I first heard of the benefits of cold water exposure about 20 years ago when I used to work with a national hockey team in the UK. After the games, we asked the guys to stand in large plastic tubs to reduce the swelling in their knees and legs. About 10 years ago, I started learning more about cold water’s whole-body health benefits and decided to try it. Back then, I was living in Calgary, Canada, and almost no one outside the athletic community had heard about it or would even contemplate it. When I suggested getting a community of people together to do some cold water therapy, I had just 1 taker….that was after an email to 10,000 people!

However, I went back last Christmas and wanted to see if the cold-water immersion attitude had changed. After a quick search on Facebook, I found a community of polar plunges and was instantly added to their WhatsApp group and asked to join their weekly winter plunge. 

Why the change in attitudes?

A lot of credit goes to the Dutch crazy man Wim Hof. This guy has held numerous world records for anything to do with ice and cold and continues to spread the word about the Wim Hof Method. A system of breathing coupled with cold water exposure has been proven to modulate the immune system.

As science is ever-evolving, it seems that a month can’t go by without more research being conducted into the health benefits of cold water.

When it comes to research, there are many ways to do it, but for simplicity’s sake, there are 2 broad categories to understand.  

1. Original research – this is the classic science experiment we all tried back at school. We have a hypothesis, run the experiment and publish the results. Some of these are better than others. For example, in human studies, the more people there are in the study means, the more reliable the results will be. With the significant variation in the quality of this type of research, we need another way of telling us what’s worth paying attention to. This is where systematic reviews come in.
2. Systematic reviews. This is a form of research that brings together all the experiments and analyses them. They generally have inclusion and exclusion criteria that mean they are dealing with ‘high quality’ experiments so that when they publish their conclusions, they are pretty sure that what they say is scientific fact.

Recently a systematic review of 104 studies was conducted out of the UiT UiT The Arctic University of Norway and from the University Hospital of North Norway(1). 

They published their findings in the Journal of Circumpolar Health and noticed that regular icy dips could promote the development of ‘good’ fat. This good fat is metabolically active, which means it burns calories and keeps us warm. The development of this type of fat, also known as brown fat, helps reduce insulin resistance and improve insulin sensitivity. This helps ward off diabetes and protects against cardiovascular, obesity, and other metabolic diseases.

Not bad for something that is essentially free. All you need to do is turn the dial on the shower one way rather than the other.

For me, though, I find that there are other benefits. I feel as though I have more energy and am mentally more precise and stronger in my immune system. So much so that I’ve converted a chest freezer solely for bathing in it; this has allowed me to become extremely regular with my dips and also introduce lots of friends to the benefits of a cold water dip.

Let me know if you enjoy the benefits of cold water bathing!

Source:

1. https://en.uit.no/news/article?p_document_id=789063

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