Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness

The Cold Truth: How Matt Soule and the Wim Hof Method Redefine Resilience

• Richard & Andy • Episode 43

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Unlock the secrets of stress management with our special guest, Matt Soule, a senior instructor in the Wim Hof organization. Gain rare insights from Matt as he demystifies the Wim Hof Method, offering practical wisdom on managing stress and exploring the minimum effective dose of cold exposure. Discover how safe cold therapy practices and breathwork can revolutionize your stress response, enhancing your ability to adapt and thrive in our fast-paced world. As we discuss the nuances of the breathwork industry, Matt shares his efforts to maintain integrity and quality instruction amidst its growing popularity.

Venture into the personal journey of overcoming adversity with a moving narrative on the transformative power of martial arts in stress management. Matt brings to light how childhood trauma and personal challenges can be harnessed for growth, resilience, and empowerment. Hear the stories of individuals whose lives were changed by the Wim Hof Method, from a former special forces operative managing PTSD to a woman battling autoimmune disorders. Their experiences underscore the method's potential to foster a growth mindset and a sense of control over one’s well-being.

Explore the expanding world of cold therapy and breathwork instruction, as Matt discusses the evolution of the Wim Hof Method and breathwork standards. Learn about the structured curriculum developed for teaching this method and the importance of maintaining high teaching standards. We also delve into the accessibility of these practices, highlighting how you can incorporate the benefits of cold exposure and breathwork into your daily life. Matt shares his personal experiences with data-driven approaches to breathwork, revealing why continuous education and a curious mindset are crucial in this rapidly evolving field.

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Speaker 1:

Dr Richard L Blake. What are people going to learn from this episode of laughing through the pain? Navigating wellness?

Speaker 2:

They're going to learn from Matt Soule about the Wim Hof method, and Matt is not just a Wim Hof instructor, he teaches the teachers. He gives the tests forklift driver tests, not the forklift driver test he is a real expert in the Wim Hof method and he's a real expert in stress and we hear a lot about misconceptions about stress, how people are framing stress wrong, why people are so anxious these days and and how that's related to their mindset yeah, from my point of view, I think wim hof is almost like a buzzword now and people just conflate a lot of things and they just chuck it in with wim hof, like being cold and breathing in a particular way, without actually knowing much about what it is or what it's for.

Speaker 1:

So to actually speak to someone on the inside of the organization who is pretty senior in that organization is really helpful, I think, because, as with anything, when an idea runs away you get a lot of kind of offshoots that are probably not particularly healthy or helpful.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely, and you're going to learn some of the basics, if this is new to you. You know what a minimum effective dose of cold is, how to do cold exposure safely, all the way up to the best ice baths on the market. And you're also going to hear about breathwork and how it can affect your stress response. And also we go behind the scenes of the breathwork industry and talk a little bit about the wild west the wild west of breathwork, teacher trainings and what Wim Hof and their organization are doing to root out the inevitable bad actors in the breathwork space the inevitable bad actors in the breathwork space, exactly, and there's also some very useful day-to-day practices that you can get involved with to help get some of these benefits of Wim Hof without leaving your home.

Speaker 2:

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Speaker 2:

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Speaker 1:

Matt, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on. Could you please start by telling us about your childhood experiences and how they?

Speaker 3:

motivated you to explore stress management? Yeah, absolutely so. There were two incidences that really shaped my view about stress from an early age. One was a lot of the domestic violence that I encountered as a kid through an alcoholic stepfather, you know. I can recall a time, one specific one, where my mom had a disturbance, a common fight that would happen in the middle of the night, and we were used to this kind of thing. We moved a lot as kids. We had police over at our house all the time, one of those kinds of things, and in this particular incident we were trying to run away from him being an attacker.

Speaker 3:

This stepfather and I'd held the door open for my mom and my little brother, who was a baby at the time, rushing through the door to try to get to the car safely in the garage and my sister and I were lagging a bit behind and my sister, you know, pulled a knife from the butcher block to kind of hold him back at a distance and it worked. And I can recall holding the door open to the garage and everything started to narrow and go black, which is common in an extreme stress response. And what motivated me to get out of that was a voice, it propelled me. I said come on, let's go, and everything kind of came back online and my sister and I got out of there safely and that was a pretty strong memory that held with me through any number of years. I actually detail it quite a bit in my book on Stronger Through Stress, because it was incidents like that and others that really shaped my understanding of how extreme stress can play a giant role even ones that were happening years ago in terms of how they show up with anxiety and depression and any number of things that many people experience after encountering these and other like incidents. So that was one that really shaped it early on.

Speaker 3:

Another was the death of my father as a teenager.

Speaker 3:

So my father was a wonderful man, very respected within the community, and he died kind of unexpectedly of cancer and that was quite hard, and so that kind of sent me into my early 20s with just a lot of grief, a lot of depression, and I didn't really see a way out of it.

Speaker 3:

My youth was really comprised of pouring myself into sports to try to build confidence and connection, and that worked quite well actually. It was a wonderful outlet, but it didn't resolve a lot of the anxiety that underlines sweaty hands going into any sort of difficult or challenging situation, and the feelings of sort of depression were always present and the feelings of sort of depression were always present. And so really, what I was looking for is a way to get beyond that, right To get to the point where I could have actual resolution, and what I found in my early 20s was actually martial arts. That was the first time, as I really delved into many of those practices, that I felt peace, that I felt that restored confidence, and it started to give me a lot of hope and inspiration that a new lens could be possible and it started to frame my understanding about stress.

Speaker 2:

Wow Well, thank you for sharing that, Matt. It sounds. Wow Well, thank you for sharing that, Matt. It sounds, yeah, awful, and I really appreciate that story you shared and I love how you reframed the trauma. As sort of you know part of your they've had traumatic things is whether or not they can use that as fuel, as you've done, or if they can just use it to feel like a victim. So well done for that. I was really interested by the fact that you said there was a voice that came to you when you had that blackout. What do you think that voice was?

