What Happens During Wim Hof Breathing?

Hello Health Champions.

Wim Hof, also known as The Iceman, is known for certain breathing technique and also for

being able to withstand extreme cold.

They’ve done some study that suggests there's some health benefits to the Wim Hof method,

but I haven't found anywhere where they talk about how these benefits would come about.

So today I'm going to talk about the mechanism and what really happens in the body when you

do that type of breathing and when you do ice baths, so that when you understand the

mechanism then you can adapt the method to fit your lifestyle and you can get all or

most of the benefits without having to become an Iceman.

Unless of course that's your idea of fun.

Coming right up I’m Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and

if you want to truly master your health by understanding how the body really works make

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a life-saving video.

The Wim Hof method according to the founder includes 3 things: breathing, cold therapy

and mind focus. The Wim Hof breathing

starts out with 30 power breaths and this is where you breathe in as much as

you can and then you blow it all out as much as you can and you keep doing this rather

forcefully you go very powerfully on purpose.

And what might happen is you get dizzy and/or lightheaded and you might even pass out so

it's a good idea to lay down or being a recliner or you're not going to fall anywhere if you

actually pass out.

Then when you've done these 30 power breaths now you blow all the air out to exhale and

hold.

And you do that for as long as you can and when you can't hold your breath anymore you take a deep breath

in and then you hold it and when you are done with that now you can exhale and hold and

you repeat this up to 10 times.

To understand anything about the Wim Hof method we need to understand the autonomic nervous

system because Wim Hof has been known to control his autonomic nervous system by will and

this is the part of the nervous system that controls the things you don't have to think

about normally.

So blood pressure and digestion and muscle tone and so forth.

They are at a certain level automatically.

These functions are managed for you.

And that two branches are sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and this is

kind of like a see-saw whenever one goes up the other side goes down same as when you're

driving a car you can't speed up and slow down at the same time.

You have to pick one, and this is hardwired into your nervous system that they're going

to alternate.

This is your resource allocation system and the sympathetic is going to allocate resources

to defend you.

This is called a fight flight system and it’s your alarm system.

If you were standing in the street and a car comes rushing up or if you're in the woods

somewhere and a bear comes running up to you then you're in an alarm state your body is

going to mobilize resources it's going to increase heart rate it's going to increase blood pressure

to pump more blood it's going to increase muscle tone to get you ready to get out of there as quickly

as possible.

It's also going to increase stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol to raise blood

sugar and mobilize energy and everything about the sympathetic nervous system is about

focusing outward that if there's a threat out there you have to defend yourself against

that threat first so you can survive before anything on the inside makes sense.

An interesting thing to know is that any time that you breathe in your heart speeds up and

the only time the hearts beat up is when there is sympathetic activation.

Therefore, your breathing is tied to the balance of your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous

system.

So we're going to talk about how this fits in with the different breathing patterns.

And the parasympathetic obviously is the opposite.

It's known as the feed breed or rest digest system it does the opposite it lowers blood

pressure lower heart rate lower stress hormones and it's involved with inside functions like

digestion, immune system, reproduction and sex.

Now of course this is about directing resources inward so you can pretty much understand how

this balance works then you can allocate resources inside to heal or you can allocate resources

outside against the outside to defend yourself but you can't do more of both at the same

time.

The seesaw principle is going to make the nervous system pick one or the other.

And of course when you breathe out now your heart rate is going to go down.

And this makes a lot of sense because the body is smart.

When you breathe in there's more air in the lungs more oxygen to be absorbed and therefore

it make sense to speed up the heart and send some more blood there to pick up the oxygen

when there is more of it there and when we breathe out we don't want to waste our energy

waste our resources to the heart slows down.

And this is called heart rate variability (HRV).

I talked about breathing in the past and after that people always ask me which kind of breathing

is the best because I've heard about different kinds of breathing that are different from

yours.

It's not that one is bad and another one is good it’s that they are different and once

you understand what's happening with this breathing mechanism now we can kind of understand

when and how do it.

So the breath I usually proposed is an even five seconds in and 5 seconds out maybe a

little bit longer on the out breath and here why.

Most people breathe in for 2 to 3 seconds and then breathe out really fast.

And then they breathe in for 2 to 3 seconds and then breathe out really fast.

So with the in breath they are activating their sympathetic nervous system but they

are breathing too fast to allow that parasympathetic nervous system to kick in and balance out

the sympathetic.

So most people get stuck in that state of stress and anxiety and of course then the

anxiety makes you breathe even faster so your sorta stuck in a vicious cycle there. But if you allow five or six seconds

to breathe out your allowing the parasympathetic and balance is sympathetic that's the purpose

of this particular breath. To balance your automatic nervous system and bring you into a state of relaxation.

