The Rise and Fall of the Wim Hof Empire
Click to Watch: The Rise and Fall of the Wim Hof Empire
YouTube | Spotify | Rumble | Patreon
On Labor Day in 2019, Andrew Encinas, a 27-year old social media entrepreneur shuttled back and forth between his new office to set up his desk with a fleet of new computer monitors and the party at his brother’s house in Anaheim Hills, California. Like his business idol Gary Vaynerchuck, Encinas thrived on the challenge of starting a new business and constantly looked for ways to optimize his performance. His favorite technique for dealing with stress was a breathwork and ice immersion protocol called “The Wim Hof Method.” Around 6:30 in the evening, Encinas made his last trip back from the office. His brother Adam invited him in for ice cream and a football game on TV.
“Sure,” he said, “But first I want to do my Wim Hof in the pool.” He asked to borrow a pair of swim trunks. This wasn’t unusual. Over the years Encinas had learned that the Wim Hof method had an almost miraculous calming effect on his nervous system. He watched videos of Hof swimming under Arctic sea ice and teaching influential social media stars to hyperventilate to the point of passing out. Encinas preferred to practice alone and often did four or five rounds of breathing in a single day. Video of Andrew doing the breathwork in the water a few months earlier focused on the peaceful expression on his face. He texted his friends that the method “works really well in the cold.”
A few minutes after Andrew went into the pool, Adam started to wonder when he would finish up and rejoin the family. Then, according to the coroner’s report filed in Los Angeles County, children at the party noticed Andrew appeared to be sleeping in the shallow end of the pool. Adam ran outside to find his brother in a “meditative position” underwater with his hands clasped in front of his chest and unresponsive. Adam dragged Andrew out of the water and performed CPR to get his heart beating again. “But when we got to the hospital there was no brain activity. He was already a goner," says Adam Encinas.
The circumstances around Encinas’s death are far from unique in the world of the Wim Hof Method and stem from a common conflation of two of its pillars: submersion in icy water and Hof’s characteristic hyperventilation breathwork. When practiced separately, those pillars can confer the benefits Encinas was seeking. When practiced together, they add up to an incredibly efficient method to drown.
Wim Hof is the most visible face of a global breathwork wellness movement. He’s the main reason behind the growing popularity of ice bathing and a variety of mostly free environmental training and exercises. Unlike many other health influencers, Hof has enthusiastically sought out and embraced scientific scrutiny of his practices and proven a variety of benefits in laboratory settings. One famous study from Radboud University in the Netherlands showed how he could voluntarily suppress his immune system with breathwork and cold exposure—something theretofore unheard of in science. This has impressive implications for anyone suffering from an auto-immune illness, from arthritis to Crohns and Lyme diseases. The program’s basic premise is that by putting the body under intense, but non-damaging stress in the form of cyclical hyperventilation and prolonged breath holds, as well as learning to relax in frigid water, the human body will respond by becoming more physically and emotionally resilient. The concept, broadly called hormesis, suggests that these sorts of stresses offer a generalized health benefit that extends to all aspects of life. The heady mix has made Hof incredibly famous and wealthy. It has also made him potentially liable for the deaths of people who follow his example and push their limits past the breaking point.
A few miles away from the pool where Encinas drowned, another incident on August 10, 2022 could potentially spell the end of the Wim Hof Method in America. In a complaint filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court, Raphael Metzger contends that Wim Hof and Innerfire, the organization that brings his method to the world, negligently caused the death of his daughter Madelyn by failing to adequately warn his followers about the risk of drowning, that the techniques offer no health benefits, and that they should never be practiced by children. In a major civil lawsuit, he is seeking $67 million dollars in damages as well as an injunction against Hof and Innerfire from ever teaching his method in America again. The case is scheduled to go to trial in January 2024. This is the first formal legal action filed against Hof in an American court since he began teaching his method publicly about ten years ago.
The facts as he recounts in his court filing are as follows.