Speaker 3:

I think it's probably a survival instinct. It's like you can't afford to pass out now. So, whatever it is like, let it come from the gut and you know and pull it forward. And so the voice that came inside of me that knew it had to get out, it caused a lot of relief actually in that moment and steered me back to an action state, instead of getting to that point where you just freeze and you shut down. Because I was very close to that.

Speaker 1:

And we haven't actually spoken much about martial arts on this podcast. What do you think it was about martial arts that particularly resonated for you and gave you such a sense of hope?

Speaker 3:

Well, I think, coming out of the early days of experiencing a lot of that domestic violence as a young child, I felt helpless, right. I felt incapable and I had a lot of anger and resentment as a result. And trying to just do sports or these other things didn't necessarily make me feel less helpless, right. But martial arts is all about tapping into that fight or flight response in a very strong way. You have to negotiate a hundred boundaries with different training partners in order to do it safely and to push the bounds of development you have to you really learn. You know actually how to fight and how to fight well, and you understand limitations and you understand your own capacity and capability. You understand how to grapple with these base elements that are so central to our being, which is self and other harm, right. And so tapping into all of that, it was no longer a mystery. I knew what I was capable of. I could see it day in and day out. I also knew what the limitations are for most people. I understand how skill made a difference versus the non-skilled. I also understood the limitations of that right.

Speaker 3:

All of those pieces sort of play a role to provide perspective and give sort of true understanding of that field and as a young man, I really had a lot of questions If I fought back, would I be able to control myself, or did I have so much anger that I wouldn't?

Speaker 3:

That scared me, right. So that means I've got to just push everything down because I don't want to let myself explode, like that was a very disruptive thing and causes a great deal of anxiety and depression in its own right. So by having a positive outlet where you actually get to test these things and put yourself out there and contend with another human being wow, so informative and so stress relieving where it just gives you a sense of peace and empowerment and I took that and I said, okay, this is something that I'm going to study for the rest of my life, and I know martial arts is a giant category, so I shaped it very specifically over time, but at the beginning I was just looking for something that would help me find that sort of deeper meaning, both the spiritual side as well as the very practical nuts and bolts of how to defend yourself.

Speaker 2:

Well, Matt, that was really interesting what you were sharing about grief, because I had a lot of grief around my sort of teenage years and twenties. I lost my father or my grandparents in a relatively short amount of time. And I remember going to a Reiki session. I was at like a group Reiki share and there was one lady there who was working on me and at the end she was like do you mind if I share some things that I picked up from doing Reiki on you? And she was just like I spent a lot of time around your chest and around your lungs because it just feels like there's so much grief there and I don't know if you've lost people, but it seems like you're holding a lot of stuff there and it makes me want to, it makes me tear up a little bit just to share it right now. But that was about the time that I became a breath worker, became really interested in the breath. So I'm wondering if, similarly, if this grief process that you went through was connected to your Wim Hof instructor experience.

Speaker 3:

Certainly, breath work is such a big component within the grief domain, just within anything that requires sort of that big acceptance piece. And specifically the Wim Hof method comprises really two tools. I mean, we can also talk about the mindset, that's the third one but the two I'm speaking of is the breathing exercises and the cold right, the cold therapy. So because your question was directed specifically around breath work, let's start there. So the one of the most impactful things that I've seen is finding that conscious connection deep through the breath and tapping into parts of the brain that allow us to really let go right, physically let go. So the w Hof method, for example, is comprised of a very strong inhale and a very passive exhale and you do that through a series of cycles.

Speaker 3:

You know, 40 cycles usually is maybe a basic protocol. And so through those 40 cycles you're practicing the physical act of stimulating an action response from the body, followed by a very passive letting go. So many times in our lives we're told, ah, just let it go, let it go. But pairing that with an actual physical action, cyclically, is extremely powerful. And the inhale which stimulates the action-oriented side of ourselves and the inhale which stimulates the action-oriented side of ourselves is very impactful because it starts to interface with the limbic part of our brain that's the emotion center, and when you tie lungs and brain together in that way, it can be truly profound. And so yes is the answer to your question.

Speaker 1:

I think it's really impactful, and especially around things that are very difficult, that people have contended with, and grief being one of them, and so, in terms of like linking Wim Hof to stress management, can you maybe describe a bit about what's going on there and how it does that?

Speaker 3:

Yes, the easiest way to think about it is that it's got two practices basically within the method that help us reframe our relationship to stress. One is the breathing cycles that I was just describing. They are sending us into an actual stress response. It's controlled, but it's on purpose. So we're sending ourselves into a big stress and then followed by a breath hold which sears us down into a rest response. So we're training the system to stress at a great deal and rest immediately following it, and by doing that we get out of what I call stress recoil. That's where we put ourselves into this elevated stress state but remain there for hours, days, weeks, months, years. That break the body down over time, and so that's one of the best ways that it reframes it. Now, breath holds in and of themselves can be more than just a rest. You know variation. They can also be amplifiers in certain types of breath work, and in the Wim Hof method they are certainly playing a role as amplifying the effects of both the stress and the rest, and so it becomes a very good practice to learn how to manage a good stress response and go deep, deep within a resting response and finding that duality within a single exercise Within the cold we're actually practicing getting into a stress response.

Speaker 3:

Again, the cold water stimulates a very specific stress response. Through the cold and in the path of that we're trying to practice acceptance, that deeper layer of I'm not going to change the environment around me, so I can only adapt and change myself. And that is extremely helpful for any number of circumstances we find ourselves in that cause us stress, where we can't control the circumstances, the stress that we don't choose. But we learn how to show up differently. We learn to show up with calm, with peace, and learn to breathe slowly amidst the stress. And so the breath work within the cold practice is very slow and controlled Inhale through the nose and long exhales through the mouth, because we know that long exhales help stimulate that rest response in any given cycle.

