Last month, a newly formed organization to promote winter swimming in the United States held its first national competition and the location was in Vermont.
I ENJOY WINTER SWIMMING, DO YOU?
Throughout history, humans bathed almost exclusively in cold water. Today, there are still many countries where people have only cold water for their personal use.
Ancient Greeks were aware of the healing properties of cold water. When they invented the first water-heating systems in 700 BC, they continued using cold-water treatments for health purposes. Spartans, for whom health was a matter of high reputation, considered it to be unmanly to use hot water; they regularly dipped in cold water for vigor and better health.
According to the research of the Federation of Tempering and Winter Swimming in Russia, the maximum healing occurs when the body is submerged in water with a temperature below 12° Celsius (53°F) for one to two minutes. During the brief application of cold water, the blood vessels in the skin abruptly contract, pushing a large amount of blood inside the organism. This results in the re-activating of the inner capillaries, many of which are typically atrophied by the age of 30, due to poor circulation and an unhealthy lifestyle. The regeneration of a large amount of capillaries ensures that our inner organs receive the necessary nutrients for their optimal performance and rejuvenation. This great improvement in capillary circulation results in the younger appearance of cold-water swimmers.
Several scientific studies have demonstrated that within 50 seconds after the brief application of extremely cold temperatures, an enormous amount of heat is generated by the transformation of neurons, which is known as the phenomenon of “instant free heat.” Therefore, despite the initial shock that can be painful, winter swimmers, often called “Polar Bears” almost immediately experience an amazingly pleasant warmth from head to toe, causing the profound relaxation of the entire body. This relaxation is one of a kind, as it cannot be compared to any other way of relaxing.
Russian scientists have demonstrated that the combination of quick cold stress and the resulting heat stimulates the body to find diseased cells and destroy them, thus reversing many degenerative diseases of liver, kidneys, and heart, as well as mental problems.
After a cold plunge the surface of the skin becomes charged with negative ions. Russian academician and scientist, Alexander Chizhevsky considered this charge of negative ions to be important for our bodies, which are often charged too positively.
Tempering the body with cold water increases the rate of the metabolism. This brings about the purging of free radicals, heavy metals, nitrates, and pesticides. Additionally this cleansing occurs via skin and lungs, and unloads the burden on the kidneys.
Finally, swimming in cold water dramatically strengthens immunity. While constantly protecting ourselves from natural cold and heat by using air conditioners, heaters, and clothing, we constantly keep our bodies at the same temperature, disabling our natural systems of thermal regulation. We tend to think that this brings our body to a healthy and comfortable state when in actuality, the opposite is true. When exposed to cold temperatures, a human organism that has not been trained to regulate its internal temperature, loses its internal heat approximately 30 times faster than a tempered body. As a result, one can get sick from even minor changes in outside temperatures, for example after waiting five extra minutes in windy weather or after getting wet under the rain.
Cold-water swimming is becoming continuously more popular in many continents, including North America. There is a number of old Polar Bear Clubs in the state of New York that engage hundreds of people in this healthy practice.
Winter swimming is a wonderful method of tempering the body, which increases the energetic strength of the organism. Statistics holds that among those who practice winter swimming sickness rates decrease for cold-type diseases 60 times. As a therapeutic method, winter swimming can heal many illnesses, including arthritis, hypertension, tuberculosis, type 2 diabetes, chronic gastrointestinal diseases, different inflammations, menstrual cycle abnormalities, dermatitis, and many others. Of course, everyone should receive proper instructions before jumping in the cold river at the local Polar Bear Club or from the literature.
Contrary to the popular belief, winter swimming is remarkably enjoyable. I usually start my day with a cold bath. After dipping in cold water I feel so good and refreshed that I cannot think of anything else being compatible with this pleasure. Try for yourself and enjoy the benefits!
ARE THERE HEALTH BENEFITS TO COLD WATER SWIMMING?
