You might know Wim Hof from his first TED talk, sitting in a giant ice bucket for 4 minutes and giving a casual interview afterwards. When I stumbled upon this man’s life work, I was immediately intrigued. It was the 57 year old’s craziness on one hand and his self-awareness and humor on the other hand, a combination that seemed rare to me.

In case you have no clue what this post is about: Wim Hof is a Dutch stunt man, known for climbing Kilimanjaro in his shorts and running a marathon in the Arctic. In total, he now holds 20 world records. Nowadays he is focused on teaching others how to reconnect with their bodies and become more healthy.

After hearing about Wim first, it took some months for me to discover his online video course, and another week until I was convinced to spend €143 (using a coupon that I luckily found) to take part in it.

About me

First of all, let me give you perspective on who is writing this review. I am a 23 year old German college student, working out regularly and trying to maintain as healthy of a nutrition as I can. I haven’t consumed neither alcohol nor fast food for at least six months now.

Nonetheless my immune system never ceased to disappoint me, being busy fighting off a flu about four to five times a year. On average once a year I get so sick that I lay in bed for a week, unable to move or think straight.

I’ve been trying to find a way out of this for some time now, reading a lot of books and articles on strengthening my immune system and consulting a couple of doctors. Nothing has helped a lot so far.

The moment I found out about Wim Hof, he got my immediate attention. Even more than that, it felt like a déjà vu seeing him jump out of the ice container with a big smile on his face: my whole life I watched people go outside in shorts and t-shirt while I was already suffering being wrapped up in tons of jackets and scarfs. That’s when I decided to give it a try.

Expectations

I had done some reading on cold immersion training before (check this subreddit), thus I had some expectations going into the course.

Besides being able to feel comfortable in cold temperatures, I hoped to find at least a partial solution for my weak immune system. Furthermore I heard about positive effects in well-being, mental sharpness and willpower, which I am personally very interested in. In the last part of this post I will go in detail how Wim’s course met these expectations.

Content

Let us get into an “unboxing” section, so that you know what you can expect from this course in terms of its content.

The course website right after login

After you login, you’ll find the welcome video and ten instructional videos, one for each week and each about 45 minutes to an hour long. Right after purchase, only first week’s video is accessible, as each video only gets unlocked right in time before the week begins. Every video features Wim and some students of his, performing the Wim Hof Method and giving instructions for following the course at home. On top of that, two short training videos (one four minutes and another ten minutes long) are provided for days that you don’t have time for a full course.

Included as well are several detailed videos on the three pillars of the Wim Hof Method: breathing, cold therapy and commitment. Especially the extended 45 minutes breath training (which normally takes only 15 minutes) and the ice bucket exercise were very interesting to me, and I followed through with both exercises successfully.

In the bonus section you can access a number of scientific papers on tests performed on Wim Hof during immersion in ice, during meditation and after injection with endotoxins. Also included are a couple of videos of Wim performing some of his stunts, which are motivating to watch. Furthermore his book Becoming the Iceman is included for free as a PDF, which I really appreciated reading in parallel to following the course.

Last but not least there is the Q&A section, where Wim answers each ofthe most common questions in a video.

My workbook. Someone told me that I have shitty handwriting.

The course workbook comes as a PDF that you need to print yourself. After the introduction section, there is a double page for each week’s exercises, as well as room for notes on your experiences for every single day. You are encouraged to write down the results of your breathing and push-up exercises.

Breathing exercises

Trying out Wim’s breathing technique the first couple of times was a pretty unusual experience for me. After taking deep breaths for about a minute and then letting out all air from my lungs, I felt very present to the moment (or for non-meditators: I did not think at all). I noticed sounds in my environment that I never heard before, and especially the last rounds made me feel really calm and euphoric at the same time.

Practicing the breathing exercise was the most fun in the first weeks. While normally one wouldn’t expect something normal like breathing to be a strenuous exercise, it turned out to be exactly that at several points during the course.

One incident was pretty scary to me: after holding my breath one time, I experienced a steady ringing sound in my ears. Also one can become lightheaded and feel tingling sensations when taking the deep breaths as intended. I can only compare this to times where excessive running had the same effect on me. In the end, I did not experience any lasting damage though.

All these physical effects wore off a little in week 3, and my retention times also dropped significantly. Many other people reported similar experiences in the course’s Facebook group. A given explanation was that practicing the WHM, toxins can be released from the body’s cells into the metabolism and thus stunt performance temporarily.

All in all, the course was a very pleasant experience. What contributed greatly to this was the fact that Wim was skillfully demonstrating the exercises and supervising his students while talking to his virtual audience, which made me feel like I was physically present in the class room.

Cold showers

Stepping into a cold shower can be a rather unpleasant experience if you’re new to that. While the shower exercises started off easy with 30 seconds of cold water per day, especially week 5 was hard to push through with 10 consecutive minutes of cold shower every day.

Nonetheless, I made it through the course and found out some tricks that may benefit you as well.

The most important thing is to keep your focus on the situation at hand. If your mind is occupied with thoughts that are unrelated to your practice, you are very likely to jump out of the cold water before your body can adjust to its temperature.

Also helpful to know is that it may take some time to fully adapt to taking cold showers. I was still anything else than euphoric about jumping into the freezing stream a couple of weeks into the program. In fact, during that time I was actually very uncomfortable whenever I entered the stream of water and it took me a lot of willpower to finally push through.

A lot of this had to do with pushing away negative thoughts like “This is too cold. This is not good for me. I will be sick”, which kept popping up in my mind over and over again. Later it became a lot easier to remind myself that it is just cold water and I would probably be fine.

The more you practice though the easier it becomes to convince yourself to do it, and the faster you feel comfortable once standing in the stream.

Physical exercises

Most of the physical activities in the course were stretching exercises, which felt good to me and improved my stretch a lot at the same time. Further into the course Wim introduced more difficult yoga exercises like the raven (kakasana) and the shelf (mayurasana), which I both learned to do in one single week respectively. The most proud I am of being able to do a headstand now, something I was afraid of for the longest time before.