‘As good as an orgasm’: how to go wild swimming in winter

Wild swimming has become almost tediously fashionable recently, and no heatwave is really complete without a flood of articles on how it feels to take a dip in the outdoors (and even more tedious ones about how ‘in my day, we just called it swimming’ from people fortunate enough not to have grown up with chlorine and floating plasters as their introduction to the water. But the strange thing is that as the weather chills, so does the trendy interest, even though winter swimming is far more fun – and even better for you – than its summer equivalent.

Only recently we’ve seen more research suggesting there is a ‘cold-shock’ protein found in regular winter swimmers which could slow the onset of dementia. Researchers at the University of Cambridge ran a study of winter swimmers at Parliament Hill Lido in London over three years, and found elevated levels of a protein called RBM3, which had slowed brain cell deaths in mice in an earlier experiment.