From ice baths to mask tips: how to survive the heatwave

As Britain braces for record temperatures, Jacqueline Steele adapts a warmdown usually reserved for athletes – ice bathing

With another potentially record-breaking heatwave hitting parts of the country, contending with climes hotter than the Caribbean is frankly all we’ll be thinking about for the next three days. Yet if the desk fan, pillows left in the freezer and cold compresses aren’t doing the trick, there’s a – well, cooler – way to handle the heat: ice bathing.

Once the preserve of athletes and sadists, it has been reborn as a wellness trend thanks to the Wim Hof Method, one of its most popular iterations since featuring on The Goop Lab, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show.

As someone who wears extra layers even in midsummer, the prospect of plunging myself into icy depths is little short of horrifying. But extreme heat calls for extreme action and, having recently given sub-zero bathing a go, I can understand why A-listers and flustered families alike might be giving it a try this weekend.

Known as the “Iceman”, Dutch athlete Hof has 26 official world records to his name – he’s run marathons barefoot in the Arctic Circle, holds the record for the longest time submerged in an ice bath (one hour, 53 minutes, 2 seconds), and climbed 22,000ft up Everest in only shorts and shoes. Since his appearance on The Goop Lab, the 61-year-old has racked up 1.3million Instagram followers and says we can all tap into natural human superpowers through a mix of breathing techniques, meditation and cold therapy.

At a workshop in Berkshire – one of several to spring up since WHM entered the wellness lexicon – my practitioner, Will van Zyl, explains that it is based on three pillars: cold therapy, breathing and commitment. By following these principles, people have reported life-changing results: the method is said to boost your immune system, help you sleep better, reduce inflammation and improve your mood.

A&E nurse Jessica Andrew is one of many converts. The 24-year-old claims that her daily ritual of taking cold showers for two minutes has “made me a better nurse and I have become calmer in life”; now nine months into going cold, she says “it helps me get through really tough days at work but even more so I feel it helped get me through Covid-19”.

She is one of many for whom a sub-zero shower might have to do in the absence of a cube-filled tub. Yet others – particularly those with outdoor space – have been getting creative: Barry O’neill, 49, began cold water exposure during lockdown to soothe his spinal aches, and found it so helpful that he has now bought a barrel for his garden. Its capacity is 350l. “I buy 30kg of ice from a local ice maker and have an ice bath about once a week,” he says. “I also have cold showers and head for the sea as much as I can. Most of my friends think I’ve gone mad!”

He explains: “I suffer with spinal problems and have always had aches, pains and extreme cramping. As well as the weight loss [he has shed 20lb since lockdown began], I also have no more cramping. My spinal problems are easing and I no longer have pins and needles down my left arm, which has been constant for three years.

“I’m sleeping better and have so much more energy during the day. Mentally, I feel calm and relaxed, due to the breathing techniques.” These are crucial to successful practice of WHM: our workshop begins with Bhastrika, or Bellows Breath – a yogic exercise that involves breathing forcefully in and out as if you were pumping a fire. By learning how to breathe fully, Will says, we can control how we feel pain, too.

There are now more than 500 certified Wim Hof instructors across the globe, offering small, intimate workshops and retreats – covering the method’s theory, breathing and an optional ice bath. It takes around a year to qualify, before hopefuls are tasked with climbing a mountain in extreme cold wearing just shorts and boots. Will, who describes himself as a “wellness and effectiveness coach”, recalls swimming in icy rivers, training barefoot in the snow and an eight-hour mountain hike in –20C “with wind chill, in shorts and boots only”.

Mercifully, workshop-goers can take things more easily. Damien La Lau, a graduate of Will’s “fundamentals workshop”, has turned his wheelie bin into an ice bath – something you could well be seeing more of this weekend.

The 50-year-old learnt of WHM from Youtube and was intrigued: “I found there was a real peacefulness about the whole method. I also started meditating after each session and found my mind quite clear, ready and still.”

You don’t tiptoe in as you might a cold swimming pool but step in with the inhale, sit down with the exhale and submerge yourself just up to your shoulders, then just keep breathing. In Berkshire, Will would only allow us newbies to spend two minutes in the ice bath – it had taken a day of breathing training to get to that stage, and we were told horror stories about what happens if you stay in longer.

But even so, there is some risk of an “afterdrop” – where the core temperature can become low enough to trigger hypothermia; we are taught to adopt “horse stance” afterwards (a sort of half-squat), which warms the body steadily.

My own bath left me in shock: the ice felt like it was burning my skin, my heart raced, I was literally frozen still. I exhaled loudly and deeply to relax, followed by a strong, slow inhale through the nose, and out through the mouth. Like a baptism of sorts, I came out rejuvenated, full of energy, with a sense of pride. Those with medical conditions, of course, should not try this at home. But I might just be putting my wheelie bin to good use.