Personally, I think that for some people who are used to swimming in cold water, are able to calculate their strengths and enjoy it, winter swims are normal. In the end, everyone has the right to some kind of hobby. But to medicine, such an extreme has a weak relationship.
Bathing in the Epiphany ice hole is often confused with hardening, although hardening can only be regular. They can not be engaged once a year. Strictly speaking, modern medicine, in principle, does not know how useful hardening is, because major studies on this topic have not been conducted.
However, many doctors believe that a short and regular stay in the cold helps the immune system, especially in children, but the use of more extreme options for hardening (such as winter walrus) is quite doubtful.
I do not want to disappoint readers, but from a medical point of view, there is no particular sense in swimming in ice water in January. We like to think that health problems can be solved in one fell swoop – jump into the hole, take a “magic” pill or slightly change the diet. In real life, this does not happen, and even if you “just” want to lead a healthy lifestyle, you need to do a ton of everything.
For example, maintain an adequate level of physical activity, eat right, periodically visit a doctor and follow his recommendations. It is naive to think that if you plunge into an ice hole, you can improve your health and do nothing else.
And so – if you decide to swim in the ice hole and at the same time do not get a cold or some other chronic diseases, then your business. There are not many recommendations here: quickly undress, do not sit in the water for more than a couple of tens of seconds, and then quickly wrap yourself in a towel and dress. Rubbing the body with a towel is not worth it – you can damage the skin. Try to quickly get warm – you’ll warm yourself there. No alcohol. No barefoot walking in the snowdrifts (treating frostbite is an unpleasant occupation). Stay away from coughing people around you – after hypothermia, the body is more susceptible to infections.
If something hurts or you just cured, it’s better to refrain from such feats, because the consequences can be very different: from pneumonia to kidney diseases and even pressure surges. A warm winter should not reassure you – at a temperature near zero it is easier to catch a cold than at minus 20.
And finally, for some, baptismal bathing is a kind of shake-up, an incentive for further action. Like, you need to swim in the hole and after that start a new, healthy life – go in for sports, not overeat, and so on. Efficiency here is also not guaranteed, it is not without reason that psychologists say that changes are better to be carried out gradually – it is easier to get used to them.
Ultimately, in the fulfillment of such promises, everything depends on willpower – otherwise the promise made when diving into an ice hole will turn out to be as unreliable as those that we love to give out before the New Year.
