About a month ago, I started the Wim Hof breathing exercise of which I have shared my initial experience and my experience after the first week. Now, I will be sharing my overall experience of the exercise. Even though this is the last post of the challenge, I think I will continue the exercise privately because of the benefits I have experienced in it.
Image from Pixabay
You can check out my first and second posts to know what the exercise is all about and how to get started if you are not already into it. You can also check the official Wim Hof website (https://www.wimhofmethod.com) for more insight into this exercise.
When I first started the exercise, I could barely sustain my breath for about 10-15 seconds at a go. After reading through the Wim Hof site and following a few of his YouTube videos, I was wowed by the fact that people could actually sustain their breath for minutes. According to Guinness world record, the longest period someone sustained their breath (under water) was a whopping 24 minutes 37 seconds. Wow! I never knew humans have the ability to perform this feat. This motivated me to put in extra effort into the exercise.
I was not planning to sustain my breath under water like the videos I watched though, but I still needed to practise more on the breathing exercise. I devoted few minutes a day for the exercise. By the second week, I was able to go pass the 20 seconds benchmark and I felt happy about that. Now one thing I noticed about this exercise is that it has a way of affecting the mind positively because of the level of concentration and meditation you need to put into it.
Prior to the commencement of the exercise, there were things I would normally have been bothered about if it happens but at this present moment, I have achieved a level of inner peace and stillness that I cannot explain but it is undeniable. As I mentioned in my second post, I noticed a kind of soundness of mind and mental alertness. Maybe it explains why I now fall asleep easily as against when I had to force myself to sleep.
After I noticed these things, I went back to the Wim Hof site to research more and I discovered that these are part of the benefits of the breathing exercise. Among the benefits of the exercise is tolerance to extreme cold temperature. Well, I cannot confirm this in my own experience because the country is experiencing intense hot temperature at the moment :(
Meanwhile, I saw this amazing YouTube video on guides to the breathing exercise by Wim Hof. You can take a look at it
From Wim Hof YouTube