Madelyn Rose Metzger started her morning at her father’s palatial $1.8 million dollar home with its large swimming pool surrounded by palm trees in an up-scale neighborhood of Long Beach, California. Around 9:30 in the morning the cats followed Madelyn into her father’s home office as he prepared a deposition for the law firm he runs that handles toxic exposure cases. A little while later, she got into an argument with her mother on the phone about which local college would offer her the best multivariable calculus course (her parents, Raphael and Tammy divorced several years earlier and were not on the best terms). The discussion got heated enough that perhaps Madelyn may have needed to calm her nerves. A tab on her computer linked to various Wim Hof method training programs, but it’s not clear whether she accessed it that day. What is clear is that at some point in the next few hours she donned a bathing suit, dipped into the shallow end of the pool that she rarely used and drowned.
That evening her father found her face down in the water. He dragged her out and started performing CPR, but neither he, nor the paramedics who arrived a few minutes later, could bring her back to life. The Los Angeles County coroner concluded that the manner of death was accidental, but Raphael Metzger thinks there’s a more direct explanation: his daughter passed out after performing several rounds of Wim Hof’s characteristic hyperventilation breathing method in water and lost consciousness. Data from the Apple Watch she was wearing on her wrist that day could show characteristic variations in her heartbeat to add credence to his claim.
Metzger’s attorney Scott Brust, said “as tragic as Maddie's death was in isolation, it’s not an isolated incident. . . We are seeking an injunction against Wim Hof from marketing his deadly breathing technique in the United States. The goal is that no more young Americans should die doing the Wim Hof breathing methods, which we've seen have a proven track record of leaving deaths and drownings in their wake.” Raphael Metzger has also named his ex-wife Tammy as a defendant, accusing her of introducing their daughter to the Hof method in the first place without a full understanding of its underlying dangers.
Contrary to the suit’s claims, Hof and the keepers of his flame say they are meticulous and careful about warning people not to do these breathing exercises in water. Hof’s website and YouTube videos do in fact include prominent warnings against performing the breathing method in water. One typical example, a YouTube video that gives Hof’s basic breathing instructions and has 66 million views, includes this warning in its description: “!! Don't do the breathing exercises in a swimming pool, before going underwater, beneath the shower, or piloting any vehicle. Always practice sitting or lying down in a safe environment.” Enahm Hof, Wim Hof’s son and the CEO of Innerfire is adamant over email “Wim Hof doesn't teach hyperventilation techniques. Within the Wim Hof Method we never teach people to do our specific breathing exercises, before submerging in water. We are very careful and protective in teaching the people the Wim Hof Method so they practice in a safe environment, in a safe way.”
Whatever the particular merits of the Metzger case, which will come out in court proceedings, according to my reporting on the Wim Hof Method over the last ten years, as well as a network of current and former Wim Hof Method instructors and practitioners, and despite what Innerfire writes on their website, Wim Hof and his organization do not practice what they preach. Even in places where warnings exist Hof simultaneously teaches a veritable recipe for blacking out in water. In numerous instances, he conflates waterwork and breathwork and abandons safety protocols that he explicitly states are necessary. According to a Wim Hof Method instructor, the training center that Innerfire operates in Poland lacks even basic safety gear like AEDs in case someone’s heart stops during his intensive workshops.
The disconnect between what the Hof organization says in its official capacity and the actual teachings Hof gives can be jarring. Take, for instance, the eighth week of his $99 “Classic 10-Week” video course. After almost two months of training in breathwork and cold exposure, which work up from very mild practices into ever more intense variations, Wim Hof stands in front of an icy waterfall alongside an eager shirtless student and gives some simple instructions. “Go into the water,” he says in the video. “Keep on with the breathing. Keep on being focused. Then you sit. Then you immerse. Focus…and you stay in the water.” Hof gives similar sets of instructions in various ways three times over the course of the lesson, ultimately hyperventilating in his own characteristic way and then dunking his own head into the water and staying under for about a minute.
A strange disclaimer in the comment section next to the video appears to contradict what Hof is doing on screen. It reads: “The guy in the video is guided by Wim to learn to deal with the cold. He is not doing the breathing retention and then putting his head under the water.” At the very least, the juxtaposition between the written warning and Hof’s own words is confusing. At worst, it’s a dramatic acknowledgement of the sort of negligence that could get someone killed.
