gwyneth paltrow and the whole multi-million dollar wellness industry converting what should be rational scientific discussions about the potential benefits of something like yoga meditation or the wim hof method into conversations about communing with the cosmos and crystals and all kinds of rubbish i also asked scott who spent much of his career debunking false gurus what set wim apart from some of the charlatans he's met in the past so when i first met wim and first heard about him he was making claims that were way too grand right that his breathing method his cold would cure basically everything under the sun and this is what happens in the wellness industry in general they make claims that are often far too big um but um he also made these claims that you would i would be able to like control my body temperature in the snow and do you know more push-ups and things like that and uh i figured that you know you're you're if you're if you're wrong about something you're gonna be wrong about everything um go there try his method and i was um i mean i was really shocked that uh not only that it worked but it worked very quickly like i adapted to a cold environment within the matter of a week you know i was doing things that were unexpected to me which was you know i was living in los angeles before and then i was climbing up this mountain in poland you've probably seen the videos you'll probably show some of these videos um of people like going shirtless at the mountain and i felt really warm and that was very counterintuitive and i think because the wim hof method is very quick um it it has the ability to change someone's mind about their expectations for their own body very quickly and i think that sends very powerful messages not only to you know about your own personal physical limits but i also think that it it creates sort of a a new perspective on the world in general about robustness about your ability to interact with things and about you know interestingly to control parts of my body that i did not think i had control over at least influence parts of my body that i couldn't influence uh and that was really remarkable so let's get to the science this is going to be our running order number one is how does whim resist the cold what's actually happening in his mind and body number two what's all this business about brown fat number three do breathing exercises really have a measurable effect on physiology number four probably the most outlandish claim about the wim hof method can it actually affect your immune system and number five can the wim hof method prevent altitude sickness the body regulates its temperature via the central nervous system and the endocrine system mediated primarily by the hypothalamus the anterior hypothalamic nucleus to be exact however the sensation of cold can be modulated in the brain and i think we've all experienced this if the adrenaline's pumping for whatever reason you don't really feel cold but once you calm down you realize it's quite a chilly day the ancient practice of dumbo meditation by tibetan monks is said to allow practitioners to generate heat from within there's not a great deal of evidence about it out there but luckily there is one very useful study from a few years ago which showed that the monks generate heat from the physical work of forceful breathing but this on its own could not be maintained for very long without the associated meditation so you need both elements to really get the benefit from it and we'll see this pattern repeated in tests of the wim hof method a team out of wayne state in detroit performed a key study on wim by scanning him whilst he was cooled by a clever suit using an fmri scanner to detect the following two changes in wim's brain number one wim was able to activate primary control centers in an area of the brain called the periaqueductal gray to modulate the sensation of cold number two higher cortical areas associated with introspective concentration and focus lit up the major potential confounder here is that the sudden changes in carbon dioxide levels that we mentioned earlier caused by hyperventilation can affect blood flow carbon dioxide is a potent vasodilator it opens up blood vessels so the changes detected on the fmri scan might simply be related to changes in blood flow rather than inherent brain activity however these changes are replicated in other studies about meditation so i would be happy to say that these are likely to be genuine changes what this means is that whims ability to tolerate cold in a large part comes from his mind telling his brain if you like to ignore the cold sensation the authors also went so far as to say that much of the feel-good effects of cold exposure comes from placebo which is not to trivialize it people often hear the word placebo and think it's a criticism but it's actually a reflection of the body's immense power to change its own physiology and i'm all in favor of harnessing it as long as nobody is getting conned so what's all this about brown fat if you've read anything about the science behind the wim hof method at all you've undoubtedly heard of brown fat or more correctly brown adipose tissue b-a-t never leave the cave without it in a nutshell there are two types of adipose tissue fat in the body white and brown fat sometimes you'll hear beige mention we'll ignore that for now white fat is used for energy storage and that's the stuff that when you have too much of it you become obese so we're all very familiar with what white fat is brown fat is a much more rare species we all have brown fat we have a lot when we're babies and we gradually reduce the amount we have as we get older we used to think not long ago just about a decade ago that we lose brown fat entirely as adults but studies in the last 10 years or so have shown that adults do have small stores of brown fat and this is used for non-shivering thermogenesis that means