Cold-water swimming: what you can do to acclimatise to the temperature

With the growth in outdoor swimming during the pandemic, and with more people trying it out this winter, the question of whether the body gets used to cold temperatures if you swim often is much debated.

The short answer is “it can”. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Your body can acclimatise to cold if you repeatedly swim outside, but whether or not this is a good thing depends on what happens to the body’s adverse responses.