“They are teaching hyperventilation before submersion, which is the recipe for shallow water blackout,” says Brit Jackson, the executive director of Shallow Water Blackout Prevention, an organization whose mission is to raise awareness about the dangers of hyperventilating in water.
According to an extensive search of available news articles, police and coroners’ reports, as well tips from people in the broader Wim Hof Method community and watchdog organizations that monitor drowning deaths, I’ve located thirteen instances of drowning related to known Wim Hof Method practitioners who likely fell unconscious and died while following Wim’s example A further six incidents indicate deaths by cardiac arrest in ice water and people who drowned and survived after they were rescued. Survivors invariably recount that they followed Wim’s inspiration and engaged in their combination breathing and water practices without knowing the dangers. Equally concerning is that, of the 19 total cases I’ve examined, 9 occurred in the United States with four in California alone. (Jan 1, 2024 Update: since the original publication of this article in June 2023, the current totals have risen to 21 deaths and 18 injuries with 12 deaths in the United States).
If we assume that Americans aren’t particularly more prone to confusion about breathwork and water work than any other nationality, it seems probable that the cases I’ve identified account for only a fraction of the total number of global cases.
In ways that I am both proud of and deeply regret, there’s a good chance that whatever many people know about Hof can be traced, in one way or another, to when I first began reporting on Hof in Poland about ten years ago. When I first met him at his dilapidated farmhouse in Przesieka, Poland in the winter of 2013, Hof was, at most, a circus act. He wore a green hat and had a red nose and ruddy skin that made him appear a little gnome-ish. He was bursting with energy, talked loudly, and smelled like an onion. To the extent he was known at all, it was for performing death-defying stunts in ice water and for a stint shilling battery-heated jackets for Columbia Sportswear—not for possessing valuable insights on the mind-body connection. No one predicted that those insights would one day inspire millions.
Hof had recently started advertising a workshop that promised to give people the power to control their immune system and to survive in hostile natural environments. It was a heady mix of seemingly impossible promises, and I convinced Playboy to let me write about his first-ever public training session so I could debunk him as a charlatan trying to sell fake superpowers to the masses. I was working on a book about the dangers of intensive spiritual-seeking called The Enlightenment Trap, and had seen charismatic leaders like Hof grow popular with similar claims, only to fall into the familiar disgrace of scandals and suspicious deaths.
My hypothesis went: Most groups like these tend to fall into cataclysmic death spirals after their leader’s oversized egos eclipse whatever positive message initially attracted their following. The only problem with my plan was that Hof’s method actually worked. Within a few days I learned to hold my breath for several minutes at a stretch and heat my body in the snow. An autoimmune illness that had plagued me for 30 years went away. A few years later I climbed, shirtless, up Mt. Kilimanjaro with Hof when the temperature dipped to minus-30 degrees. There was no doubt about it, I was a convert. Soon I became his chief evangelist, not only writing book, What Doesn’t Kill Us, which spent a few months on the New York Times bestseller list, but also appearing for more than 300 media engagements, from TV shows and news articles, to radio programs and podcasts where I preached the good news
His workshops, like the small one I attended, would grow into a loose following, which would evolve into an international organization, which would explode into what some people have called a cult. (Innerfire, run by Hof’s son Enahm, owns all of the trademarks of Wim Hof’s name, as well as all the property and income of the Hof empire, which has a declared value of $18 million.) Hof has routinely taught his method to crowds that number in the many thousands, sometimes spreading his message of ice and breathwork for a $200 ticket price. His international bestselling book The Wim Hof Method has been reprinted in twenty-one languages. Gwenyth Paltrow’s The Goop Lab series on Netflix did a full episode on him. The BBC ran a full series. His Instagram feed has grown from a few thousand people when we met in 2013 to more than 3 million today—with similarly impressive numbers on YouTube (2.4 million followers). There are seventy-one videos about Hof on YouTube with more than a million views each, and 146,000 videos overall. The video giving instructions for his basic breathing method alone has more than 64 million views. A search of the Newspaper Archive of over 16,000 publications shows his name has appeared on 12 front pages, with more than 489 mentions overall. He’s also about to get the Hollywood treatment; a movie about Hof starring Joseph Fiennes reportedly began shooting in November 2022.