generating heat thermogenesis so there are different ways to generate heat obviously one is shivering by working your muscles and non-shivering thermogenesis is what brown fat does for a long time it was believed that whims repeated cold exposure allowed him to activate his brown fat in a special way and despite the studies disproving this taking place about five years ago you'll still see websites mentioning it but it's not true two studies have looked at whim's brown fat and they use positron emission tomography coupled with ct pet ct along with the aforementioned mri to take a detailed look at his anatomy what they found is that wim does not activate his brown fat in a remarkable way at all it barely lit up however he does have more brown fat than is typical for someone of his age is this caused by repeated exposure to cold well in a truly incredible cosmic case control coincidence wim has an identical twin brother who doesn't follow the wim hof method he's got a sedentary lifestyle without the frequent cold exposure so it offers an amazing opportunity to actually study some of these changes and i think i speak on behalf of all medical researchers when i say that life would be so much easier if we all had a clone stuck in a in a cupboard somewhere that we could take out and study from time to time i'm joking of course wim's brother also has high levels of brown fat in fact slightly higher so it does seem that in this regard at least the hoffs are genetic outliers and it's likely that this contributes to whims ability to withstand the cold the wim hof method hasn't been shown to increase brown fat levels but mice do increase their levels in response to repeated cold stimuli the jury is still out when it comes to humans the research showed that whims muscles of breathing the intercostals that are between your ribs lit up like christmas trees generating large amounts of heat now remember the pattern that we saw with the tibetan tumor monks exactly the same that both women and the monks are generating a lot of heat from the physical work of breathing and if you think about all the blood coming back into the chest going through the myriad capillaries in the lungs this is an effective way to maintain blood temperature by exchanging heat from these muscles into the bloodstream it's exactly the same as what happens when you go for a run on a cold day within a few minutes your body is generating enough heat to make you feel hot even though the temperature is cold so it's nothing very exotic but it's effective and i think this is a really nice way of explaining in a small part how wim does what he does this graph is quite striking it's skin temperature the blue circles are normal controls normal people and the hollow red circles are when whim is just relaxed he follows the same cycle of his skin warming and cooling as the suit that the participant is wearing is warmed and cooled however the filled red circles at the top are whim when engaging with the wim hof method and as you can see his skin temperature barely changes irrespective of whether the suit is hot or cold so the authors concluded that without any outlandish physical findings the majority of wim's ability to tolerate cold actually comes from his mind and activation of the sympathetic nervous system which we'll come on to in a little bit take a deep breath because now we're going to talk about the breathing aspects of the wim hof method for healthy people it's the level of carbon dioxide in your blood and your lungs that determines your urge to take a breath hyperventilation as we mentioned earlier blows off carbon dioxide at a much higher rate than normal which is why you can hold your breath for much longer after hyperventilating because it takes that much longer for carbon dioxide to reach the level at which your body feels the urge to breathe carbon dioxide is also a weak acid so reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood transiently makes your ph go up making your blood slightly more alkaline rhonda patrick interviewed pierre cappell as well as wim actually and they focused on the fact that blood ph was noted to rise i.e becoming more alkaline with deep breathing and confusingly uh dr patrick and professor cappell seemed quite wowed by this observation which is odd because any doctor who has treated a patient with a mild asthma attack severe pain or even a panic attack some reason that's causing them to hyperventilate will have seen a markedly elevated ph making your blood slightly alkaline with deep breathing is nothing noteworthy at all seen in emergency departments on a daily basis an arterial blood gas is a special type of test looking at the partial pressures of different gases as well as the acid-base status of somebody's blood and a normal healthy person at rest will have an abg result that looks something like this ph is normally 7.35 to 7.45 oxygen is say 14 and carbon dioxide 4.5 this is in kilopascals i'll put freedom units in later if that same person hyperventilates for maybe 10 minutes without any special training their abg might look something like this now the oxygen hasn't changed much as the partial pressure of oxygen in the air is of course fixed unless you inhale concentrated oxygen but you can see that the co2 has dropped right down to 1.3 and ph has risen to 7.67 which is exactly the kind of range you see in some of the studies of the wim hof method daniel beard a professor of physiology at the university of michigan gave some responses to a study that demonstrated this transient alkaline blood work of wim hof method practitioners explaining that we don't know whether this is short or long term none of these people have control over their blood ph or their breathing except when they're actually consciously doing this thing their heart rates are the same as other subjects their pressures are the same in other words the physiological changes that are seen might