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C OLD T RAINING

“You can’t learn anything from the cold.

But you can learn to not do some things.”

—Wim Hof

W e are addicted to temperatures around 20-21°C (68-71°F). In the summer, we switch on the air-conditioning in the car, and in the winter we set the central heating to about 20°C (68°F). Companies and shops do the same, so we spend much of our time in roughly the same temperatures. Double glazing, insulation, and concrete all help us to maintain the temperatures we like. In the winter, we wear coats, scarves, hats, gloves and thick socks to make it easier for our bodies. This feels comfortable and pleasant.

We have gotten used to it.

That is a pity. In the winter, we can actually use the cold, rather than continually protect ourselves from it. Exposure to cold has a favorable effect on our health and our moods. In some parts of Scandinavia, Russia, and China, ice-hole swimming is popular. The swimmers saw a hole in the ice and immerse themselves in water that is just above the freezing point.

Cold is considered to have many benefits. It is supposedly good for:

But, what happens to you when you get cold? How can exposure to cold be so beneficial?

Your body has 125,000 km (77,671 miles) of blood vessels. If you laid them end to end, they would go around the world three times. All these blood vessels ensure that the billions of cells in your body continually get enough nutrients and oxygen. If they work properly, your whole body will function better, because it will get more nutrients and oxygen. Your brain will work better and the same applies to your muscles, intestines, heart, liver and so on.

W HAT E LSE D O W E K NOW A BOUT B LOOD V ESSELS?

When you measure or feel your pulse, you are sensing the heart beat through your arteries. One of the best known arteries is the aorta, which connects your heart to the other arteries. The coronary artery makes sure that the heart muscle is supplied with blood. Your head and your brain receive blood through the cerebral arteries. Blood vessels divide and supply your whole body with blood. Smaller blood vessels called capillaries, are very narrow. Oxygen and nutrients are filtered through the thin capillary walls to your tissue cells. Blood that is low in oxygen returns to your heart through the veins.

Blood is transported from the intestines by the portal vein to the liver, where harmful substances are removed as much as possible.

This gigantic web of arteries and veins is crucial to many functions in your body. If your blood vessels are open and working properly, your whole body will benefit.

What does all this have to do with cold?

When you expose yourself to the cold, by stepping into a cold lake for example, your body automatically closes off blood flow to the less vital parts of your body. That is necessary because your body temperature must not fall below 35°C (95°F). It is more important that your heart keeps beating than that your little toe gets enough blood. Your body is smart enough to give priority to your heart and your other vital organs. Your arms and legs get less blood as their blood vessels contract. This ensures that your vital organs—your heart, liver, lungs and kidneys—get enough blood to continue working. Your arms and legs will start to tingle and you might feel a burning sensation. When the body warms up again, the blood vessels open up and your circulation normalizes.

By exposing your body to the cold, you can train your blood vessels by closing them forcefully, then making them open again. It’s like training your muscles. For example, you can train weak arm muscles by doing push-ups. At first, your muscles will hurt and feel weaker. But after they have recovered, they are stronger. It’s the same with your blood vessels. You benefit from having stronger arms even when you are not doing push-ups in the same way that you will also benefit from having open blood vessels when you are not cold. But you can train your blood vessels by exposing them to the cold.

People who regularly train in the cold say (almost without exception) that they feel the cold less. We hear time and time again about the energy “boost” they get from the cold, and how it affects their mood. But, despite all its benefits, cold is also a dangerous force. You can achieve a lot if you build up your exposure slowly, but if you go too fast, it can be dangerous.

C OLD D AMAGE

If you expose yourself to extreme cold for too long without training, you run the risk of suffering cold damage. If your core body temperature falls below 35°C (95°F), the cold will get into your bones and tissues can die. That is what happens when people get frostbite on their fingers and toes while climbing in the Himalayas or other high mountain ranges. First, the fingers or toes become white, which is accompanied by a burning or tingling sensation. After a while, they become completely numb, which is dangerous. If they are not treated, the skin will become dark or even black. The skin will look as if it had been burnt.

Of course, hypothermia (when the core body temperature falls below 35°C) doesn’t just affect the toes and fingers. Your normal metabolic functions are also at risk: your heart rate and blood pressure lower and your breathing slows down. Eventually, you will lose consciousness and after an hour, it will be fatal. In ice water, this process happens even more quickly to untrained people. In water, the cold can be fatal after only half an hour.

