With awesome feats of physical endurance under his belt, Dutch-born wellness fanatic Wim Hof believes he has the key to a healthier, happier life. And it all starts with a cold shower
WORDS IMOGEN ROWLAND
Monday mornings are no match for Wim Hof. When he answers the phone to WW magazine he’s already in full flow, talking at 100 miles an hour and bursting into the chorus from The Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays when we apologise for the early hour. He is, of course, joking – he loves Mondays, just as he loves every other day of the week. To Hof, life is for living wholeheartedly, even while the rest of us are still reaching for our morning coffee.
‘After speaking to you, I’m jumping straight into a lovely ice bath,’ he says next, without a hint of sarcasm. ‘It’s relaxing, stimulating.’ Isn’t it unbearable getting in? ‘Don’t be silly. It’s a piece of cake.’
A tour de force of energy and enthusiasm, Hof is known the world over as The Iceman, thanks to a series of outlandish achievements that have made him seem superhuman. They include running a barefoot half-marathon above the Arctic Circle on snow and ice, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in just two days wearing only shorts and shoes, and setting Guinness World Records for the longest ice bath and furthest distance swum beneath ice.
To prove his powers of endurance are not limited to extreme cold, in 2011 Hof also ran a full marathon in the Namib desert in temperatures reaching 40ºC, without drinking a drop of water. In short, he is extraordinary – just don’t try telling him that. ‘Pffff, I’m not extraordinary, I’m simply in tune with my body,’ he says with his trademark, gung-ho delivery. ‘Everyone has the capacity to do what I do.’
What he does is summed up in his self-titled wellness programme, the Wim Hof Method. Borrowing from Tibetan Tummo techniques, it centres on three principles: cold therapy, breathing and commitment. According to Hof, the method is as simple as it is life-changing, with the potential to support the immune system, alleviate depression and stress, boost energy levels and even help with weight loss thanks to the energy used to counteract the cold. It’s not just Hof who says so, either: more than one million people subscribe to his YouTube channel, hundreds of thousands follow his method worldwide, and in the past decade formerly sceptical scientists have also begun to recognise his principles through rigorous experiments. He’s even starred in his own episode of The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow on Netflix. So