In time, both his ego and his message have only become more overwhelming. I’ve watched Hof gain increasing—and mostly uncritical—attention from outlets as diverse as National Geographic, Smithsonian, The Joe Rogan Experience, The Guardian, and this magazine. Now I find myself wondering: Is Wim Hof’s reckless messaging responsible for people dying?
If you’re not familiar with the Wim Hof breathing method, you might be wondering why anyone would want to hyperventilate in water in the first place. Hof’s breathing pattern allows a person to hold their breath for an abnormally long period of time. The pattern is fairly simple: do thirty or forty deep, rapid hyperventilation breaths followed by an exhale, finally holding the remaining breath with near-empty lungs. When I first tried the breathwork on Hof’s floor in Poland, I reached two minutes on my first attempt. My longest holds since then have brushed against seven minutes. For some people—including Hof—that abnormally long breath hold seems ideal for underwater feats.
The reason Hof’s method works has to do with the peculiarities of the mammalian respiratory system. Contrary to common sense, the urge that we feel to gasp doesn’t derive from a lack of oxygen in our system, rather from the buildup of carbon dioxide in our lungs and bloodstream. Hyperventilating blows off all the CO2 in the system so that you don’t feel the signal to breathe until much later than you normally would. If, instead of Hof’s ordinary exhalation at the end, you follow up hyperventilation by holding your breath at the top of the inhale so that your lungs are full to their maximum capacity—this alternative method which he sometimes teaches, will result in the longest possible breath hold—it’s possible to run out of oxygen before your CO2 levels restock. When that happens, a person can fall unconscious without feeling any warning sensations. Either way, both methods can lead to passing out. On land, this isn’t as much of a problem. In water, this kind of blackout can be deadly.
It is easy to get caught up in Hof’s enthusiastic message of breathwork and limit pushing—to be captivated by his message to the point where it almost seems reasonable to do unreasonable and even dangerous things. Since the Method really only includes two techniques—cold water immersion and breathwork—it seems natural to want to combine the two, especially considering Hof is known for having once held a Guinness world record for swimming the longest distance under sea ice. More on that later.
After I met Wim, but before I knew about the dangers, I occasionally swam underwater laps in a community pool after doing Hof’s breathwork. Similar breathwork programs, like the Extreme Performance Training (XPT) run by big wave surfer Laird Hamilton and Gabrielle Reece, experimented with hyperventilation techniques and diving briefly in 2015. They revised their method after two Navy SEALs died from shallow water blackout at a naval training facility. “Anybody taking Wim’s work and going into the pool and hyperventilating is just playing roulette. You’re almost guaranteed to go out if you do that,” says Hamilton.
Rather than doing everything in his power to separate the two components of his method, Hof habitually conflates the practices. In 2018, I shared a stage with Hof in Los Angeles in front of about 300 people who’d paid to learn the Iceman’s breathwork and take their first ice bath. I was excited to see Hof teach his method to the public. Wim wore bright red sneakers and a t-shirt that featured a drawing of a bearded figure wearing an eyepatch made out of a compass. He looked notably older than when I’d met him before. His now-long hair had receded from his forehead like a low tide.
[Disclosure: while I have no financial ties to Innerfire and didn’t receive a speaking fee for the event, from 2017 to 2021 an affiliate link on my website to Hof’s training videos resulted in 134 sales. My total commissions amounted to $5,324. Innerfire netted $21,061. At the time, Enahm Hof, Wim Hof’s son who runs the company, told me that the company was making $1 million a month selling video courses, or about 10,000 courses a month.]