Wild swimmer Pete Roberts insists he’d now be dead had he not begun cold water swimming after suffering a ‘silent heart attack’ ten years ago.
Roberts, 61, from Runcorn, Cheshire (in England) says the benefit to his health has been so strong that when he stopped swimming briefly in February, his doctor told him off.
“He said cold water swimming was keeping me going, and that it was working my body as hard as a gym workout,” says Roberts.
He adds that at the time of his heart attack “I didn’t know how long I had” – which is why he opted to keep swimming the year round.
“I couldn’t make it all the way through the first winter, but the second winter I could,” he says. Now he usually stays in for “10-15 minutes, and can tolerate any temperature down to zero degrees”.
Roberts’s record time spent in six-degree water is 40 minutes. Roberts says the cold water leaves his arthritic knees “pain free for anything up to 24 hours after a swim”, adding that “various aches and twinges in other parts of my body seem to disappear as well”.
Roberts and his doctor are not alone in believing in the health advantages of cold water swimming; the body’s apparent ability to acclimatise to very cold temperatures not only allows swimmers to enjoy the open water all year round, but it’s also claimed to confer health benefi ts, including fewer colds, better circulation, healthier skin – and even an improved sex life.
And if swimming in cold water really does help to combat major killers like heart disease and cancer, then it’s surely time for all of us to sit up and pay attention.
But what is the truth, exactly? Does the human body really undergo physical changes that help it endure cold-water swimming? If so, does this process have knock-on benefits for our general health?
As anyone who has entered a festive dip will know, the body’s usual reaction to cold-water immersion consists of gasping and a rapid heart rate. It’s the cause of about 60 per cent of immersion deaths each year. Following the shock, you begin shivering, which creates warmth, yet this is an ineffi cient use of energy, and can’t be sustained for long.
Roberts believes his body has been conditioned to avoid these normal responses, a claim backed by Michael Tipton, professor of human and applied physiology at the University of Portsmouth. Professor Tipton has been researching this area for almost20 years, and says there is strong evidence for cold-water acclimatisation.
His experiments demonstrate that five daily 2-3 minute immersions can eliminate the cold shock response, and that even after 14 months without immersion, this brief acclimatisation still works at around 50 per cent. After ten exposures of 45 minutes,the professor has found that people stop shivering, too.
“Classically, people who are cold-acclimatised don’t have a big response when they go into the water; they don’t shiver a lot and they feel very comfortable,” says Tipton.
During experiments involving cold baths in the 1970s, channel swimmers sat in the frigid water, happily reading and chatting while control subjects next to them could barely speak for shivering.
Ironically, the conditioned swimmers were actually getting colder than their non-acclimatised counterparts – the difference being that their bodies had learned to function normally at lower temperatures.
However, the comfort lasts only within the times and temperatures that people are acclimatised to, after which the normal cold response kicks in.
Tipton says the perfect cold water swimmer would also combine a large body mass (which cools more slowly), plenty of subcutaneous fat (the layer just beneath the skin) and a high level of fitness. This is because the body can produce its own heat by burning energy, and is insulated by fat.
“If you then knock out the cold-shock response, then the person I have just described is someone like David Walliams or Lewis Gordon Pugh,” Tipton says.
One of endurance swimmer Pugh’s preparation team is Professor Timothy Noakes, Discovery Health professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town. He believes the key to cold acclimatisation is the reduction of blood flow to inactive parts of the body.
“We found that Lewis allowed his legs to become incredibly cold in the swims,” says professor Noakes. “His muscle temperature in his legs went down to 31 degrees centigrade, while he protected his core body temperature at about 36 degrees, and was therefore able to maintain consciousness.”
There is a widely held perception that cold-water swimmers develop more subcutaneous fat, but this is largely unfounded. However, recent research highlights the part ‘brown fat’ might play in cold adaptation. Unlike the ‘white fat’ with which we are more familiar, brown fat is a substance that burns energy rapidly, and therefore creates a lot of heat. For some time, it’s been known that brown fat exists in newborn babies and hibernating animals, and experiments show that when mice are repeatedly exposed to the cold, some of their white fat becomes brown.