Wim Hof can sit in a tank full of ice for an hour and a half while his body temperature remains constant at 37°C (98.6°F). His heart rate and blood pressure remain normal, too.

H OW IS T HIS P HYSICALLY P OSSIBLE?

Research by Hopman et al. (2010) shows that when exposed to ice, Hof’s metabolic rate increases by 300%. This also increases his body’s heat production. According to Hopman, Hof can turn up his body’s “stove” three times higher than normal. Most people will start to shiver and shake to stay warm, but Hof doesn’t do that either. He stays warm by controlling his autonomic nervous system with breathing exercises just before the cold exposure. Hof’s training has given him a lot of brown fat, which means he stays warm more easily.

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There are two varieties of fat:

White fat mainly stores energy and is a reserve of nutrients. Beneath the skin, it serves as insulation for your body. It protects your organs, and also ensures that they stay in place.

The main function of brown fat is warming up your body by burning fatty acids and glucose.

One consequence of Hof’s many years of training is that he has a lot of brown fat. Brown fat releases energy directly, generating heat. Newborn babies have a lot of brown fat, so that they can warm up quickly in a cold environment. After nine months, there is little left of this brown fat. Each year, it decreases, perhaps because of clothes and blankets. Adults in Western societies have almost no brown fat left.

It now appears that brown fat tissue can be activated by cold (from Marken-Lichtenbeld et al. 2011). It starts to be stimulated at 18°C (64.4°F) when fatty acids are activated to keep the body at the right temperature. The lower the temperature, the more brown fat tissue is activated. In a room at 11°C (51.8°F), Hof produces 35% more body heat than at normal room temperature—thanks to his brown fat. His body heat increases up to 50%, while young adults only produce 20% more body heat at the same temperature.

People who are overweight (which is always excess white fat) who train in the cold, can teach their bodies to turn the white fat into fuel via brown fat.

The benefits of cold training are not just restricted to blood vessels and brown fat, but extend to the production of white corpuscles.

W HITE C ORPUSCLES

You have between five and six liters (1.3-1.6 gallons) of blood flowing through your body. Blood consists of 55% plasma and 45% corpuscles. Plasma is mainly water with minerals, carbohydrates, fats, hormones and more than 100 different kinds of protein.

There are three types of corpuscles: blood platelets (throm-bocytes), red corpuscles (erythrocytes) and white corpuscles (leukocytes). Platelets help heal wounds by ensuring that the blood stops flowing and a scab forms. Red corpuscles absorb oxygen in the lungs and transport it to the organs. The red corpuscle cells contain hemoglobin, which gives blood its red color and binds with oxygen. White corpuscles are a collective name for different cells. They are larger than red corpuscles and you have fewer of them. They defend the body against infection from bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi, yeasts, and foreign substances. If we have an infection, we also have more white corpuscles, since the body will produce them to fight it.

Research carried out by the Thrombosis Foundation (Documen-tation Centre 1994) shows that people who take a cold shower daily also have more white corpuscles. The researchers explain the increase in white corpuscles by the activation of the immune system, which releases more white corpuscles.

The great advantage of knowing about brown and white fat, and red and white corpuscles is that you will know at least a little about what happens to your body when you are exposed to cold. That can encourage you to train yourself to withstand cold. Cold training can affect a lot of physical complaints including excess weight, fungi, and viruses—along with helping to open up lax blood vessels. But even without this knowledge, you will notice that something happens to you if you take cold showers or get into an ice bath.

On the first of January, 2015, more than 3,000 people started taking cold showers as part of the “Cool Challenge”. One initiator of the challenge was Dr. Geert Buijze of the Amsterdam Medical Centre. Wim Hof clearly experiences effects from exposure to extreme cold in combination with breathing exercises, but Buijze was curious to know whether just taking cold showers had any effect. During the challenge, it was remarkable how quickly many people got used to the cold and started to feel the benefits after only three or four showers. Many said that after showering, their skin quickly turned red—a sign of good blood circulation. For more of their experiences and the results of the study, see www.coolchallenge.nl .

Profile of Jack Egberts, who worked with the WHM.