Speaker 2:

So we've got these two duality things that are happening where we're reframing stress with the body using these practices yeah, I think reframing stress is such a battle and I think the type of people in the world who think like we shouldn't have any stress are the people that need this the most. I feel like you know there are types of people who think that, yeah, life should just be easy, or all times, and we should. You know, there's that story of the king who wants to walk down the beach and it's like a pebbly beach, and so he decides right, we're going to make the whole, the whole of the beach, leather so it's smooth for him to walk instead of just putting some leather shoes on himself. And then, you know, it's that saying of the prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. Yes, we can do some preparing of the road, but ultimately life is always going to be stressful and the more stress resilience we can have, the better.

Speaker 2:

And you know, when you in my environment, academia, there are people who think that, like you, should never hear a different opinion, because a different opinion is violence. Or you know, they don't understand that having microaggressions and focusing on microaggressions is actually making people more anxious. And this mindset stuff is so important. It's almost like people, it's like it's too easy. People like no, I don't want to just switch my mindset because that's too easy, it's too much of a low-hanging fruit. I want something, you know, bigger, grander. I want structural change. So I get quite frustrated at that mentality. But the wimim Hof method seems to be changing that for a lot of people. So yeah, misconceptions about stress that's one example of a misconception of stress. We should just never experience stress, I would say, as a misconception. So can you tell us more about common misconceptions? Yeah, I mean just to piggyback on that.

Speaker 3:

It's not just the mental reframe that's necessary, though it is. That's a very powerful thing. Just setting our mind and having that acceptance that stress is guaranteed in life, right? So you're going to choose it. Which hard do you want to choose? Do you want to choose the difficulty of, you know, not being prepared to handle difficult times, or do you want to put yourself in more of an empowered locus of control seat and, you know, have some preemptive practices that allow you to weather any storm? Personally, I would like to choose the latter. Right, I want to prepare myself because it makes a difference.

Speaker 3:

But in terms of misconceptions and this is a common one anybody kind of thinking or hearing about the cold for the first time, they think I'm already cold. Why do I want to go into the cold If I'm already cold? How does that work? And surprisingly, when you do that, when you actually expose yourself to these elements in a positive way, you're not cold anymore. Right, you end up building the body, comes back stronger, it builds resilience, it builds vascular strength, if you will. And now, all of a sudden, blood flow is easier. You physically don't feel cold nearly as much because you're exposing yourself to these elements in a dose that's beneficial, and so I think that's a big piece and a big misconception as well.

Speaker 3:

It's like if I don't want that I better avoid it. It's probably the opposite. It's like if I don't want that, I better dig into it and lean into it. I just need to make sure I've got I do it in a way that has a proper dose right, and so that becomes sort of the driving factor is what's the right amount? And trying to figure that out sometimes for new people can be challenging, or even people that are training it can be challenging, and so I'm happy to give your listeners some advice on how to do that. What are good indicators to determining if a stress practice is actually working in your favor or working against you? Because it'll go one way or the other right, and we want to have some good information around that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, carry on with that. Yeah, tell us more about dose.

Speaker 3:

So there's basically four indicators for any practice and you can use it for your athletics that you enjoy, or your cold practice, if you like to expose yourself to the colder heat, if you love sauna. All of these things could be wonderful practices. Or fasting, you know, that's another good stressor that's very popular in today's world, whether that's intermittent fasting or some of the longer duration fasts. But if you want to know if a practice is working for you, there's four times that you want to check. One is I love to do in the mornings. Well, I'm going to get in there and I'm going to pay attention, I'm going to make the transition to a nice rest amidst the stress and I'm going to check in. How do I feel? And I should be feeling good. Right, I should feel that it's exhilarating, maybe a little challenging, that's all well and fine, but I should feel good. I shouldn't feel that deep ache, chill, you know, trying to keep everything together, shattering and that kind of thing just to tough it through. That's not the purpose of the practice. So I should feel good in that time. Number two is how do you feel about 15 to 30 minutes after the activity? In the case of the cold, I should feel relatively warmed up right. So my hands and feet if I'm a new practitioner might still feel a little bit cold, but by all means I should feel basically recovered. You know, I shouldn't again feel that deep ache and chill. I should feel pretty good, high energy, ready to go about my day.

Speaker 3:

The next check-in is four hours later. So after four to six hours is where the body basically goes through a number of different, you know, positive arcs and in this case we're going to have a big boost of adrenaline that comes from the cold and it's going to sustain for about four hours or so. So you should feel clear. You know, mentally clear is what I mean. You should feel energized, you should feel, you know, all by all means pretty good.

Speaker 3:

And then the last one is how do you sleep at night? So a practice like the cold or any really solid practice martial arts practice, et cetera should help you get enough of that physical activity out of the way that you sleep well at night. If you've got sustained adrenaline in the system or you're feeling anxious or you're still in a stress response because you haven't fully warmed up yet in the case of this cold practice, well, that tells you that you probably overdid it, or you need to support your body because it should facilitate sleep quite well. And so if you've got those markers, how do you feel in the thing? 15 to 30 minutes after, four hours later, and sleep at night.

Speaker 3:

You know if a practice is working for you or not. If you're not recovering, you're going to get up in the morning, you're going to feel lethargic, you're not going to want to do it whatever it looks like and you're going to need extra rest time. So people are bound to make mistakes, but if you keep those things in mind, you can sustain a practice over time and have it keep serving you. And it gets us out of this mindset that more is always better, which is just not true.

Speaker 1:

Interesting and if you could tell us a little bit about why people are coming to Wim Hof. Is there kind of a pattern that you're seeing, or is it just curiosity? People have tried other things and it's not working. What's going on for people there?