It has also recently been shown that brown fat exists in adult humans, too – and that it shows more activity when we are exposed to the cold. But can cold-water swimming actually allow humans, like mice, to convert white into brown fat to help them stay warm?
“This is essentially speculation,” says Dr Alexander Bartelt, who has led several studies on brown fat at Hamburg-Eppendorf University, “but we are trying to establish an MRI-based method to detect this conversion in humans.”
Brown fat has generated much interest because of its energy-torching potential to help combat obesity. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an apparently exciting result regarding the health benefits of cold adaptation.
A Czech study in 1996, for example, found that winter swimmers had more white blood cells (key to the immune system), while a 1999 study involving Berlin winter swimmers found they had more antioxidants (these help fight cancer) than non-swimmers.
But Tipton urges caution about such studies: “For every study that shows something, there is one or two that show nothing.” He also says that there can be methodological problems: “They tend to make the comparison with people who do nothing. But you really need a matching group of warm-water swimmers.”
Cold-water adaptation follows the same principle as any other kind of habituation, which is that a repeated mild stress to our bodies produces physiological changes. With physical exercise, these include a host of benefi ts, such as better cardiovascular health and stimulating the endocrine (glandular) system, which together can significantly extend our active lives. But Tipton says there’s no evidence cold-water swimming creates benefits that go beyond these.
“There’s obviously a benefit to swimming,” he says. “But is there a bigger benefit to swimming in cold water than there is swimming in warm water? There’s no evidence for it.”
Professor Tilman Grune, one of the authors of the Berlin winter swimmers study, admits that his evidence is inconclusive: “You have to take into account that a lot of these people have a fairly healthy lifestyle anyway – many of them do some running before entering the cold water. So it is sometimes difficult to discriminate between the effects of their ice water swimming and their other activities.”
But one area where winter swimming definitely does differ from other exercise is in the intensity of the feel-good buzz it creates. Cold-water immersion causes large amounts of ‘stress hormones’ such as adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol – as well as endorphins (natural opioid painkillers) – to flood the brain.
Combined with the sensation of blood rushing back to the surface of the skin upon exiting this creates the euphoria reported by many winter swimmers. This natural high decreases with habituation, so an experienced winter swimmer like Roberts, for example, no longer experiences it. (“I feel refreshed, but that’s it,” he says.) But in any case, the most important long-term benefits of cold-water swimming are arguably psychological.
Jack Bright is a winter swimmer based in the Czech Republic, where the activity is an organised sport. Under the official regulations he can wear a swim cap, but boots and gloves are disallowed. He has previously swum for 20 minutes in 1-degree water, and says winter swimming is “good for the head”.
During his process of acclimatisation, Bright needed to swim 250 metres across a partially frozen lake of 1.5 degrees. “After 70 metres I had a very strange experience,” he says. “I hesitated a bit in the water, and thought ‘what’s happening to me?’ I saw the safety boat, and thought ‘I might have to quit, I’m not a winter swimmer,
I’m going to die, or something’. That happened in a split second, and then I went through it and finished the swim.”
The big challenge of very cold water is that it stimulates the body’s pain receptors, which can take longer to habituate than those that react to cold. Bright says anything under four degrees is “something different”. Tipton’s experiments were carried out with 10-15 degree water, and the fact that li_ le research has been done on very cold temperatures will surely encourage some cold water swimmers to continue to believe that their activity has special benefits –backed up by the sight of sprightly 80 and 90 year-old winter swimmers across the country.
But whatever the case, Tipton agrees the boost that comes from crossing a mental barrier is a real benefit from cold water swimming.
He says: “Cold water immersion is a fairly significant stress, and for a lot of people it’s the most obnoxious thing they will experience in their lives. Conquering that gives them confidence and a positive feeling about themselves.”
This article was first published in H2Open magazine.
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