only last for the period of time when the participant is actually doing the wim hof method breathing what we're lacking is a trial looking at how long these physiological changes last for 8 12 24 hours the things like ph won't last long at all because your body has such effective homeostatic mechanisms taking you back to a normal range but some of them may be longer term the increase in ph is a key component for a particularly interesting reason it may be related to improved cold tolerance no c-seption is the body's detection of pain which is mediated by specific sensory neurons or pain detecting nerves a component of these nociceptors is acid sensing ion channel 3 which is a key target for pain killing drug research and is quite sensitive to ph a drop in ph activates them like an acidic burn but a rise in ph to around the levels achieved by hyperventilation can actually deactivate them effectively improving the pain threshold so this is actually a pathway that explains why deep breathing can improve tolerance to a noxious stimulus like cold the wim hof method employs not only hyperventilation but hypoventilation breath holding and this achieves a transient hypoxia or low oxygen level in the blood which appears to kick-start the sympathetic nervous system the fight flight fright response try saying that fast um and this is probably the key step in the whole process it's believed that a physiological stress after priming the sympathetic nervous system in this way releases endocannabinoids causing a pleasurable sensation accounting for the euphoria achieved with an ice bath and it also explained something like the runner's high that pleasurable sensation after physical stress a mantra that you'll see repeated in every article about the method and in the official ebook is that medical opinion is that humans cannot exert an effect on the autonomic nervous system making effects observed in whim apparently miraculous however this is clearly nonsense the autonomic nervous system includes things like heart rate and blood pressure and these can both be affected with simple relaxation or meditation making them go down or the opposite if you work yourself up into an anxious state they can both go up or autonomic nervous system also includes things like sneezing and you can overcome the urge to sneeze with a bit of practice in scott's book he more accurately states that we didn't previously think that a person could voluntarily affect their immune system although even that comes with a slight caveat in that that's exactly what the placebo effect is mark changes in immune system response can be observed purely based on a person's belief about what the outcome will be even with an inert substance whether you want to call that involuntary or conscious or the power of positive thinking is entirely up to you one of the marquee claims about the wim hof method is that it can modulate the immune system and this is backed by the most compelling of all the trials i read as it looks at real normal people not wim hof himself 12 people were trained for 10 days in the wim hof method and tested against 12 people without training the study protocol was the same as a study performed on whim himself earlier on participants were injected with an endotoxin which is a component of e coli a common bacterial infection which is used in experiments to produce a transient unpleasant but ultimately harmless syndrome of infection in comparison to the control group the people who didn't have any training the intervention wim hof group reported fewer flu-like symptoms after the injection things like headaches or malaise but these are subjective so i'm not sure they really tell us very much however some objective measurements were taken as well the intervention group had a similar response to whim when he was tested namely in comparison to the control group they had a transient respiratory alkalosis as we mentioned before which is caused by hyperventilation a markedly elevated adrenaline level but no difference in cortisol the stress hormone between the groups increased levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines probably released in response to the adrenaline things like interleukin-10 and the levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines were lower things like tnf-alpha and interleukin 6 and 8. just unlike meditation studies which have shown changes in blood pressure and heart rate which work via the parasympathetic nervous system the thing i find really interesting about this is it works via the sympathetic nervous system which as we mentioned earlier is the kind of fight flight fright system the elevated levels of adrenaline are significant adrenaline is a key constituent of the sympathetic nervous system pathway the use of a control arm here is to be applauded it adds a major dimension to previous studies which have just looked at whim on his own those are known as case studies they're the lowest form of evidence in medicine however this doesn't eliminate the possibility of placebo effect at all because both arms are unblinded being blinded means you don't know whether you're in the intervention or the control arm you may have heard of a double-blind trial that's the gold standard that's where the clinicians the doctors and other healthcare professionals involved in trial also don't know whether a participant is in the intervention or the control arm obviously none of that's possible here because you can't blind people to whether they're in an intervention arm if the intervention involves 10 days worth of ice cold water and meditation and indeed the authors wrote a follow-up paper about how optimism and the mental expectation of the outcome affected the result which is the very definition of the placebo effect let's take a look at a clip from the curiosity stream documentary as well did vim hof release more of the stress hormone than the two students as he claimed