Why cold water?

At her boarding school in the late 1920s, my mother was forced to take a cold bath every morning, followed by a mile run. Probably, in the aftermath of World War 1, the thinking was to create a generation so robust in both mind and body that they could withstand anything, starting them as young as 8 year olds. Having listened endlessly to this story throughout my childhood, I’d always dismissed it as another form of needless torture that was commonplace long before my time, however now that I have discovered what happens to both mind and body with regular cold water immersion, I am coming to realise that she was probably right about that (and maybe also about many of the other things I dismissed from the stories from that generation)

A recent piece of research about winter swimming focuses on brown fat cells and how they are activated in the adult body by cold water. We have always known that newborn babies maintain their core temperature by brown fat cells, the body’s internal combustion system, firing up from the inside to keep them warm. But until recently it was not known that adults still have these cells situated up and down the spine and in the clavicles under the collar bone. Susan Soberg’s research in Denmark has highlighted the effect of cold water immersion of firing up these cells, increasing metabolism, the brown fat cells burn sugar and fat from the bloodstream. It is early days yet, but her suggestion is that cold water swimming will increase energy metabolisation, improve insulin sensitivity and possibly lower blood sugar levels. As diabetes becomes more and more of a problem in our society, this is amazing news indeed.

Wim Hoff has been telling us about the positive health benefits of cold water for years, and recently an increasingly wide audience has started to listen. People talk about a boost to the immune system, reduced inflammation, improved sleep, higher energy levels and a fired up metabolism. This knowledge is not new, Hippocrates in the 4th century proposed that cold water therapy reduced violence. The Romans built circular cold baths called frigidariums. The practice of cold water immersion was then lost for many hundreds of years until it was revived in the 18th and 19th century. Florence Nightingale and Charles Dickens both claimed to have been cured by 'hydrotherapy'.

For me, something has definitely kept me sea swimming through the winter, and I’m not sure exactly what that magic element is. I certainly haven’t been ill for nearly a year, since I started regular cold water swimming, but that could just be chance. I’ve met some lovely people on the sea shore at crazy times of the morning, there is definitely a comradery that springs up between strangers as we share such an extreme experience, watching the sun rise on an empty shore, but I don’t think that is the main thing. For me, the powerful surge of wellbeing and invincibility comes from that moment of conquering the dread, conquering the cold, conquering the waves (sometimes) – of being able to do something that seems so impossible. Walking past dog walkers on an early morning beach, them all wrapped up in coats and scarves, and me walking past them in a swimming costume really does feel nuts. But the feeling as you come out, having felt that energy from the waves, having shrieked as loud as you possibly could as the cold first hits, is second to none that I have ever felt before. I’m sure there is a physiological reason for this, a surge in dopamine and serotonin, but I think it’s more than that. I think it’s what my mother endlessly told us about mind over matter, about walking straight towards your fears and immersing yourself in them. I realise now that she was probably right.