JACK EGBERTS (1971)

Jack Egberts is a lawyer in Leeuwarden, in the northern Dutch province of Friesland. He had been tired and listless for some time. He had always been active and energetic, but he was diagnosed with Lyme disease. The doctors who diagnosed the disease could do little for him. But Egberts did not accept that there was nothing he could do, and looked for alternatives on the internet. After searching for “more energy”, he found Wim Hof. He was immediately curious and wanted to know more.

Egberts has a large and successful law firm. He never does anything half-way. So when he found Wim, he didn’t sign up for just one day, he signed up for a whole week. The favorable effects of the cold training were enormous. After a week of “Hoffing”, as he calls it, Egberts hardly had any trouble from the Lyme disease. Better than that, he now had more energy than before the disease. Everything changed, his energy, eating habits, and all the symptoms of Lyme disease disappeared.

At first, Egberts had a lot of reservations because it all seemed too good to be true. He is still a down-to-earth Frisian and a well-read lawyer—rationality rules. And yet, he was soon unable to keep his enthusiasm about the results of the training to himself. He persuaded his mother to take cold showers. She has been taking medication for high blood pressure for years. As Egberts told the story, he had a broad grin on his face: after one month, she had no more symptoms and could stop taking the medication. Completely.

Profiles like this will appear regularly in The Way of The Iceman . Of course, they are only intended as information and to inspire you. They are not intended to encourage you to stop taking medication or end a course of treatment without first consulting your doctor.

Would you like to know how to achieve these benefits, for your own enhanced well-being?

Below are a few exercises for you to try out.

DO-IT-YOURSELF:
TAKING COLD SHOWERS

Take a warm shower, as you always do. Then, while the water is still warm, start doing the following breathing exercises: Breathe in and breathe out slowly. Breathe in deeply and breathe out nice and slow. Keep doing this for about a minute—taking a total of six to ten breaths. Then, turn the shower to cold.

Of course, you will start breathing more quickly and the cold will give you a shock. The trick is to breathe calmly again. Control your breathing under the cold shower. The moment your breathing is under control, the cold will feel different. If you find it difficult to set the shower to cold in one go, do it in two or three steps. You can also start by just holding your feet under the cold spray, then your hands and arms, then gradually bringing your whole body under the cold shower.

Stay under the cold shower for a minute.

If you are unable to relax with the breathing exercise, try another trick—rubbing yourself. You can “lead” the cold spray over your body with your hands. Massage your arms and legs as the cold water goes over them. The cold might feel a little less intense.

DO-IT-YOURSELF:
A BOWL OF ICE-COLD WATER

Fill a bucket or bowl with cold water. Add some ice (you can make ice by putting plastic containers filled with water in the freezer). Put your hands in the cold water. At first, it will tingle painfully, as the blood vessels contract. But the pain will quickly decrease, and when you feel your hands becoming warm, you can stop. It sounds crazy that your hands will feel warm from being in ice-cold water, but it really happens, because your body “turns up the thermostat”. If your hands are not warm after two minutes, you can stop.

How can your hands become warm while they are in ice-cold water?

Wim calls it “collateral smear”, a phenomenon caused by a hormone that makes the walls of your blood vessels strong and elastic. When you immerse parts of your body in cold water, it releases strengthening hormones and an anti-freeze hormone. These hormones ensure that the vascular system continues to work automatically.

Cold showers and a bowl of cold water with ice in it are excellent starter exercises. We recommend that you try it for a month. After that month, you can continue with your cold training. In the winter, you can swim outside. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if in a couple of years time, people started swimming in the canals of Amsterdam en masse in the winter? While I was writing this book, I became so enthusiastic about cold training that I went swimming in the Admiralengracht canal in Amsterdam in December during a light frost. After a few times, I got more and more reactions from people. Half of them were curious and we had fascinating conversations about the cold, health and illnesses. Others thought I was mentally ill and should be protected from myself. Someone called the police and I had to explain why I was swimming in the canal. After I explained that I was writing this book about cold training, they let me go home to warm up. This shows how new and unusual it all is. Many of my friends thought swimming in the canal was stupid and that the water was dirty. I thought that it wouldn’t be that bad—after all, Princess Máxima had also swam in the canals during the Amsterdam City Swim, to collect money for research into lesser known diseases; in 2014, that was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). If they even let the princess—now the Queen—swim in the canal, then it couldn’t be that dangerous.

Anyway, before you saw a hole in the ice and plunge into the cold water, start by taking cold showers and doing the breathing exercises.

Summary

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