he could for most people altering one's metabolism at will is impossible [Music] during the movie we know that long-term stress hormone is very damaging chronic stress or conditions like cushing's disease which is a pathological elevation in cortisol that stress hormone that we mentioned earlier can have hugely damaging effects to health but short term controlled stress appears to have tangible benefits the concept of good and bad stress is something that scott goes into in a quite a bit of detail in his book it's the reason that things like those hardcore assault courses have exploded in popularity in recent years lavender body wash make my pores tingle our lives have become unrecognizably comfortable in comparison to 99 of our existence on this planet and whilst we're familiar with testing ourselves physically we rarely expose ourselves to extremes of temperature this is a normal daily cortisol pattern it's highest in the morning and varies over 24 hours while it isn't a direct correlation to stress let's just imagine for now that it can represent overall stress in response to a short-term stressful situation like a viral illness or climbing a mountain it will peak chronic stress looks like this elevated across the board and that's what's harmful stress is a disease people perhaps an ideal scenario would look something like this a low general level of stress facilitated by good physical and mental health through whatever works for you but a more potent response when needed which can be modulated by conscious efforts such as the wim hof method what about climbing a mountain yeah just do it i won't spend too long on this because it's likely that only a small proportion of you viewers are going to be scaling tall mountains but for me it was one of the most remarkable things i heard about the whole wim hof method the fact that whims successfully took groups of essentially novice climbers to the top of mount kilimanjaro which is just shy of 6000 meters in only two days instead of the suggested four or five with extremely low levels of drop out due to altitude sickness was amazing you know as someone who's been to altitude and treated me with altitude sickness um that that was i mean forgive the pun but really breathtaking and do you do you think it was just a product of the conscious hyperventilation and avoiding that kind of hypoxic hypoventilation or do you think that there was some additive effect from the other aspects of the the method yeah i think that it was because i had been doing the training consistently for um six months to a year beforehand not everyone on the program had somebody like you were supposed to do it that way but a lot of the people hadn't done it that way and those these were the people who didn't make it up with my group which was just three people and remember whim had this crazy thing at the top of the mountain where he went nuts and we had to there was a mutiny like but there were issues going on but i i attribute it to the rapid breathing the entire way up right so essentially what diamox does as far as i'm aware right is it is it makes you breathe rat more rapidly and you pee more right and and and what we're doing is we're consciously doing essentially what diamox does by breathing a lot more consciously from a low level to a high level um you know we we kept that that oxygenation up and if you actually go to a mountain you know next time you're climbing something big um you can notice that your o2 if you use an oximeter you will notice that your o2 might get low you know maybe you're in the 70s maybe you know you know and it sort of stays chronically low if you're not working on it but you will notice that if you have that pulse oximeter on your finger and you do the wim hof breathing without the retentions you'll notice that your o2 goes back up immediately um and it and and and it just goes right back you know you could just we could just watch it go from in the 60s for somebody all the way up into the 90s and sort of stay there and then if you just keep on doing the breathing you you you're able to compensate and so i think this is actually something that every mountaineer doing high altitude stuff should be trained in as an idea you know because it's just something you can do and can probably save some people's lives uh i think there is a mindset part to this like there is this feeling of fighting the environment versus working with the environment and that is like this quasi-almost spiritual thing that comes out of my experiences that you know i end the book with the cheesiest line in literary history where i say i am not on the mountain i am the mountain and i know it's cheesy but it's it's the way i feel and i think that there's a real lesson here that comes out of it is that is that i've gotten up this up kilimanjaro not because i was fighting everything because i just accepted it and i said okay we're going to do this and there was a a calmness to it versus a a a relationship of adversary adverse adversarialness adversality i don't know how to say that word you know what i mean adversity right it's not it was not adversity um and uh and i think that gives some element of resilience i don't think it makes it impossible for bad things to happen um i think that that that we're what you're doing with the wim hof method is you're expanding your range of ability to exist in an extreme environment um and and get right up to that point where you know your nervous system and your body there's there's a you ring alarm bells very early before you get to damage or death it's like whoa wait there you go you're gonna get damaged and and it's usually very conservative so what the wim hof method does is allows you to push closer to that barrier of where the damage happens and maybe pushes that damage thing a little bit further what scott's referring to there is hypoxic ventilatory response it's difficult to predict who will get altitude