Two things happen when we breathe. First, you take oxygen in and also you take

carbon dioxide out. And the thing about carbon dioxide is that it is acidic so this is the way that the body can

regulate pH of the blood. If you don't breathe enough then the carbon dioxide builds up and your blood

gets acidic. And this is actually the trigger for your body to breathe more. There is a sensor in your brainstem that says your blood is too acidic

breathe more and this is a much stronger influence actually than the oxygen need. Now when you

breathe in balance like this, the purpose is to create balance. Also known as homeostasis. When they

measure heart rate variability, when they measure the pattern of how the heart rate increases and decreases with the breath

when you get into a perfect smooth and rhythmic pattern it's called coherence and that's a very healthy

place to be that means that your brain and your heart are working together. They're cooperating in harmony.

This kind of breathing is also very relaxing obviously. And when you do it and you stay within these relaxed

physiological parameters then the body is going to regulate the PH, and the CO2, and O2 and put them

all within optimal levels. Then what about the Wim Hof breathing? Well it is not a relaxed breath

you breathe in as much as you can and as much as you can and repeat repeat 30 * and also

time to get busy or even saying so this is a reading unbalanced it is stressful unnatural

and what happens now is because you're forcing the breathing you're blowing off way more

carbon dioxide in your body calls for you artificially bringing your pH up you're making

your blood alcohol and this is why you get dizzy and lightheaded at the same time your

field new levels go down and your oxygen levels go up then once you're done with 30 breaths

and the blow out and you hold now your body is really alkaline your blood is really alkaline

and because it's the CO2, the acid CO2 that makes you want to breathe, that gives

you that air hunger you're not going to have any air hunger when your blood is alkaline. So it's

very easy to hold your breath. It might be 30, 40 seconds before you have any urge to breathe and you might be able

to hold this for quite some time and then of course you alternate breathing in and breathing out

but whenever you're holding your breath you are increasing growth hormone. They've done studies

on this. They've taken people and have them hold their breath for as long as they can repeat a few times and their

growth hormone levels increase. And Now Cold Therapy. This is something that you can practice from the

discomfort of your own home I added the discomfort part because I don't know about you it may

or may not be your idea of comfort however it is an extreme stress it is an increase

it's a powerful massive increase in sympathetic drive it causes vasoconstriction and it has

the blood pressure shoot through the roof you could probably, if you managed to measure it

right in that moment it would probably be 200, 250 something like that anytime you

shock your body, or stress it significantly the body is also going to make growth hormone so that

it can adapt. Now that we understand a little bit about the breathing and the cold therapy. What really happens in the body,

the next question is is this actually a good thing? Well, we have to start understanding

a little bit more what stress is and what it does in the different types. Short-term physical

stress is very very normal this is when you have to get out of the way from the car this

is where your response to something physical you defend yourself you do a workout you have

a physical strain of some sort and now it's adaptive that type of stress is adaptive

It gives your body a chance to adapt and get better for when it's going to happen next time therefore

it's very healthy and it's very constructive it gives the body of reason to improve so now if

you understand these parts then we also see that it's necessary because if you don't have

these if you don't have this short-term physical stress then the not giving your body a reason

for that to not giving it a reason to get better and in one word that's called De-generation

other kind of stress is destructive That's The chronic stress. We're designed for short-term physical

stress but chronic stress is the stuff that we can't bounce back from because if it goes

on and on in a lot of emotional and if we have anger or anxiety or depression or worry or

fear, the4n these are emotional habit patterns that break us down we can also have excess

physical stress and even though exercise is necessary and hugely beneficial if we do too

much then it breaks us down. Exercise is break down and when we recover, when we rest we

allow the body to build back up but if you work out too much we don't allow enough time

to the next workout now we're just adding insult to injury and we break the body down

more and more. So this chronic stress we're not designed for. It's abnormal it's maladaptive it's unhealthy

destructive and in the case of emotional stress these are habitual patterns that we create and just like you

can create a skill of any kind. You can create a language skill or the skill of catching a ball.

these are neurological patterns. They work for you but they also work against you in

the case of negative emotions like anger and fear. Wim Hof talks about the mind and it takes a certain amount of dedication

and commitment of determination to jump into that ice water so you have to sort of focus

I have to make a commitment and then wants to jump in this is a massive sensory input

the firing off all types of receptors halfway normal response to self massive sensor input

it's a type of shock and when you do that in an extreme form increase supposed to jump

into that ice water and you're not going to stay back and say whom I wonder if I remember

to feed the dogs before I left for worry about what I'm going to do later on today I'm not

going to do that right now we're going to be present in the moment and focus on what's

going on in the ice water and that includes a focus which is a good thing it involved

frontal lobe activation and cancel oh it's like a muscle you work out muscles with weights

you work out his frontal lobes with signal stimulation and then once the frontal lobe

is activated and strengthen it actually gets better as in Hibbett at sympathetic nervous

system is also like a rubber band but if you really want to relax a muscle it can help

to contracted first and then notice and accentuate the contract before it works the same way

to jump in the ice water and really spiral that sympathetic but then that makes it easier

to notice the contract and relax and parasympathetic several benefits you have a pattern into this

is very very powerful.