Speaker 3:

Well, I think you hit it on the head in terms of all of those reasons. So people are coming for their own reasons. Just to give you a quick makeup, from the groups that I trained last week, I had one guy that was special forces, so he was a pretty serious guy, had done a lot of cold training as part of his military training there, so he had been sent to Norway to do pretty deep cold stuff. But he found, actually, that this practice totally reframed how he looked at it. He no longer had to use it as this deep fight thing. It was actually a much more stress relieving exercise than simply this mindset of we've got to build toughness in the body and he said I can sustain the cold a lot longer, a lot easier, a lot better. And you add to that some of the breathing exercises that go along with it and he's able to get out of some of the PTSD and other things that he experienced in wartime. So super powerful, and contrast that for another lady.

Speaker 3:

Uh, this woman, sarah she's what a beautiful woman, this just beautiful heart. She had been battling six different autoimmune disorders since she was a child, stuff that ended up causing her limbs to dislocate randomly and she wouldn't be able to walk at times or do all kinds of stuff. She at one point wrote down her list of things that she would love to do if she could, and one of them at the top, was to do her own laundry, like that was her aspirational goal. And you can think about how low you have to be to make your aspirational goal I wish I could do my own wash. How low you have to be to make your aspirational goal I wish I could do my own wash. Right, so you can appreciate where this woman's coming from. And she had found the Wim Hof method and it was the only thing that put her on a path of higher energy. It was the only thing. And she was extremely skeptical when she was dragged to the workshop the first time. Fast forward now, a couple of years later, and she's trying to be an instructor to share it with others, right? So people come from this from all vantage points and so forth for their own reasons, but it's attractive, for I think one big reason is that it's so simple, right, it's a very simple thing to follow.

Speaker 3:

Cold water can be found virtually anywhere in the world. I do spend a lot of time in Mexico City. So I will say it's not everywhere, because you can't find a cold shower there and water is actually pretty scarce, and so there's some challenges to contend with. But for the most part you can find cold water just about anywhere, if nothing else, in a shower. So it's accessible. And the breathwork, of course, you don't even need that. So the breath work alone is something that can be done by anybody and that's really powerful.

Speaker 3:

And then it's a shift in mindset. It's this idea that we're willing to take more sort of that internal locus of control step and say I can do something about how I feel in a positive way and I can have growth in my mindset to say that I can do something about how I feel in a positive way and I can have growth in my mindset to say that I can do something right, I don't have to just be bound by limiting beliefs that I have no control. And so when people find hope in that growth mindset, they're willing to step in and give it a shot. And when you get the results that you thought you were going to get which is the vast majority of people stick with it and they tell their friends, and their friends tell their friends and you try to coach your family and you coach everybody you love because, damn it, this thing works. It's pretty straightforward, so you like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and dose of cold. What do you recommend prescribe? What's a minimum effective dose for people with cold exposure?

Speaker 3:

a lot less than people think, so I'll start there at least right it's a lot less than people think. So a couple of things that I'll just mention. So if you've got water near, you know, let's say, near zero or one degree celsius, or you know 32 to 35 degrees, well then even inside of 20 seconds you're getting a cascade of positive hormonal effects, right. You get the boost in dopamine, you get the boost in norepinephrine, you get the boost of adrenaline, all this kind of good stuff that happens. You get endorphins that are released so you feel happy and pain-free, and all this kind of good stuff. So that happens very, very rapidly in super cold water. And so the next question is did the practice serve you correctly in terms of, did you go inside the water and make this internal shift from a stress to more of a rest amidst the stress? So if you've done that, your practice is basically you're good. So, typically for a newer practitioner, in quite cold water, even in water as much as you know six or seven degrees Celsius or 40, you know mid forties or so for Fahrenheit, you know, even inside of that, it's going to take newer practitioners sometimes 30 seconds or a minute or some even two minutes to make that happen, right. So that's really the practice. Go in there and make the shift. Once the shift is done, if you feel good, get out, do it again, like you know, do it again the next day or whatever. You don't need to stay in there for 10, 15 minutes or something like that, which will almost certainly break the body down. Okay, so that's one. The other piece is that there was a great study that was done where a guy that hated cold he didn't like cold, but he was a good researcher and he wanted to determine a minimal effective dose, and so he set up a couple of different groups and said we're going to give for 30 days. We're going to give one group a shower, a cold shower, for 30 seconds, another group for 60 and a last group for 90 seconds, and compare the groups, and, sure enough, all three groups improved all the metrics and it didn't really make a much different big of a difference between the 30 and 90 seconds. They all improved their mood, they felt less pain, they had fewer sick days, they're more positive overall. So you look at that and you say, well, gosh, 30 or 90 seconds, that's no big deal, right, I can make that happen. And the answer is yeah. So you look at that and you say, well gosh, 30 or 90 seconds, that's no big deal, right, I can make that happen. And the answer is yeah, so you can make it happen. So I would say, like, just start there and just keep playing with it.

Speaker 3:

I'm nearly a decade into the practice and I've got a very, very strong practice because I lead people into some pretty epic settings.

Speaker 3:

Like I've got a retreat that's coming up where I'll take people into the Alaska wilderness in winter right, and it's an extraordinary adventure retreat and I guide brand newcomers to that practice as well as very skilled and advanced practitioners that come along that trip as well, and so I need to be really in my element when I guide people into that space, and so I've got a very strong practice. But even me, most of the time I'm in cold water for, let's say, less than three minutes in a given day, right, I'm not spending eons in the cold water. It's not necessary. Now, if you ask me to go out for an extended period or go into deep cold, I can do it. My body's ready to adapt. But in terms of the baseline practice day to day, I just try to make it feel good. That's the point, you know, and so I would just suggest that you don't have to keep pushing, even if you're looking for a long-term practice that'll continue to pay dividends.

