Dominique from the Wim Hof Method Center France doesn't spend much time explaining the science here. He doesn't need to. Four cycles, thirty to forty breaths each, and your body figures it out faster than any lecture could deliver it. But let's talk about what's actually happening, because the mechanism is worth understanding.
The core claim is simple: you can consciously shift your blood chemistry through breath. That pH change — from the CO2 washout — is what produces the tingling, the lightheadedness, the altered state. You're not hallucinating. You're alkalizing your blood, transiently reducing oxygen release to peripheral tissues, and triggering a sympathetic cascade that your body would otherwise reserve for genuine emergencies. You're borrowing stress. And then, during the retention, you're paying it back with interest.
We have several Wim Hof breathing tutorials indexed in the knowledge base, and what strikes me across all of them is how differently they frame the same physiological event. Evan Carmichael's breakdown of the five-minute technique goes deep on the immune response — the 2014 PNAS study, epinephrine, the trained meditators injected with endotoxin. Jordan Peterson's session with Wim focuses on the psychological dimension: using breath to access states that are ordinarily beyond voluntary control.
Dominique does something quieter here. He keeps saying "trust it." Trust what you feel. Trust the body. That's not woo-woo — it's pedagogically precise. When you're in your second or third cycle and the sensations get strange, the most common mistake is to resist. Tighten up. Fight the lightheadedness. Dominique is training the nervous system not just through breath, but through permission.
The breathwork community broadly agrees on the physiology. Where you see divergence is in the dosing. Some researchers, particularly those in clinical settings, caution against daily high-intensity breathwork — arguing that chronic sympathetic activation without sufficient parasympathetic recovery can backfire. Others, including Wim Hof himself, advocate for morning practice as a consistent baseline protocol.
What the retention research consistently shows is that breath-hold duration improves across cycles within a single session. This is real. CO2 tolerance builds cycle by cycle. That's not placebo — that's measurable adaptation happening in real time.
Do this session on an empty stomach, lying down, in a space where you won't be disturbed for twenty minutes. Not in a bath. Not while driving. Dominique mentions safety at the start and it's worth taking seriously — the alkalosis is real, the lightheadedness is real, and brief loss of consciousness during retention is possible. Respect the practice and it rewards you. Rush it and you're just hyperventilating.
Four cycles is the right number for building capacity. Three feels incomplete. Five starts to fatigue the nervous system for beginners. Stick with four, track your retention times across the session, and notice whether cycle three or four is producing the longest holds. That's your data point. That's where your baseline lives.
Here's what I keep coming back to: Dominique asks you, mid-session, to notice what it feels like to do absolutely nothing. Not even breathing. Just being. That moment — the space between the exhale and the next inhale — is pharmacologically distinct from anything you can manufacture with supplements or external stimuli. Your brain is in a low-CO2, high-sympathetic state, and you're choosing stillness inside it. That's the training. Not the breath count. Not the retention time. The capacity to remain calm inside a state of biological alarm. That's what carries over into cold exposure, into high-pressure moments, into the moments in your life that demand clarity when your body is screaming otherwise.