December: Wim Hof Breathing
Preface:
As my new year's resolution for 2020, I am going to set 12 goals rather than one. In the hope of making goal setting and tracking an integrated habit, I will be setting a goal at the beginning of every month rather than just once at the beginning of the year.
The formula is this. In the first week of every month, I will make progress towards a defined goal every single day for at least 10 minutes. At the end of the first week, I will evaluate the goal that I set and decide whether or not I wish to continue working toward that goal. For the rest of the month, I may continue to work on that goal at my own pace. At the end of every month, I will make a blog post about what I did/learned/accomplished.
I decided to start my resolution a month early to test it out and see if I like it so here is my first month of goal exploration.
December:
My goal for December was to try out a meditation/breathing method developed by Wim Hof.
I was inspired by a youtube channel called Yes Theory to give this method a try.
Video Inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cvhwquPqJ0
Wim's method has 3 pillars Breathing, Cold Exposure, and Commitment/Intentionality. For the first week, I tried the breathing exercises and found that I quickly beat my previous records without even trying! It also makes you feel tingly which is pretty weird. After the first week, I experimented also with cold exposure. I tried cold showers, short cold exposure outside in 10-degree wind chill, I even went on a mile and a half run in just shorts and shoes.
Positives:
• It is invigorating
• I got a new breath-hold record of 3:13 seconds (previously 2:15)
• I learned that sometimes the way we react to cold makes us feel colder than we are
• I feel that cold exposure helped me to learn to embrace discomfort
• Breathing exercises have helped me with singing
• leaves the lungs feeling full and open which is something I have trouble with due to asthma.
Negatives
• It's much harder to do breathing exercises in Pennsylvania than Florida to drier air
• struggled slightly with a feeling of shortness of breath when I first started but this got better with practice
I'm not sure Wim's method does everything that Wim claims it does but I enjoyed it and, while I don't think it will be something I do all the time, I think that Wim's method definitely adds some excitement to my life and I would recommend giving it a try
As my new year's resolution for 2020, I am going to set 12 goals rather than one. In the hope of making goal setting and tracking an integrated habit, I will be setting a goal at the beginning of every month rather than just once at the beginning of the year.
The formula is this. In the first week of every month, I will make progress towards a defined goal every single day for at least 10 minutes. At the end of the first week, I will evaluate the goal that I set and decide whether or not I wish to continue working toward that goal. For the rest of the month, I may continue to work on that goal at my own pace. At the end of every month, I will make a blog post about what I did/learned/accomplished.
I decided to start my resolution a month early to test it out and see if I like it so here is my first month of goal exploration.
December:
My goal for December was to try out a meditation/breathing method developed by Wim Hof.
I was inspired by a youtube channel called Yes Theory to give this method a try.
Video Inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cvhwquPqJ0
Positives:
• It is invigorating
• I got a new breath-hold record of 3:13 seconds (previously 2:15)
• I learned that sometimes the way we react to cold makes us feel colder than we are
• I feel that cold exposure helped me to learn to embrace discomfort
• Breathing exercises have helped me with singing
• leaves the lungs feeling full and open which is something I have trouble with due to asthma.
Negatives
• It's much harder to do breathing exercises in Pennsylvania than Florida to drier air
• struggled slightly with a feeling of shortness of breath when I first started but this got better with practice
I'm not sure Wim's method does everything that Wim claims it does but I enjoyed it and, while I don't think it will be something I do all the time, I think that Wim's method definitely adds some excitement to my life and I would recommend giving it a try
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