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. 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.

Wim hof method scam