Speaker 1:

And it sounds like this is very much a morning practice to take the full benefit of the adrenaline and, for hour, sustained adrenaline.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so you can approach it two different ways. The primary way is, yes, early in the morning it's typically going to be best, and or early afternoon, depending on what your training schedule is and what specific adaptations you're looking for. But usually first half of the day is going to be ideal and for many people they're going to find the best just to include it in their morning cold shower. You know, in the morning shower at the beginning of their day it's going to be the easiest to include. The exception to that is if you've got sauna present.

Speaker 3:

So if you can do contrast therapy which is fantastic in its own right for a hundred different reasons you can do that at night and what's going to happen is actually going to facilitate your body giving away heat in a very good way. That's going to help you sleep better at night. That's going to work along with the melatonin that we produce. That's going to lower core body temperature in order to get us into sleep. It's going to help us with sleep pressure in the middle to help us stay asleep. So there's lots of good reasons, and so cold can be certainly included along with heat in the evening.

Speaker 2:

very few people can sort of get around that exception, but I'll still be there that's how I do it, yeah, sort of end of the work day just before dinner, about you know five, six o'clock, sauna ice, and that I find it really relaxes me. Um, if people want to get started, so going on to like models of ice bars, you have your freezer. What do you recommend to people? Because I've just come across this thing. It's called the. It's like a. I'm looking at it on amazon. It's called an ice shower and it's just an attachment that you put on your shower head and it's like 20 bucks and I think that's a way for people to start. So people want to start with that, or what other suggestions do you have and what's your favorite model for people who want to spend a bit of money on it?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So there's a range of budgets that are available, a range of products for every budget that are available these days. The ice shower that's a really good little thing. You've also got some of these new chillers that'll pop right into your bathtub that aren't terribly expensive, so that can be a really easy one as well.

Speaker 3:

If you prefer a bath rather than a shower, some people struggle with, you know, feeling like the shower is constantly hitting them and they're having trouble to adapt to it. I'll tell you that if you can get past that initial discomfort, you can get past that initial discomfort. You can build sort of that wetsuit effect that actually feels pretty good. But that's just my piece. I know we're going to be different, but so if you like a bath, you can get one of those external chillers, and they're a couple hundred bucks these days, is all, and so they're not terribly expensive. Other people I know that live in more cold areas. They just set up their baths and they put them outside and they break through the ice, you know, for the morning, and so most of the year it's going to be cold and at some points they may have to actually heat it up a little bit. So depending on that. But those are cost-effective ways and it can be even as simple as like one of those sort of Japanese O'Furrow type tubs that are vinyl, so less than a hundred dollars.

Speaker 3:

If you want to spend a little bit more money than the chillers that are on the market these days, there's a good range, everything from some of the aquarium chillers that are going to run, you know, about half the price of a more marketed cold chiller for ice baths. You're going to probably pay double, triple or quadruple for those and there's some reasons for that. I'm not suggesting there's not. Some of them will go heat or cold, which is nice, and they're pretty robust. But you can have options along those lines.

Speaker 3:

Some of the top brands that I think are doing a pretty darn good job gosh Renew's got a pretty good one. I mean that bat's quite expensive though if I'm not mistaken it's probably $14,000 or $15,000, but it makes it so nice and it's pretty remarkable. You've got Plunge that product. It runs anywhere from, I think, $6,000 to as much as $12,000, depending on the unit. So these can get quite pricey. But if you're looking to spend money and you like the elegance and the look and you want it to be serviced for any number of years and guaranteed. These can be wonderful products for those that are interested.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I have to give a shout out to Monk. I don't know if you come across Monk ice bars. I just invested in them, crowdfunded them and yeah, I think they're doing a good job. Uh, I think they're kind of mid-range, sort of five grand, and anthony joshua, the heavyweight champion or former champion is, is an investor as well, so he's sort of the front man of them, but I really think monk are gonna be pretty big then it is big enough to fit anthony joshua in.

Speaker 2:

Yes so yeah, it is. Um, yeah, okay, great. Well, going on to breath work, so one of the things we I kind of mentioned is like, uh, in wellness I think there's a kind of idea that just more is always better and you know, like if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I, as part of my PhD, looked into sort of the dose response of conscious connected breathing and found there was no difference between people doing one 90 minute session per week and people doing a 90 minute session plus doing conscious connected breathing every day. In terms of anxiety, and as someone who's just finished with the Oxygen Advantages advanced training, I'm very interested in CO2 tolerance. So one rumor that comes out of the Wim Hof method is often when people start with the breath work, their breath hold time goes up, but then they do it every day for a year and then their breath hold time goes way down, their carbon dioxide sensitivity goes way down and they experience increased breathlessness and some sort of negative effects. Is that true to that rumor?

Speaker 3:

Well, yes and no. So let's get into it, because I think that's a wonderful question. One of the things, as we mentioned before, about the Wim Hof Method breathing is that it does steer us into a stress response. So you can imagine that if you overstress your body, if you're doing that too often, you're going to steer yourself into a more action-dominant state, on and on, and that in and of itself is going to reduce the time that you're able to hold your breath. It's going to elevate your heart. That you're able to hold your breath right, it's going to elevate your heart rate and do some negative impact. And so the ideal practice within the Wim Hof method is one that allows you to stay connected, that allows you to raise the ceiling of tolerance within oxygen saturation but simultaneously lowers the floor, which allows you to get into that more hypoxemic state and helps you deal with oxygen deprivation and, ideally, co2 tolerance as well.

