the wim hof breathing method. There is so much confusion online about it.
In: Biology
It’s confusing because we’re still studying it.
It wasn’t created by a scientific researcher who was looking for ways to help people resist disease. It was created by a person who does daredevil feats involving swimming in ice water who wants to make money selling exercise courses.
Medical science looked at it and decided to study it because why the heck not? They already determined it seems to help the body resist cold, and it generally helps people swim in ice water (except the practitioners who drowned.)
But to sell his courses, Hof also claims it can treat diseases like Parkinson’s and even cure cancer. These are complicated illnesses and our known treatments take years. So to give Wim Hof a fair shake, we have to study the technique’s impact for years. However, the papers I’m seeing about the smaller effects were published in 2017, so there really hasn’t been a reasonable amount of time to figure out if Wim Hof has greater impact.
And like many similar situations, even if the research concludes in a few years the claims are baseless, it’s likely people who make money selling Wim Hof courses will insist the research made some kind of mistake, the people being studied didn’t do it correctly, etc. In the worst cases, people might argue science was worried it’s wrong about immunology and falsified the study, etc.
That part works because it turns out if you stick with just about *any* disciplined exercise regimen you’ll see health benefits. Going from “no exercise” to “some exercise” is a big deal for your body, and after a few months you’re going to feel a lot different no matter what methods you adopt. More people are in bad shape than great shape, so it helps exercise programs “hook” people. When they hear their regimen can’t do some of the outlandish things it claims, they think about how much they’ve improved (because they’re exercising) and assume the study is wrong.
But if we took someone else who is already a pretty dang good swimmer like Michael Phelps and asked him to start using Wim Hof, it’s likely he wouldn’t notice much of a perceptible difference and definitely not the kind of improvement the average person might have.
So some people make wild claims about it without evidence. They do so because they make money (at least indirectly) or gain power from promoting it. Other people say it’s hogwash because they’re biased against the idea a breathing exercise can impact your body. Somewhere in between is the truth: it affects the body in a measurable way, but we haven’t finished studying the impacts of those effects so the only thing we know for sure is it helps your body resist cold short-term and also has a short-term effect on your immune system.
Latest Answers