sickness but probably the best predictor is someone's hypoxic ventilatory response this is how their body reacts to lower oxygen environments some people increase their respiratory rate more than others and the ones who tend to get more altitude sickness are the ones who don't mount that increase in respiratory rate if you are deliberately consciously taking deep breaths you circumvent any problems with having a poor hypoxic ventilatory response and you ensure that you're getting as much oxygen as possible rather than hypoventilating the drug that scott mentioned is this acetazolamide or diamox and it works by creating a mild metabolic acidosis in the body and so that forces you subconsciously to breathe harder and blow off carbon dioxide to correct the ph back to normal and as a byproduct you do extra breathing and you get more oxygen the first expedition wasn't published as a paper but as a letter to a journal and it concludes by saying that they don't encourage people to ascend mountains very quickly but if needed for example a mountain rescue team dumbo meditation or the wim hof method can help and i agree so before i get to my conclusion why don't we categorize every point made on the wim hof method website every potential benefit into one of three categories number one probable benefit or probable that it has this effect number two possible meaning that the evidence is rather weak but there's a little and the third category is no evidence now this doesn't mean it doesn't achieve this effect it doesn't mean that it's false it doesn't mean that anybody's lying it just means that i can't see any clear evidence that can back up this claim so first into the probable category i would put short-term effects on the immune system i think that was nicely shown positive effects on mental health stress sleep and willpower well these often go hand in hand and the wim hof method clearly appears to help a lot of people but more than that these are benefits that have been shown to be achievable through many different programs of meditation and discipline sort of routines like this arthritis relief i think more research needs to be done here but cold exposure this is out with the wim hof method looking at other research involving cold exposure does appear to have some beneficial effects on inflammatory types of arthritis although again i don't know how long term some of this is next in the probable category i'm putting asthma and copd management not a cure but management and the reason i'm confident of putting these here is because we know that one of the best treatments for people taking control of the asthma and copd copd sorry is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease chronic lung disease like emphysema is respiratory physiotherapy and these are specialist physiotherapists who work with patients with these conditions to teach them coping mechanisms and ways to regulate their breathing to prevent getting into those episodes where they become very short of breath so it's no surprise that a program which has breathing controller central to it will be beneficial also in the probable category i'd put improved cold tolerance and finally having an effect on reducing the likelihood of altitude sickness which for me is quite astonishing in the possible category i'd put improved energy because this is just a bit vague and i don't really think it's well defined improved workout recovery well this is a difficult one there's been a lot of work to do with ice baths after training i mean this is something that was routine when i used to do athletics years ago it's kind of fallen out of fashion a little bit evidence is a little conflicting and then i'd put arthritis relief in the no evidence column i'm putting long-term effects on the immune system sporting performance again this is a bit wishy-washy it could have gone in the possible column really in terms of just overall improved physical fitness why not but i don't know if we've seen any hard evidence that the wim hof method has caused long term improved sporting performance then i'm putting fibromyalgia and chronic lyme these are two conditions which are very hard to define they're very hard to treat and a lot of people self-diagnose so we're treating a very heterogeneous patient population and i've seen classes uh about the wim hof method specifically advertised for both fibromyalgia and chronic lyme which makes me a little bit uncomfortable because i can't really see what that's based on and finally parkinson's again this is something that i feel a little uncomfortable saying that the wim hof method will be beneficial for because we really don't have any evidence to say that all right everyone so in conclusion i know this has been my longest video ever and probably will remain my longest video so if you skip directly here from the introduction then shame on you but i probably would have done exactly the same thing all i ask is that if you have found this video useful or any of my other videos i don't have a patreon account or anything like that so please just stay watching till the end of the video for the sponsoring that's all i ask the wim hof method does definitely appear to offer significant health benefits the effects appear to be mediated by a good stress activating the sympathetic fight flight or fright response in a controlled way through breath holding and again through cold exposure it's difficult to tease out which elements do what although perhaps that's not important if you're going to do them all anyway but cold exposure probably has the least evidence with a committed program of meditation and breathing exercises actually having a body of hard science behind them cold exposure with preceding sympathetic nervous system priming with the breathing is what is likely to help cold exposure alone is of questionable use but of course that's not what the wim hof method advises a major unanswered