Speaker 3:

So I think it depends on an individual practice, and I think the second reason that people struggle with that is, as you do something over and over, your body's going to adapt to whatever it is. So that's a piece, and then mentally we tend to check out right. We're no longer as connected to a practice over time. So I think there's a variety of reasons why people experience that, but what I'll say is that as I work with people to slow their breathing rate down, as I work with people to slow their breathing rate down and they start to get reconnected to a practice and include some variations that are helpful to restore connection that those breath holds come and to the point that I don't even think is necessary in order to get the benefits of a practice. But for all sake, I just want to recognize that. So we're seeing a lot of different things and I think there's a few different reasons that we see that, but what you mentioned can actually happen. So, yes, that could be the case in some cases interesting.

Speaker 1:

Um, I think you said you've been practicing for 10 years, matt, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, and in that time I'm sure you've seen the wim hof name and brand grow almost exponentially. Does that come with a few kind of, I guess, rogue practitioners or people kind of trying to piggyback off that name? Um, uh, I don't need you to name names, but is that something we're seeing? Name names.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no names. Yes, of course, certainly that happens. The Wim Hof Method it's grown very substantially over the last 10 years. When Wim was first starting to take people to Poland, there was four or maybe six people that would attend a retreat. So now there's multiple weeks of 80 to 100 per week and then most recently they started to put them back into one week, but at a new hotel, and it's huge for that particular week.

Speaker 3:

So a lot of people are practicing and it's a very it's a growing practice and you know that that's going to cause any number of people to either piggyback on, latch on to it, shift, how it's talked about and you know, even the Wim Hof method itself has grown quite a bit and changed its view on several things over the course of the decade. So I think that's important to recognize as well, because what was taught? When I first joined, I was part of the first group of US instructors. I began to train people in the academy in 2018. And so I've trained, you know, six, seven years. I'm going into my seventh year of training instructors. Seven years. I'm going into my seventh year of training instructors and you know, at the beginning we didn't have the same curriculum or even close to it, in the same practices that we do today, and so a lot has shifted over time and, I believe, for the most part very positive direction.

Speaker 2:

Can you say more about what's changed in the Wim Hof method? What do they?

Speaker 3:

they changed their mind on but very much a practitioner and not so much a teacher, right? So I wouldn't call Wim Hof a teacher per se in the traditional sense. His teaching style is by demonstration and encouraging people to explore their own personal limits and sort of breaks that inside, that limiting belief inside many people that allows them to really access the deepest parts of themselves and get curious about what they're capable of. And in that sense he's a teacher. But in terms of like nuts and bolts and describing many of the different aspects, that's not his skillset, I would say. And so some of the things that we had tried early on were at you know, we're pushing our bodies in any number of ways pretty hard, a lot more breathing perhaps than we needed to do. Right, in terms of the nuances of how to breathe, we're not. Then we're really talked about.

Speaker 3:

You know, whim is kind of famous for saying I don't care if you use your, your nose or your, your any hole, just get it in. I'll just put it that way. It's kind of how he puts it right, kind of crass and crude, and that's not necessarily fully accurate. What what he's trying to do is simplify it so that people don't get in their own way, right, but that's not terribly helpful if we're actually talking about how to instruct people to breathe, both for that exercise but, more importantly, breathe throughout your life, because the Wim Hof method says nothing about how to breathe through the rest of your day.

Speaker 3:

It's only a specific set of exercises, and I think people conflate those two things. They're like ah oh, you should always breathe like this. That would be insane, like you're. That's not good for you to breathe as we do in the Wim Hof Method, breathing exercises throughout the course of the day. But if you do your exercises properly, then you're going to actually improve your breathing a lot down the road. And so over the years we've really tried to instruct people how do I show up in life better, or at least that's been what I've tried to do as a teacher I'm one teacher out of several and obviously there's a lot of people that practice throughout the world but just trying to help people really understand the difference between particular exercises that should be done in a part of the day and how to breathe throughout the rest of your day and through the rest of your performance or any other things that require, you know, sort of a shift in breathing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so I guess what are you doing to ensure that the high standards are met and maintained during your teaching instructors?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, only that I can do on my weeks, you know. So I'll take that responsibility to the extent that I can do myself. What I try to do is really understand all the different parts of breathing breathing. So the most common problems that I see in today's world where we discuss this topic is that most are taking a very thin slice and trying to suggest that's the whole, and that's not really the case. And so I've really tried to read as many studies as possible about breathing, about oxygen saturation in both tissues and in the blood, why things change the difference between conscious, active breathing and pathologies. Right, because most of the studies that are done are actually pathological based, meaning they're trying to address a specific condition in a hospital setting or an acute care setting, or for nurses to understand how and when to intervene on a patient's behalf if they're in distress, even though they may not present as such. So a lot of studies are around that, and I think we sometimes will also cause a lot of confusion around the differences between internal and external respiration.

Speaker 3:

And so my job over the last decade has been to dive into as much of the literature as possible, as much into the medical information as possible, the physiology and so forth, and just do that to the extent that I can and then back it up and also do applied breathing stuff.

Speaker 3:

So I had some of the early devices that were reading SMO2, for example that's muscle saturation, oxygen saturation in the muscle, as well as your blood saturation oximeters, and I was performing any number of experiments.

Speaker 3:

So, for example, I did these things at sea level, I did them during martial arts classes, I did them at rest, I did them on extreme altitude as I ascended Kilimanjaro in 33 hours and change right, so adapting from sea level with no other means other than a breathing method to support me and track the data, while I did it right For me and six other guys. And so I'm a very data driven person and I would say in that sense I'm quite unique in my position because I don't steer into some of the discussions or ideas that are always purported from the Wim Hof method. I would say I steer away from some of that because I like to see data and have it supported very clearly and also understand that like what are the actual mechanisms behind each of these things and why they may work? I want to know the reason why, and so that's been my deep dive, and then I carry that information forward and try to do my best to train the instructors to really understand it.

