Before the podcast began, they were already in the water. Eddie Hall — the 2017 World's Strongest Man — and Wim Hof, holder of more than two dozen world records related to cold exposure (discussed further here), had spent the morning in an icy lake in England. What followed wasn't a typical interview. It was a live demonstration of the method's effects — measured in real time, in one of the most credible human beings you could choose as a subject.
The headline number: after 30–40 rounds of Wim Hof breathing, Eddie Hall performed 90 dumbbell shoulder press reps at 30kg — compared to 60 reps at the same weight just minutes earlier. Fifty percent more, at the same load, with less perceived effort. He describes stopping not from exhaustion, but from disbelief.
The 50% performance increase is not presented as a scientific study — it's a personal experiment between two people with a combined weight of around 300kg and decades of training experience between them. But it opens the conversation in exactly the right place: the body is capable of far more than our conditioned experience suggests. The question is why.
The mechanism Wim points to is the adrenal axis. Controlled hyperventilation followed by breath retention stimulates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal pathway — the same system that activates during genuine threat. The body mobilises adrenaline, clears cellular waste, sharpens oxygen delivery to working muscle, and enters a state of chemical readiness that ordinary training conditions rarely produce.
Cold exposure — genuine immersion in cold water — triggers a cascade of neurochemical events. The most significant, from a wellbeing perspective, is a roughly 250% increase in circulating dopamine levels. Not a transient spike, but a sustained elevation that persists for hours.
Wim frames depression in a way that is unusually concrete: not as an abstract emotional state, but as a blood flow problem. Certain areas of the brain receive 10–20% less blood over time. Pressure falls. The system underperforms. Cold water immersion floods the brain with blood, with neurotransmitters, with the biochemical substrate of presence. The effect, he argues, is not metaphorical. It is hydraulic.
This is consistent with a growing body of research, including a 500-person study published in Nature Scientific Reports comparing the Wim Hof method to established meditation practices. The cold protocol outperformed meditation for stress reduction — not because meditation is ineffective, but because the physiological stress of genuine cold exposure creates an adaptation that no amount of stillness alone can replicate.
Wim's origin story is not one of athletic ambition. At 17, walking alone through Amsterdam on a winter Sunday, he stripped and entered an icy canal — not as a stunt, but out of something he describes simply as feeling drawn to it. The connection was immediate. He returned every day that winter.
The breathing came later, as a tool to extend his time in cold water. By modulating CO2 levels and activating deeper physiological pathways, he found he could remain submerged far longer than seemed possible. When he separated the breathing from the cold and practiced it at home, the effects were profound and repeatable.
In 2007, Dr. Kevin Tracy — then head of the Feinstein Institute — measured Wim's blood across 307 biomarkers during a breathing session. The results demonstrated activation of the vagus nerve at a level previously considered involuntary — meaning outside conscious control. When the vagus nerve activates fully, systemic inflammation drops. This was, at the time, considered physiologically impossible. The data disagreed.
Four years later, Wim agreed to an injection of E. coli endotoxin — a standard immune challenge used in research. Participants typically experience significant inflammation, fever, and flu-like symptoms for hours. Wim, using breathwork alone, suppressed the response. He later trained a group of volunteers in the method; they demonstrated the same capacity. The autonomic nervous system, once thought entirely automatic, turned out to have a door — and breath is the key.
In 1995, Wim's wife took her own life. She had struggled with manic depression and schizophrenia. He was 36, with four children aged between seven and twelve, and no money. He had been practicing his method for nearly twenty years at that point — but quietly, privately, not yet with any understanding of what it was. He turned to it entirely in those years of raising his children alone. Every morning at 4:00am, practice before the day began.
This context matters. The method was not born in a laboratory or a performance psychology clinic. It was forged in grief, tested against reality, and found — repeatedly — to hold. The scientific validation followed decades later. The experience came first.
Wim's argument for implementing cold and breath protocols into daily life is not primarily about performance. It is about returning to baseline — to what he calls the "factory settings" of human physiology that modern comfort has gradually obscured.
Two men who have built their lives around physical extremes, sitting in the aftermath of an ice lake, agreeing on something quiet: the most powerful thing a human being can do is learn to inhabit their own nervous system. Everything else follows from there.