#017 Wim Hof (the Iceman) on Defeating Extreme Cold & Attenuating the Immune Response

FoundMyFitness

Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D.

Nutrition, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 5.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2015

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wim Hof

Wim Hof, also known as "the Iceman", holds the world record for the longest ice bath (1 hour and 53 minutes and 12 seconds), just to name one of his many impressive feats. Dr. Patrick and Wim talk a bit about Wim's back story that culminated in him trying out cold water immersion, the relatively recent 2014 scientific publication of the "Wim Hof Method" which includes cold exposure during training, exposure to bacterial endotoxin, Wim's breathing techniques, and meditation.

In this episode, we discuss...

(00:00) Introduction
(02:08) Wim Hof tells the story of how he fell in love with the cold
(08:35) Activating the sympathetic nervous system to lower inflammation
(14:37) Hyperventilation changes blood pH enough to inactivate pain receptors
(16:24) Just four days of breathing exercises decreased inflammation
(28:06) How much of the effects of meditation are due to breathing technique?
(36:45) Cold exposure increases norepinephrine two- to three-fold
(44:05) Treating depression with cold therapy

If you're interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone. I'm here in... Well, I guess it's not really Amsterdam. It's somewhere close to Amsterdam. What's the name?
0:07.5	It's a storm.
0:09.1	Stur.
0:10.1	And I'm sitting here with someone I'm very excited to be having a conversation with not only because he's extremely charismatic and passionate,
0:19.6	but also because he's into the cold. And as you guys all know that I'm very interested in changes in temperature,
0:27.5	on human physiology, on brain function, his name is Wim Hof. You may have heard of him through the Tim Ferris interview recently or through the Vice documentary.
0:40.0	He holds 26 different world records. Maybe you can tell us more about that.
0:44.8	Yeah, 26. The different disciplines like climbing Mount Everest in your shorts or climbing Kilimanjaro in record terms or hanging by one finger in the air,
0:57.7	or one hour, 53 minutes in the direct contact with the eyes or swimming beneath thick ice cap on the the eyes,
1:07.7	or running marathons, not been trained to do so, but then run a marathon because... And Rondo is going to tell you about breathing techniques.
1:20.9	Very, very revolutionary, but tell.
1:25.0	Well, I want to ask you, Wim. I've been very interested in the effects of changing temperature on human physiology.
1:33.8	Specifically, I've been interested in the sauna for a while, mostly because I sort of serendipitously started using the sauna when I was in graduate school,
1:43.9	which is a very stressful time for me. And there's a sauna across the street from where I lived. And so I started using the sauna every morning before I would go into the lab and do my experiments.
1:54.1	And I noticed that I felt really good after and I was able to handle stress better.
2:00.7	So I started to figure out why is this? So I started diving into the science and trying to understand how it affects the brain.
2:07.5	But how did you become interested in sitting in the ice or taking ice baths?
2:13.3	I thought there was more than meets the eye. There is more into all the system.
2:19.6	And I was like grown up in a big family, but my... You know, school results were not so big.
2:34.7	And everybody was into, hey, you have to become a doctor, you have to become this, you have to become that.
2:40.6	Otherwise, you are lower in the system.
2:46.4	And I thought, no, what I feel is okay. What I feel is... It's not really what I want.
	...

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