The “wild swimming” trend — aka open-water swimming, or taking dips in lakes, rivers, streams or even the sea — isn't exactly new. Still, it has been increasing in popularity over the past decade, ...

Wild swimming has grown massively in popularity in recent times. Not only is swimming outdoors a pleasant way to enjoy the sunshine, fresh air and green leafy surroundings, it can also help to relieve ...

Fancy diving into the exhilarating world of wild swimming? Maybe you don’t have the best wild swimming gear already. But if you’ve got a half-decent swimsuit and a towel to dry off with afterwards ...

Preparing to jump out of the second-floor window and into the river below, I felt the acute sense that my anxiety was about to be washed away. It was a balmy July day in perhaps the most ...

Want more tried and tested recommendations from the Editors of Women’s Health? Sign up to our new weekly newsletter The Edit. Click here to subscribe. You can barley scroll Insta these days without ...

It was nostalgia, not a desire to clear my head that first drew me to outdoor swimming in my 30s. I’d grown up close to water and spent my childhood at the beach, neck deep in the North Sea. The ...

People have been swimming in bodies of water since the dawn of time. Whether it’s a lake, ocean, or river, it’s human nature to want to take a dip. But be honest — when was the last time you actually ...

The water below me is 11ºC, which doesn’t appear to bother the ducks sailing past, preening themselves in the morning mist. Around me, a few other regulars are making their slow descent into the ...

Primrose Freestone, senior lecturer in clinical microbiology at the University of Leicester looks at the growing trend of wild swimmining and whether fears of germs and unwanted bacteria are founded.