When we got to the heavy-breathing part, Hof led the group in a rapid succession of inhales and exhales until people’s fingers tingled and they were lightheaded. Then a large screen behind him showed a famous piece of footage of Hof’s 2000 record-setting swim under sea ice. He told the crowd to hold their breath until, in the film, he reached the exit hole—the precise time was unrecorded, but it was more than most were used to. People in the audience looked amazed that they were able to hold their breath for as long as Hof did while swimming. But I was aghast that Hof was so brazenly conflating swimming with breathwork. I’d never seen Hof teach in public to a crowd this large, and I could feel my heart sinking to my stomach.
By then, news reports from multiple countries linked people doing the Wim Hof Method in water to people dying. I’d even mentioned deaths in my book. In addition to the three reported in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool in 2016, three more cases of drownings in connection to Hof’s method had been reported, one in Holland and two in California. One article quoted Enahm saying, “It’s pretty lame”—in response to people dying—“but then you shouldn't do the exercises under water. Everywhere on our site and with all our expressions we warn people, we can do no more.” But the event in Los Angeles happened more than two years after the news reports and Wim Hof continued to espouse the virtues of doing precisely what the site warns against. When I asked Wim Hof about the juxtaposition of water and breath on stage later that evening, he cited the disclaimers on his website, and averred that of course people understood they shouldn’t try it at home. Even if I had pushed back against Hof harder that night in Los Angeles, I don’t think I had the power to make him take caution to heart.
On May 29, Royal bailiffs from the Dutch government served Wim Hof and Innerfire with the official legal complaint in accordance with Hague convention. In order to prove negligence, Metzger’s legal team will have to convince a jury that it was more likely than not that Madelyn did, indeed perform a Wim Hof inspired breathwork practice in water just prior to her death. A lot will depend on how experts interpret the data from her Apple Watch. They will also need to prove that Wim Hof has been irresponsible with conflating the two aspects of his method to his global audience. While Metzger’s is the first legal case against Hof, the lawyers will likely attempt to connect her death to a string of similar incidents.
In January 2019, Christopher Kuyvenhoven was another person who admired Hof from afar and who drowned. An adventurous former soldier who once aspired to be a Navy SEAL, Kuyvenhoven, 23, was exactly the sort of person who might think about how to take the Wim Hof method to the next level. He liked the challenge, and the sense of risk. “He’d go to the gym and sit in the hot tub and practice breath-holding,” says his then-girlfriend Kara Spencer. “Sometimes he would do Wim Hof before holding his breath. And he would time himself. He was always focused on reaching a certain goal and trying to increase his breath holding.” It took nearly 30 minutes before anyone noticed Kyuenhoven was unresponsive in the hot tub at Western Washington University. He was already dead. Spencer says Hof is at least partially to blame. “It’s putting people at risk for sure. It creates a message that’s really confusing and ultimately a person is going to go with whatever Wim Hof, the master of the Method is doing himself. If he’s doing it, the implication is that it’s safe enough,” she said.
If those cases had gone to court, a jury still might wonder exactly what was going through Encinas’ and Kyuenhoven’s minds before they drowned. Encinas clearly communicated his plan to do the Wim Hof method in water, and documents with the medical examiner and hospital make the link, but the statue of limitations expired before his family contemplated legal actions of their own. In either case, there is no video tape of the movements directly prior to their deaths, and there is no way to communicate with the dead to determine their exact mental state. But there are at least a few cases in which people drowned and were rescued, where survivors recount how they mixed Wim Hof’s breathwork and water work and passed out.
Take for instance, 24-year-old Hamish Jamieson who lost consciousness in a public pool after doing Wim Hof breathing and spent nearly seven and a half minutes underwater in 2021. Lifeguards pulled him out and issued several shocks to his heart to revive him. The entire event was captured on CCTV and later became part of an inquest into public safety. Jameison spent four weeks in a medically induced coma, and eventually made a full recovery. When I spoke to him about the experience he remembered the moment he blacked out and felt very lucky it was not his last. “I didn’t know the dangers,” he said. Jamieson’s mistake is an easy enough one to make. YouTube has many videos of people doing Wim Hof’s breathwork before going for a cold swim. Indeed, Hof often claims that his breathwork will directly heat up a person when they’re cold, making an association with cold water difficult to ignore.
