Just before he died Nova Xavier led his mother through a series of rapid breathing exercises and breath holds that he learned from Wim Hof’s online video course in a community pool. Catherine Xavier had bought Wim Hof’s Classic Course for $100 for her son half a year earlier, but she felt that Hof’s hyperventilation didn’t look totally safe.
“Of course it’s safe, mom. It’s Wim Hof,” he said.
Over the next several minutes Nova convinced his mother to practice the breath holds and hyperventilation with him, just like like he’d learned in Week 8 of Hof’s online course. The rapid breathwork allowed them to spend more time underwater than they would have expected otherwise. Catherine offered to time Nova’s breath holds, but he had left his phone where he recorded his breath hold times on a Wim Hof App at home. Catherine started to do laps in their community pool while Nova did the Hof Method.
A few minutes later she noticed that he hadn’t come up for air.
Her son was already dead.
Over the last decade and a half Wim Hof, the eccentric sports guru has grown into international fame and acclaim for this ability to withstand cold temperatures and his characteristic rapid breathing method that he claims has numerous health benefits. While scientific research on Hof’s methods have indeed shows promising effects, many of Hof’s claims reach far past what have been backed up experimentally. This has led many members of the scientific community and the press to question whether Hof’s method lives up to the hype.
I have been a daily practitioner of the method for 11 years running, wrote a New York Times bestselling book on Hof and even climbed up Mt. Kilimanjaro with him bare-chested while the temperature dipped to minus thirty degrees. There is, indeed, something to Wim’s principles. However, over the last two years I have become one of the most outspoken critics of Hof for his increasingly outlandish pseudoscientific statements as well as a rash of drowning-related deaths that I attribute directly to his reckless teaching style.
In June of last year I released a report titled The Rise and Fall of the Wim Hof Empire that catalogued 13 reported deaths due to the Wim Hof Method. While the mainstream media largely ignored the story, in the last twelve months I received many more reports from grieving families who had similar tales as well as documentation similar to what Xaviers’.
The total has reached a heartbreaking 34 deaths.
While I initially posted links to my notes, members of the broader Wim Hof community attempted to harass grieving families. In order to protect the victim identities now I only post a public list that is limited to only cases that have also been reported in other news sources.
Those same internet posters have variously claimed that the dead were “Darwin awardees,” “should have known better,” “deserved what they got,”and that Wim Hof is blameless because he “always warns about the dangers” of performing his method near water. Less charitable comments question my integrity as a reporter. Others have called for me to be publicly hanged.
Despite the backlash, the facts are clear. Popular videos across the internet and on mainstream outlets like the BBC and Discovery show Wim Hof performing, and even directly teaching, hyperventilation in water. One video with more than 5 million views shows Wim teaching an exceedingly dangerous “press” maneuver to two influencers sitting in a barrel full of ice on Wim’s property. Indeed, the very first video Hof ever posted online features him performing an extended breath hold under water. In another clip that seems to have been only recently taken down after garnering close to a million views, Hof directly explains that this personal routine invovles hyperventilating while sitting in ice-water.
As one of the first people to formally study with Wim Hof I remember when he directly instructed me to hyperventilate in order to extend my breath hold in water. After I returned from his training center in Poland in 2013 I spent the next 3 years doing underwater laps in public pools after a several rounds of Wim Hof breathwork. It wasn’t until 2015 when news reports of drownings surfaced in the Dutch media that I realized that I had learned a dangerous practice. I included warnings about the danger of what is known as “shallow water blackout” in my 2017 book and approached Wim about altering his methods several times as we met over the years.
While he acknowledged the dangers, Wim never changed the way he talked about the method or presented it to his audience of millions. Instead he said that anyone could learn to do what he does.
The physiology of hyperventilation is a little unintuitive. Hof frequently claims that his breathwork “super-oxygenates” the blood to give a person "“more than 100%” oxygen saturation.
This is incorrect.
By definition, oxygen saturation in the blood is constrained by the four of O2 molecules that a hemoglobin molecule can transport. During hyperventilation causes a person to blow off carbon dioxide from their system. Because of an evolutionary quirk, the body uses rising levels of CO2 to trigger the urge to breathe instead of declining levels of O2. People are able to prolong their breath holds during the Wim Hof method because hyperventilation artificially lowers the body’s CO2 levels.
As the diagram above described, it’s possible to run out of oxygen and black out before your body ever senses the urge to breathe. On land this isn’t much of a problem. In water it is deadly.
Even experienced Wim Hof method practitioners can die when they perform Hof’s breathwork in water. Indeed, Wim Hof passed out in water while attempting to set a Guinness World Record for swimming under sea ice in 1998. As my own experience swimming in my local pool demonstrates, a person can perform the breathwork in water for years without triggering a blackout. You can think of it as a little like playing Russian Roulette.
While the percentage chance of passing out during any single WHM routine is small, when you scale up the situation to the size of the entire internet, and continually encourage a dangerous practice, people will die at a predictable rate. The practice is so prevasive now that it has gone beyond what Hod started. Other breathwork practitioners who were inspired by Hof, but unaffiliated with his organization, have begun to teach hyperventilation in water as part of their own programs.
Last year a family in Long Beach California filed a $67 Million lawsuit against Wim Hof and his company Innerfire, alleging that 17-year old Madeline Metzger drowned in her pool after performing the Wim Hof Method. Metzger’s case has numerous problems, and was not as well documented as many of the cases that I have collected over the last few years. The judge dismissed the case this month based on lack of evidence. Metzger’s lawyer says they will appeal the decision.
The only bright spot that I see in the situation is that since Nova’s death on July 17 of last year, I haven’t received a new report of a person drowning related to the Wim Hof Method. This could be because my videos on the topic have spread awareness throughout the breathwork community. It could also be because people are only likely to contact me while a particular story is trending in their feeds. If you hear about other cases of deaths associated with the Wim Hof method or other related practices please let me know.
I’m sharing the story of Nova Xavier today because I believe that spreading the word about the dangers of shallow water blackout is essential for all breathwork practitioners. I had a role in popularizing Wim Hof in the years before he was famous and feel that it is important to set the record straight if we want to glean the benefits of a method that has changed my life for the better.
Identifying details have been changed at the request of the Xavier family.
The Tragic Story of Nova and Wim Hof