Wim Hof breathing problem most of our emotional problems is because we get our pathway to

get a nervous system stuck in certain tax rate in one of those powerful things you can

do is to interrupt that have it make the nervous system just do something else anything else

at all is good and you also get hormonal burst you activate survival circuits you have

sirtuins to have survival genes and if you expose your body to something harsh than the purpose

of the survival game system help the truth that crises, that harsh period.

So in the short-term you make adrenalin which is stress hormone but as soon as you get out

of the water that adrenaline is going to go down very quickly but instead you have a long-acting

benefit from the human growth hormone that decays. that have a much slower half-life. You

get the brain stimulation which is like a workout for your brain and it helps

you get even more after see if you are Lord of 3 or benefits of being this message now

that you even more calm after, so now that you understand its benefits now I'm sure you are worndering, well? Do I have to do all of that? and how

much do I have to do? Do I have to become an Iceman to get these benefits. Well let's talk about it if it

thrills you. Then I think you should be a iceman. If you really getting kicked out

of walking on coals and jumping out of airplanes and sitting in ice water you can look back

and feel good about the fact that you did that and that's an added benefit. So if that is

your personality then we can go for it. The only thing I want to point out is about is about your

particular health state and the duration. Because when it comes to the ice bath for example they

talked about starting off with 32/62 to maybe working up to 15 minutes. As humans we tend

to think that it's a little bit is good then more has to be better but that's not really

how it works as we saw was a discussion on stress before. That our bodies are designed for short stress. That is what creates

the trigger the body gets the point and then it makes changes so I'm not convinced that

15 minutes is better than 60 seconds okay this is my opinion I don't know that anyone

is really studied this but the other part is that if you're not super healthy if you

have a weak heart because you could get in a lot of trouble you can actually trigger a

heart attack if you have a weak heart and you jump into icewater it's like you lockdown

all of your blood vessels and it's like a heart is trying to pump against concrete and a healthy

heart can handle that a weak heart might not. Same thing with adrenals. That a little bit might

be good might be just get like a little stimulation but if it goes on and on and on now you might

actually sort of whip those adrenals beyond the point of health. So if you like doing

this and you are healthy I would say go for it. There are certainly benefits. Now what about the softies? What if

we're not looking forward to the next time we plunged into the ice water then we have

other alternatives that in my opinion can probably create most if not all the benefits. Fasting

is the single most powerful way growth hormone and the longer you fast the more growth hormone you

make. I've done several videos on that. Fasting alone is not going to get to keep it not going to

stimulate your brain tremendously even though it has benefits so you always want to do more

than one thing and high intensity interval (HIIT) training is excellent way to stimulate your

brain to create more growth hormone to challenge these survival circuits and adaptive circuits. So Wim Hoff

breathing is an excellent idea I think it's a good addition but again understand why you're

doing it that it stressful and again I don't think that more is better but I would use

it as an introduction as a warm-up to a relaxing breath. So you do the power breaths with the Wim Hoff.

You can do some breath-holding if you like. But then you sit down and relax because now you're stirred

things up. Your are in a very receptive state for your body to relax and now you do that five seconds in and five seconds

out and you allow your nervous system to get back into homeostatic and create some

long neuroplasticity. When it comes to cold therapy in turned out that both hot and cold

will produce growth hormone, it will stimulate the autonomic nervous system shake things

up if you don't like ice bath you could just alternate a warm and cold shower. So you do your shower and

then at the end of it to turn up the heat a little bit and then you're cold and you just do

that back and forth a little bit and you have created a lot of the same effects. Now the Scandinavian

the Finns and Swedes have known this for centuries they have something called sauna and this is a

very hot place. You throw on some logs on the fire and you create tons of heat and steam

and you sit there and roast and that hot in itself is quite effective but then if you

go outside and you jump in ice water or in a cold shower now you accentuate the effect

of the contract. And here is the interesting thing for those who have the facilities, the availability,

to do this, I strongly suggest to do a sauna and then jump into cold water or ice water

and you'll be amazed because it's not going to feel cold when you're really really hot

and you create that contrast for the first five or ten seconds before he doesn't know

what happened but does not feel cold 10 seconds into it it you start getting cold but it's not really

unpleasant because you don't have to freeze to get the benefits.

The create the contract and then you jump out at the ice water and the stand there after

a minute and it feels really nice warm. You're steaming your skin. You look like a red lobster but you are

feeling so peaceful and so wonderful. So if you have a chance give it a try but not just work with

it in the shower. If you enjoy this video and you like learning about how the body works

and how to get really healthy I would suggest watch that one next thank you so much for

watching.

I will see you next time.