In 2017, the chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin—the kid the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer is based on—an avid Wim Hof method practitioner, told the author and podcaster Tim Ferriss that he was doing his Wim Hof-inspired breath hold work in a New York City pool and blacked out for four minutes before being rescued.
It’s frightfully easy to get the wrong idea about how to correctly apply the Wim Hof method in real world settings. Since writing my book, readers have often approached me asking how to use it as a survival technique in the wild (you shouldn’t) and what the correct way is to use his breathwork to heat up the body (it doesn’t). Part of the confusion has been that the science is still catching up with the practice—and some things I wrote about, such as the efficacy of a thermogenic tissue known as brown fat to heat up the body, has become more complicated, and frankly less impressive, than it was at the time of writing. Another part of the confusion stems from Hof’s own inability to moderate his message, as well as the media’s own seemingly insatiable desire to turn Hof into an almost infallible superhero who knows what is possible with the human body better than any scientist ever could.
Even as I evangelized Hof’s teachings, I’ve always known Hof had a darker side. There were some less-than-savory stories in the original manuscript of What Doesn’t Kill Us that I cut after discussions with Mark Weinstein, my editor at Rodale who later ghost wrote Hof’s book The Wim Hof Method, because we feared it might undermine the way people saw Hof, making readers less inclined to take the breathwork and cold exposure parts of the book seriously. I regret those deletions now.
One story begins in 2008 when Hof had not seen his children in almost ten years. That decade had been rough on the family. Hof’s wife Olaya committed suicide by jumping from an eight floor balcony in Pamplona in 1995 after a long struggle with mental illness, leaving him to raise four children on his own. After his wife’s death he began a relationship with a woman in another city and left his kids to live alone in a squat-house in Amsterdam. The eldest, Enahm, was only fifteen years old when he became the family’s surrogate dad. Eventually Hof’s relationship with the woman ended and he found himself with a €30,000 tax debt. That seemed to be the impetus to reconnect with his family.
Hof asked his second son Michael to meet him, and they set a time to rendezvous at Vondelpark in Amsterdam. Hof arrived early and went for a swim in the park’s pond while he was waiting. He paddled out to a fountain and positioned himself over the spout to give himself an enema that he thought would “cleanse all of his intestines.” Or, as he often likes to say “get the shit out.” On a recording of one of our conversations in 2013, Hof recounts that he had done the park fountain enema at least a hundred times before, but that unbeknownst to him the park service had changed the spigot on the fountain to create a more impressive spray. The narrower gauge sent water cutting through his intestines like a knife, filling his bowels with dirty water. He managed to make it back to shore while blood and feces leaked from his rectum. Hof’s first words to his son in a decade were that he needed to go to a hospital.
The story of the changed spigot never quite added up to me. The timing of the meeting with his son felt too coincidental, especially if he was such a frequent purveyor of the fountain’s services. I asked Hof if he had an inclination that the fountain maneuver might hurt him, and whether hurting himself before meeting his son might have been a way to show his remorse for abandoning his children for a decade. “You get a feeling that you want to kill yourself and want to end the story. Not deliberately, but unconsciously. Stop this shit even if you have to die. Something like that was going on,” Hof said. The action ended up being at best reckless and at worst suicidal—dangerous qualities when you’re asking millions of people to follow your other extreme health practices.
The story of Hof abandoning his children and his near fatal enema never made it into my book because both my editor and I wanted to protect Hof’s reputation from evidence of his own madness. It’s a role that many other journalists have also fallen into when they might have otherwise doubled down on their fact checking efforts. Take, for instance, this typical exchange between Hof and Joe Rogan from October 2016:
Hof: We found out for the first time in scientific history that doing this 100 percent saturation of oxygen in the blood is not 100 percent.
Rogan: But there is nothing more than 100 percent. They had a level that they thought was 100 percent and the said nobody has reached a higher level than this, so this must be what 100% saturation looks like.
Hof: Exactly.
Rogan: It’s not that you got more than 100 percent saturation, it’s that you achieved higher levels of saturation than they thought possible.