Speaker 2:

From that point of view, I would say that's the responsibility I carry yeah, yeah, that's great because, yeah, I'm affiliated with the gbpa I don't know if you know them, but they're more well, it's the global breathwork practitioners alliance is more to do with conscious connected breathing and they're trying to maintain standards of practitioners and facilitators. And, as you said, wild West that I think everyone gets thinks that all breathwork is the Wild West and it is because it's so hard to monitor practitioners and it's so hard to monitor people who are not even practitioners. You know, then they've just done the wim hof method from the app and then they go out and teach people. Same with conscious connected breathing. Yeah, yeah, face palm absolutely drives me mental. So the gbpa is obviously doing something.

Speaker 2:

Wim hof is, you know the whole method, I guess is the biggest breath work organization in the world, certainly bigger than the gbpa and breath guru, who I teach for. So you say you you're trying to monitor for your week, but is there scope for the wim hof methods to really be policing its own, its own staff, raising those standards? Because you mentioned you were teaching 73 people at once and I'm teaching on the breath guru conscious connected thing and we've decided six is the maximum we can teach at once. Conscious connected breathing is more about you know. It's more like a therapy, so you do need to go more into to holding space for people. But yeah, can you say more about what wim hof and the organization are doing on the standards?

Speaker 3:

yeah, I think what they've done that's a positive is that they've they continue to add to their programming and change their curriculum and make it more robust. And if you were to ask me how do I personally feel have they met the highest standard that they should? No, that would be the short answer, but they're on their, they're making improvements on a regular basis and so I have to commend them on that side, right? I think that when we look at 73 practitioners and again that was just for two weeks I had 40 in one week and 36 in the next, so I think total of 76 actually this last couple of weeks. But those people have been working and training for close to most of them close to nine months, right? So it's not something that happens just in the last week and the rest of the responsibility is through their other modules that they go through to learn some of the material, to learn about the studies, to learn how the breath practice, how it's impactful, what's the actual protocol and why we do it, and so forth. And then my week is really about clarifying a lot of that and pushing them forward, and what I see in five days of their master module is pretty remarkable and I feel like that's about the best I can do within the framework that's offered there.

Speaker 3:

Do I wish that I had those people for nine months myself? A hundred percent, right? Do I feel like we could do more? Yes, a hundred percent. And, as I mentioned, I feel like what I do is I give the notes back to the organization about what I see and how I feel, and I've seen them make really positive changes as they go forward, so that's a good thing. Many of the top teachers, the lead teachers, are certified in more than one type of breath work. I think that's helpful because it gives them a little bit more perspective outside of a single practice, which is good, and so I think that's a benefit. But I think we can only do what we can do, and that's what we're doing right now.

Speaker 2:

Yes, well, I don't want to grill you too hard.

Speaker 3:

No, it's good.

Speaker 2:

I know you have I love it, have good intentions, but um, what we're doing at breath guru and my, my wife, is doing her master's in psychotherapy and, as you probably know, psychotherapists have to have supervision. You know she's coming towards the end of her master's. She'll be let out into the world with practitioners and she'll have to go to regular supervision whilst until she gets sort of 3000 hours worth of training. So I think for breathwork supervision from the schools is something that maybe we should look at. But is there any any supervisors out there for Wim Hof method instructors?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think there is. I mean, there's a lot of people that are trying to do their best in terms of looking at instructors that are out there and there's a large community that people can ask questions if something's not going well. We try to have a number of resources to continue to educate people within that framework and so I think within that side of things there is a help and if people are doing something reckless or sort of off the bounds, as soon as we hear about it or the organization, I should say because that's really their responsibility does try to intervene and help people to pull back. What does happen, I will say, is that not everybody continues to renew their certification and carry on. Not everybody continues their education. Some people are looking for a certification to really do their own thing, but they want to have a piece of paper that allows them to get business, and so maybe the intent is a little bit different in some cases and those people are really looking to do and explore their own practices and their own styles. That really has nothing to do with the Wim Hof method.

Speaker 3:

So I think that happens as well and that's pretty hard to police, if you will, but I think for the vast majority of people that are part of it. Nobody's really looking to do harm. Everybody's looking to do their best and to hold space for people and guide them in a positive experience. I would say that's the overarching goal. In most cases, the vast majority right the people are well-intentioned.

Speaker 3:

It's like with anything, though if you don't remain curious, if you don't have a broader perspective, if you don't continue to build and reinforce a strong foundation within your own practices, you don't know what you don't know right, and you'll never know what you don't know, but you're going to be limited in your ability to assess potential issues or to really understand and how to care for people throughout an arc of a breathing practice, and breathing is extremely profound, right.

Speaker 3:

It can be life-altering, life-changing both in the moment and going forward, and so the responsibility that we have as breath workers, as people that are helping people in this way, is tremendous, and to look at it otherwise, I think, is a grave mistake, and so one of the things that I try to do is just communicate that for the people that I am specifically in contact with and to say keep curious about your practice, keep curious about it in general. Let's not try to just glub onto something to assume it's the end all be all truth. And how can we actually know that we're caring for people in a proper way to make sure they're not getting damaged from the work that we're doing, that we're actually facilitating a positive, life-changing experience, that it can be?

Speaker 1:

Wow. So what's next for you then, Matt? That it can be.

Speaker 3:

Wow. So what's next for you then, matt? So what's next? Oh well, I've got. I've got some things that are on the horizon that I've been working on. So typically I would be holding any number of events.

Speaker 3:

I do a number of different types of events as a as my personal brand. I guide people in the cold. Of course. I run a martial arts school to help people in that sort of area, and then I do a variety of breathing events, and one of which is the vibrational breathing experience. So that's always been a lot of fun and that steers people to the psychedelic using their breath, and so that's really powerful and positive that I've been playing with the last couple of years.

