Feel the fuar and do it anyway
Deirdre Reynolds braves the cold to find out if totally chilling out is good for body, mind and the waistline too
It’s the ultimate ice bucket challenge: plunging your entire body into a tub of freezing cold water filled with chunks of ice, deep breathing your way through the pain. Four years after the viral phenomenon swept the globe, ice therapy is cool once more.
This time, however, participants are actually volunteering to feel the fuar — and do it anyway.
Named after the Dutch adventurer who invented it, the ‘Wim Hof method’ which combines cooling the body with controlled breathing techniques, is fast coming in from the cold, after new scientific research indicated it can fortify the immune system by triggering the release of antiinflammatory agents. Some say the research gives fresh hope to those suffering from everything from rheumatoid arthritis to depression.
But you don’t have to scale Mount Everest in your shorts or swim under polar ice like the world-famous ‘Iceman’ Hof (below) to reap the benefits of his therapy , which are also reputed to include less stress, better sleep and weight loss, according to one of just two Wim Hof instructors who are now offering the therapy in Ireland.
Two years ago, Níall Ó Murchú was a sleepdeprived father of four young children and stressed-out digital consultant aiming to set up his own business. Today, the 41-year-old Dubliner says he’s never been more zen after stumbling upon an interview with the extreme athlete on a podcast and jetting to the Netherlands to study the Wim Hof way. “I had spent years doing pranayama breathing, qigong and tai chi breathing,” he says. “But I remember within the first three breaths of the Wim Hof breathing, I could feel how different [it was]. “So I did a little bit of breathing and a little bit of cold, and after three days, I was in the kitchen with my wife, [and] I remember feeling full of light and energy and laughing and joking in the morning, which wasn’t the usual thing, and I thought to myself: ‘What the hell is going on here?’
“I used to wake up tired, kind of like: ‘How am I going to get through this?’ When I wake up most days now, I feel really energised.”
So convincing is the former international basketball player that I’ve somehow found myself standing in a swimsuit in a back garden in Blackrock in Dublin about to step into a huge bucket of ice. And I’m not the only one — Niall’s weekly Wim Hof classes and monthly workshops at various venues throughout the capital are booked out for the rest of this month and beyond.
“I’ve been flabbergasted at how it’s taken off so quickly,” says Níall, whose training last winter involved climbing the Czech Republic’s highest mountain, Mount Snezka, bare chested. “There’s a movement in Ireland where people are more health conscious and they want to do something about it,” he says.
“When we’re faced with something like the ice, that’s frightening to us, we go into fight or flight mode and with the breathing we learn to train ourselves to get from that into this ‘rest and digest’ mode. It’s testing your ability to relax and breathe.
“I have people in their early 20s [up to] people in their 70s — all ages and nationalities and occupations. Everybody comes to it for something different, whether it’s grief or better health or better sports performance.”
Ahead of my one-on-one session, where I practised the eponymous
Everyone comes to it for something different, whether it be grief or better health or better sports performance
breathing exercises before braving an ice bath, Níall suggests testing my tolerance to the cold at home by having a quick cold shower at the end of my usual hot one. It didn’t go well. I lasted about 10 seconds and dropped the F-bomb approximately the same number of times.
“There’s always that part of us that doesn’t want to do it, so it is that fear,” says the instructor, who runs breathwithniall.com. “There’s no forcing at all, and it’s always gradual. When you go home, there’s no way you should be jumping into ice. Fear is such a dominant force in people’s lives, even that process of getting into a little cold shower at the end of a hot shower every day proves to yourself that you can face fear, and then fear starts to fall away a bit.”
But even Iceman Wim Hof has found himself in hot water after four men drowned separately after reportedly practising his breathing method unsupervised.
Acknowledging the use of ice in sports therapy, Dr Nina Byrnes urges Wim Hof-ees here to exercise caution when it comes to extreme cold. “It’s totally different for an elite athlete having this done in a controlled environment under observation, versus someone just plunging into a bath with no particular supervision,” says the GP of Generation Health Medical Clinic, based in Castleknock and Glenageary in Dublin.
“You have to compare it to people who have plunged into really cold water if they fall off a boat. If you’re immersing yourself suddenly into cold water, it’s a stress to the system, and a stress to the system to someone’s who’s not otherwise healthy and fit, can bring on changes in the heart rate and potentially changes in the rhythm of the heart.
“Really rarely, people develop allergies or shock from exposure to really, really cold [temperatures].
“These things are probably okay done under supervision for people who are otherwise well. But it’s not something to do without consulting a doctor to see you’re otherwise healthy and suitable for it.”
Back at his Dublin home, Níall says that although no one has to get into the ice, no one has bottled it either, and I’m certainly not about to become the first.
Sealing my status as an ice queen I survived about two minutes in the tub — and, perhaps even more impressively, only swore once.
Afterwards, my skin was tingling, my lungs full and stepping back out into the crisp April air, ironically, I never felt warmer.
“Absolutely no-one has to do it,” Níall insists. “We had this lovely woman [who] was a hot yoga teacher, and she was saying, ‘I don’t think I can get in’. She got in and she couldn’t believe herself that she could do it, and that’s a big part of it. What it proved to me was just by breathing and focus and a little bit of cold, you can get up whatever mountain you want.”