Hof: Exactly. They did it with a laser on the chest and then they were able to measure the mitochondrial oxygen tension. …They are able to receive more oxygen. That is a great finding. It shows that we can have more oxygen inside. Suddenly we are able to get into the cell and influence the energy production. If it is anaerobic it is like two molecules able to produce. When it becomes aerobic, then it’s up to thirty-eight molecules they can produce. …What happens? What happens with a cell that is deprived for forty-eight hours of 35 percent less oxygen, it becomes cancerous. As simple as that.
Rogan: Have you ever worked with cancer patients?
Hof: I want to, but it is very complicated.
After Rogan gently redirects Hof’s factual error about oxygen saturation, Wim pivots to a more scientific sounding language that is hard to immediately decipher. It took me several hours on an extensive search of the medical literature and conversations with a Harvard doctor versed in the literature and I’ve haven’t been able to locate a single study that backs up any of the specific claims Hof made in this exchange–from mitochondria producing 38-molecules (of what? Hemoglobin can only hold 4 oxygen atoms) to forty eight hours of low oxygen saturation mechanistically causes cancer. It’s all nonsense. Rogan, and just about every other interviewer, gives Hof a pass. To be fair, how would Rogan even have fact checked Hof’s proclamations at that specific moment?
“There is no person in that organization [Innerfire] right now that understands the physiology. I don’t think they have a grasp on that,” says Brian Mackenzie, a breathwork expert and author of the book Power, Speed, Endurance, about the mishmash of scientific-sounding language that Hof uses. Mackenzie worked closely with Hof over the years but has been increasingly critical of the method recently.
Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt is a professor of ecological energetics and health at Maastricht University who has conducted research on Hof. “Wim’s scientific vocabulary is galimatias,” he wrote in the scientific journal Temperature,using a little-used English word for gobbledygook. “He mixes, in a nonsensical way, scientific terms as irrefutable evidence.”
The media’s tacit endorsements create an aura of infallibility about Hof that can ultimately lead to dangerous confusion down the line for people who look to him as an authority on techniques that ultimately ask them to put their lives in Hof’s hands. In other words, we learn to trust the messenger, not the message.
Even if we agree that his scientific understanding is shaky, what about his results? After all, Hof grounds his authority as a health influencer in notable feats of endurance. Hof is renowned as the holder of between 21 and 26 Guinness World Records and often credited for climbing Mt. Everest in shorts without a shirt. Yet a closer look at those feats reveals disappointing results. According to Guinness, Hof only currently holds a single record (for the fastest half-marathon barefoot in the snow). Meanwhile Hof aborted his Everest attempt after getting frostbite just above base camp. While he may have held the record for the longest ice bath at one point, the current record on Guinness is more than an hour longer than Hof’s own 1 hour and 50 minute stunt. It’s anyone’s guess as to the identity of the other 20-or so records that he claims. One feat that he promotes more than any other, however, is a verifiable now-broken world record for swimming the longest distance underneath sea ice on March 16, 2000, when he made it 188 feet underwater in Finland.
This event deserves a second look, because I believe it is a critical component as to why people decide to mix the Wim Hof Method breathing in water. Video of this famous swim plays in almost every promo reel about Hof’s life. The footage of him under the ice ended up on a well-known Dutch TV news show and one of the ways he first started getting recognition for his ability to perform death-defying stunts.
But all was not as it seemed that day. In the 2011 book Becoming the Iceman Hof wrote that he almost died on his first attempt under the ice. On that try, he ignored his own safety protocols and tried to sprint twice the planned distance without telling anyone on the crew. Afterwards, Hof claimed that his eyes froze under the water and he lost his way—and that he was lucky that a rescue diver found him after he blacked out and brought him to the surface.
His brother Marcel, who was standing on the ice above him that day, remembers it differently. “He took it too far and blacked out,” Marcel says. He recalls Hof performing the staple breathing exercise of his method—deliberately hyperventilating—just before his underwater swim. According to Marcel, it’s just as likely that Hof experienced shallow water blackout as his failure was due to frozen eyeballs. There’s no reason it couldn’t have been both.