Speaker 3:

But I've actually been working on a new project that I hope to be international with starting in the new year. So if you look on my website right now, you'll only see Alaska posted, and that's on purpose. So if you want to join something, come to Alaska. I'll guide you through there. It's a wonderful deal. We get four days of really beautiful, intense breath work. We'll eat some of the finest food made by private chefs, we'll get into the Alaskan waters both the frozen waterfalls and we'll cut holes in the ice and be in the sauna. I backpack saunas on site, we sleep in a great Airbnb group home and we just community and it's fantastic right, four days of just wonder. But that's all that's up there right now, instead of the typical month to month events. But I hope to launch my new project in the first of the year and I look forward to that. Okay, when is the Alaska trip? Alaska is February 5th through the 9th this year, february 5th through the 9th.

Speaker 2:

Exciting yeah, so this is a secret. The next thing yeah, I got to hold it back for now.

Speaker 3:

It'll be a big project, but it has to do with a lot of the things that I've been working on within the stress tools that I share with people to manage their stress and to leverage it to live their best lives. But I got to hold that back for now because I've got one or two things that are still on the horizon that I have to button up before I can announce that. Fair enough, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Awesome.

Speaker 3:

But stay in contact. You can go on and get a free membership on my website and you can be privy to the announcement as soon as it's made. And the website name is Matt soulcom, so my last name is s-o-u-l-e, so matt soulcom, and you can find all the information there awesome, all right well.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much, matt.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, andy yeah, thanks, matt, and congratulations by being my kilimanjaro time by seven days. It's pretty impressive, if nothing else wait.

Speaker 2:

How long did you do it? I think it's like eight days. Eight days, okay I enjoyed it.

Speaker 1:

That was great scenery.

Speaker 2:

I did it in five days, three like three and a half up, one and a half down. You were six up two down.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, okay, wow, 33 hours is serious it was pretty fast.

Speaker 3:

It was pretty fast were you running the way up? No, on the way down I ran, I ran pretty fast, but on the way up, no, we just hiked and we spent one overnight as part of that. So you go up midway and then one overnight and then we push to the top to get our time there. It's pretty fast. A wonderful experiment to get our time there. It's pretty, pretty fast. A wonderful experiment, really. I was motivated by breathing and how it was impacting. You know different breathing protocols, different breathing styles whether we were using the nose or the mouth, how we use that, to what extent is each relevant and really tried to inform my understanding of breathing physiology in real time. Especially as we steered into extreme altitude, it becomes pretty important. I document all of this and stronger through stress. There's a great story that goes along with it. That's my book that's out on amazon, so if you're interested in learning more, you could definitely read there.

Speaker 3:

Awesome it's been a great pleasure having you on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you're obviously so knowledgeable and clear on your, on your mission. It's that's great to talk to you yeah, all right um, I don't know about you, but I was totally blown away by the introduction there um such a moving story and um so eloquently spoke. But what a what a example of turning some serious um adversity and traumatic events into something so positive yeah, I think that's such an important reframe.

Speaker 2:

I think there's a lot of the idea that if something bad happens to you in a child, childhood you know childhood trauma then you're just your life's over, you know you're, you're a dud, you've, you've got no chance. But actually there are so many people who recover from trauma and actually it fuels them, it propels them to things that perhaps they wouldn't have done if they did have just, a very, um, safe, normal, uneventful life. And uh, I think it was maybe it was Bessel van de Kolk one of the trauma people says you, I worry less about the people who have had childhood trauma than the people who have never experienced any adversity. And there's some amazing statistics like in Encyclopedia Britannica 90, I think it's like 97% of the Encyclopedia Britannica's most notable people of all time lost one or both parents before the age of 14. So certainly there are positive consequences to having tragedies such as losing a parent or other terrible things.

Speaker 1:

I really enjoyed his story through, you know, martial arts and really kind of going into the dissonance of it and finding that peace within martial arts and then within breathwork. And it's very clear that he maintains such high standards, which is encouraging for anyone who wants to get involved in Wim Hof.

Speaker 2:

Yes, the standards in the breathwork industry are a recurring theme on this podcast, but, yeah, it's first time we've had someone from wim hof a different methodology to the one that I teach, but a great one nonetheless. By the way, listen, I love wim hof. I've done a lot of it. I've met wim and uh, I really like their technique and what they're doing for the world. Just one disclaimer that we should throw in here you never want to do breath work, uh, breath holds, hyperventilation in water because you can pass out and people have died from doing wim hof, breath in ice and in swimming pools and things like that. So, yeah, it's really important that if you're doing breath work, it's it's not the conscious connected, it's not SOMA, it's not voluntary hyperventilation or Wim Hof.

Speaker 1:

And to end on a slightly lighter note, were you surprised by how much he'd beaten my Kilimanjaro time? What does that feel about, right it?

Speaker 2:

seemed probably right Okay.

Speaker 1:

No, that is amazing.

Speaker 2:

Because when I did Kilimanjaroaro, willimanjaro, uh, they were really like trying to slow us down.

Speaker 1:

We the same.

Speaker 2:

I think that was partly like you paid for six days and maybe we could get you to seven and then we get by the day. So can you just slow down? Um, whereas we were, we were trying to walk quite quickly. I was. I was like 19. I was doing it with my friend uh moley shout out to him, he's a listener and yeah, we were. We were walking fast and they were trying to walk quite quickly. I was like 19. I was doing it with my friend Moley Shout out to him, he's a listener. And yeah, we were walking fast and they were trying to go slow. So I think we probably could have done it quicker if we wanted to, but yeah, 33 hours is outrageous though.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it is, that's silly money. So where do they find us Rich? Yeah, it is that's silly money.

Speaker 2:

So where do they find us Rich? They find us at AndyEsam on Instagram, at TheBreathGeek on Instagram and on my website, richardlblakecom and TheBreathGeekcom, where you can find out more about me, the podcast, my breathwork practice, which you can now sign up for sessions with me one-to-one online or, if you're in walnut creek area you can come for in-person sessions as well awesome, thank you rich thank you addy, thank you listener, bye.