question is how transient some of the effects are like the immune system modulation we don't know if there is any residual benefit outside the period immediately after performing deep breathing exercises common sense dictates that things like improved mental health and general physical fitness are of course longer lasting so i'm not at all saying there are no long-term benefits from the method only that we don't have the evidence one way or the other but for the reasons i explained earlier we can never do a randomized double-blind controlled trial so i feel that there is convincing evidence that a lot of people get long-term benefits from the technique is the wim hof method the only way you can access these benefits definitely not but it's never claimed to be and i think the reason it's been so successful is a the charisma and feats of its creator b it's very simple essentially free c it cuts through a lot of the mystical mumbo jumbo that sometimes comes packaged with other courses about meditation and breathing which can't be said for a lot of the websites and videos based on the wim hof method who had a generous helping of exaggeration so overall i would have no concerns recommending it what i might say to someone asking about it is give it a try it has helped lots of people and it's unlikely to cause harm if you follow some simple advice are you going to be able to accomplish the same feats as wim hof no but just because you're not going to become michael phelps it doesn't mean you shouldn't take up swimming you need major life realignment on a number of levels can a lot of the benefits be explained by the placebo effect yes probably at least some so you might wonder why i'm supportive of this versus other topics i've covered on this channel well for the simple reason that as long as you follow the basic advice the wim hof method has little potential for harm unlike say a very restrictive diet and it's not trying to replace conventional medical treatment unlike something like say homeopathy and naturopathy and i think if either of those things are suggested which i have seen on personal blogs about the wim hof method then i would run a mile i think that's an important message to send is that sometimes us doctors can be regarded as unwilling to try new things which i don't think is true it's just that we require sufficient evidence that the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks and i feel that the wim hof method fulfills that to reiterate my earlier point about the placebo effect if a particular ritual or regime helps you tap into the placebo effects potential why not take advantage of it i would much rather you went for a walk in the cold every morning and reap the benefits contained therein like getting out into nature exercise and the good stress of embracing cold morning rather than hand over your hard earned money to a quack for some magic beans i get uncomfortable when people exaggerate the potential benefits of the wim hof method and you don't have to google for very long to find these kinds of comments and claims so don't regard it as a miracle cure for any specific condition but more a potential pathway to better overall physical and mental health you'll notice in much of the literature and videos a disclaimer that wim hof breathing and submersion in water should not be mixed they should be done at different times this was brought home to me very starkly when i posted on instagram after i'd interviewed scott and i got a message from a guy whose best mate had died at only 19 years old drowned whilst attempting wim hof breathing in water also i would exercise caution regarding cold exposure for anybody with heart disease a body of mind did his phd in cold air inhalation precipitating heart attacks the reason that so many older people die shoveling snow every winter so if you're over the age of 50 or you have a background of heart disease please consult your doctor before starting the cold shock response is a phenomenon that kills people who fall overboard in cold waters it effectively paralyzes you and causes a sharp intake of breath so sensible advice for everyone irrespective of your initial health is don't leap into arctic waters on your first day take things slowly and you should be fine i'll do my best to answer any questions in the comments below so please fire away feel free to share your experiences of the wim hof method if you disagree with anything i have said i'd be keen to hear from you so please do leave a comment thank you for watching this fast sincerely this video wouldn't have been possible without the support of curiosity stream if you want to support this channel as well as get access to two and a half thousand high quality documentaries like the one featuring wim hof then if you sign up at the link below using the code medlife you will get one month absolutely free you can watch the documentaries offline and as a parent i was also very excited to see that they have now got a kids section too which is brilliant as you're guaranteed safe educational material rather than on youtube where there are all kinds of weirdos i know people have come to expect jokes from this channel and this video was pretty serious so to make up for it i filmed the entire thing not wearing any pants i will pull batman's heart from his body and feel it freeze in the hands

Channel: Medlife Crisis

Views: 909,119

Rating: 4.8254766 out of 5

Keywords: Wim Hof, wim hof method, yoga, wim hof breathing technique, wim hof breathing, cold therapy, medicine, surgery, science, quackery, debunk, doctor dissects, Doctor, pseudoscience, pranayama, breathing, tummo, chandali, freediving, iceman, ice man, mr freeze, joe rogan, wim hof russell brand, training, fitness, performance, sport science

Id: D6EPuUdIC1E

Length: 44min 13sec (2653 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/munkiller]

TL:DW?

[u/PiplupTCG]

what size meals y'all eating