If there’s a chance that Hof almost died from misusing his own method under water, then it would make sense for him to communicate his error forcefully to any community that he has influence over, instead of claiming it as the basis of his authority. Common sense would tell most people that there is some risk involved with difficult breathing methods, bathing in icy water, climbing mountains half-naked in winter, and the like. Yet these are exactly the perceived limits that he asks people to push past.
Take for instance the winter and summer travel expeditions where 100 people pay about $3,000 to spend six days with Hof in person. During these events he teaches breathwork and ice immersion; other activities include white-water rafting, impromptu guitar performances by Hof, ecstatic dancing, and intimate conversation. On the last day of this year’s trip in Poland, Ricardo Bengoa, an airline pilot, remembers all 100 participants jumping off a 25-foot waterfall together before Hof led the group in what he called a “baptism.”
“[The participants] are starting to see him as a guru sort of thing. He has a big personality and people start listening to him. He talked a lot about pushing boundaries,” says Bengoa. Hof gathered the group into a circle, led them in twelve deep hyperventilation breaths. Then the entire group submerged underwater together with their arms placed on each other’s shoulders for 20 seconds. Video that later leaked from the expedition shows the entire ritual unfold, with Hof in the center of the circle.
The video is creepy to say the least. Not only for the dangerous breathwork practice, but the ritual feeling of an entire group following Hof’s lead based on his charisma alone. Pictures of Hof online show students in full-scale adoration, blankly looking at Hof as their almost spiritual leader—or a dozen people all putting their hands on Hof’s head in some sort of blessing. While Hof often declares on stage and on podcasts that he’s “not your f*cking guru,” as Brian Mackenzie notes, “that’s a great way to set yourself up as a guru.”
When I approached Hof over text message about the drownings associated with his method as well as his winter ritual this year in Poland he wrote to me that “28,000 people drown every year” and that I was blaming him for all of their deaths. (This fact, too, was wrong, the WHO reports 280,000 deaths by drowning per year.) A few minutes later he wrote this:
Look into baptism and the real meaning of it. You might learn some thing. I know what i do. Baptism, the real one, is shutting down our overcontrolling mind and activate deep healing mechanisms in the body. Not gonna explain this fysiologically. Not into competicion and sports here, which is entertainment since the Roman empire who killed an innoscent man called Jesus. [sic]
It’s difficult for me to interpret exactly what Hof meant by this message except to note that it looks suspiciously like Hof comparing himself to Jesus.
I think that Hof’s tendency to believe in his own abilities regardless of what is rational or even advisable lies at the heart of the mixed messages that he transmits to his followers. For the last decade scientists and his millions of followers have told him that his gut feelings are often more right than scientific data. After all, he’s been right a surprising number of times. But Hof’s gut isn’t right about everything.
It would be fairly easy for Hof to remind people prominently, repeatedly, and forcefully never to practice hyperventilation in water and to never teach techniques that indirectly or directly conflate the two aspects of his method. He hasn’t done that—which, coupled with his gift for oratory, means many of his followers can become mesmerized into doing the unadvisable. “It’s turned into this thing where people’s eyes will glaze over,” says a former Wim Hof Method instructor who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “And…it makes me angry how he has become this breathwork Jesus, when in reality what he is doing is really bad for breathwork. He makes these nonsense words for hours in front of crowds and people leave amazed. No normal person does that.”
I believe that we can appreciate Wim in all of his complexity, acknowledging the potential benefits of the method while also remaining mindful that the man is deeply flawed. Whether he wants this role or not, Wim Hof leads by example. The media has placed him on a pedestal that underplays the questionable parts of his past, while over-emphasizing the greatness of his achievements. Can we accept Hof as a prophet while acknowledging in the same breath that he’s a bit of a madman? In my mind, it’s the only way to save his message.
And, for the love of god, don’t hyperventilate in water.
January 2024 Update: the death toll has continued to rise since the original publication of this piece, as have explicit evidence of Wim Hof hyperventilating in water. See below.
Scott Carney is the author of “What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength,” and host of Scott Carney Investigates.
Registered ©PokeyBear LLC 2023