Singer Mike Posner learned Wim Hof breathing from Tim Ferriss's podcast, attended a retreat in Poland, and used the method to summit Mount Everest. He calls the breathwork a cheat code that breaks mental limits and improves oxygen efficiency in extreme cold.
Chapters
My name is Mike Posner. Today we are at the Wim Hof training facility.
Give it all you got! Good morning! Give me 20! No, I give you 100! Without breathing!
The first time I heard of Wim Hof was when he was featured on Tim Ferriss' podcast. Fast forward maybe 5 years later, a friend of mine, Lewis Howes, invited me on a retreat to Poland to train with Wim himself. And I thought, I better show up to that. Pretty special invitation. Yeah! I'm from Michigan. It gets cold there. We swim a lot in lakes there, you know, we have some big lakes. And when I was younger, I just noticed that I always felt good after I came out of that water. And so just on my own, I started to take cold showers because I just felt good after. I felt alive. I'm not a coffee drinker, but I always said, "That's my coffee." Of course, then when we practice with Wim, the water is much colder and in there much longer. And yeah, I felt high from it. It was really life-changing experience. Learning from him was so powerful, and I took the practices with me. I certainly know what it's like to just feel uninspired and to not really be excited to get up in the morning and this kind of feeling. And when I'm in those seasons of my life and my meditation mantra feels like sand in my mouth and nothing's working, the cold and the breath, they seem to penetrate, you know, when other things don't. Well, the first time I did the Wim Hof breathwork seriously with Wim and these guys in the workshop environment, the way I felt and the way I do feel when, you know, even we did the breath today and I felt it again, and it's damn powerful. It's damn powerful. It felt like I was putting a cheat code into my body or something. We used to play these old video games when I was a kid on like N64, and if you hit, you know, certain buttons in a certain order, it'd give you some special power. Well, this is kind of what it felt like. It's like if you breathe in this certain way, you know, 3 times, then like bang, you get this special power. And it's like, why did I not know about that? I've been in this been in this meat sack for 33 years now, and so it's pretty surreal. His zeal, it's not even a belief, it's a knowing, and his enthusiasm is infectious. With the limited time I've spent with him, I've seen his enthusiasm supersede people's own beliefs. About what they can do, what their limits are. His knowing in what they can do transfers over to them. People that are just terrified of cold water and cold in general, their hands always get cold, they're one of these people, and I watch them sit in an ice bath for 10 minutes and they're fine. Staying at Wim's place is fun, and because I met Wim before, I know that we just go with the flow and not going to get a schedule or itinerary or anything like that.
That's crazy.
Cannonball exercise.
Yeah.
Oh, ass jump. There's a whole host of characters that come here every day, and all beautiful people. I recommend it to people all the time just because it feels so good. And it's a way of reclaiming your sovereignty, especially if you're someone who thinks, "I could never do that." This water is looking a little murky.
Yeah, that's our feces. Through the garden, we accumulate The earth's soil, and it's getting in there.
When it comes to the cold, a lot of people have this kind of aversion to it. Then the opportunity is even greater for you. Not only will you feel how it feels, which is really freaking good after you get out of an ice bath, you know, you feel a real kind of body high for many hours after, but also you have the added benefit of Breaking through this self-imposed limit, this story, which is, you know, I'm not one of those people, I can never do that. A belief is just a thought we think repeatedly over time. Breaking through of that belief is powerful. It builds momentum and you start to get better at doing hard things by doing hard things. And this is a power that you take, you know, to other parts of your life. When I met Wim, I was training to climb Mount Everest, which is the tallest mountain in the world, and the higher you go, it gets pretty darn cold up there. The more you expose the body to cold, it acclimates. I was living in the mountains, you know, training, and I lived right by this icy river, and so after I learned the cold immersion from Wim, I'd just get in that river and take really cold showers and All of a sudden, you know, 0 degrees Celsius is actually pretty warm temperature to me after doing this for months and months. Acclimatizing. Wim Hof at 19,000. When I was on Everest, I was a lot more comfortable. Obviously, when you get up on the mountain, you know, it gets to -15, -20. Well, I'm still in all the gear, you know. It's important to be safe, but I know that it felt warmer to me than it would have if I didn't do the cold immersion work. It's pretty high. You feel good though? I'm out of breath for sure. Yeah. Mount Everest is really high, and the higher you go, the less oxygen there is. You need to take 3 to 5 breaths to get what you would from one breath. Here, and it's really intense. In a week, I used the breathwork to help myself acclimatize because my body was lacking oxygen just by being alive there. Thanks to those practices, also my team— I gotta shout them out— Dr. John, Dawa Dorje Sherpa, and Dawa Chiring Sherpa, I was able to summit my Mount Everest.
Get up there, Mike! Touch the top of the world, baby!
It's a nice sunrise up there, and more importantly, we got down safely. With no injuries, all our fingers and toes, and, uh, here, here enjoying life now. Not very high, but it's still scary to me, at least. Not to Wim.
