When you want a change of pace and are seeking a weird new way to work out those winter kinks, here’s an array of 17 strange sports that you do in the cold. Most require limited equipment and almost no training, just like all the best things in life. It is true that hospital admissions do rise during heatwaves and that many of these patients will be older. This is not one of the best cold weather sports for those faint of heart, a little bit of hang-gliding and parasailing coupled with careening down a hill. Anyone who fears heights, speed, danger, or embracing death by tree might want to give this a miss. Anyone else: get a parachute, get some skis, get a big hill, and get your will updated and notarized. Snowmobile Jumping View in gallery via desktopimages.org

The amateur version of this is the polar bear contests held every year where grizzled old men tempt death by heart failure by leaping into the freezing water in their skivvies. However, for real cold weather sports enthusiasts, there is an upgraded version. All you need is insulated diving equipment and a desire to see sea life under the ice. Speed Flying AKA Blade Running View in gallery via infinitelegroom.com You should only open the windows if the air outside is cooler than the air inside, which is most likely to happen at night. In really hot weather, you should close the windows during the day. Because there’s more shade indoors the air might even be cooler. Even if you can get a breeze to flow through your home or office, if it’s a hot breeze it won’t cool you down and when the pollen count is high it could make hayfever worse. Please, be careful engaging in these activities, as they can all be mortally hazardous. Ski Ballet View in gallery via bustle.com These were all small studies, though, and they weren’t looking specifically at body temperature, so we can’t prove that beer cools you down. But they do show that one or maybe two small beers can still hydrate rather than dehydrate you. So perhaps that single beer in Ice Cold in Alex was worth the wait.In the 1958 film Ice Cold in Alex, Sir John Mills’ character looks forward to escaping the desert and drinking an ice-cold beer. When he eventually arrives, he sits at the bar and is served a glass of lager. Downing it, he famously says: “Worth waiting for.”

Fans are less effective when it’s humid. Although the air is still moved around, it’s already laden with moisture, making it harder for the sweat to evaporate. Fans are used widely. One case report even gives an example of three patients with heatstroke who were cooled down using the downdraft from a light helicopter.Drinking plenty of liquid is the right thing to do during a heatwave: it’s essential to stay hydrated to protect the kidneys. But there is debate over whether that drink should be ice-cold or hot. What we do know is that fans aren’t always a foolproof solution. In a 1999 heatwave in Cincinnati, 17 people died – and 10 had fans which were switched on when the people were found dead. Of course, what we don’t know is if they would have died sooner without the fans, or if the reason these people had bought fans was that they lived in the hottest buildings. But there is one possible problem with these findings and that’s the the method used to measure the temperature. The brave volunteers were given rectal thermometers. As Ollie Jay, associate professor in thermoregulatory physiology at the University of Ottawa, has pointed out, the liquid from a cold drink goes straight to the stomach, not far away from the rectal thermometer. It’s little wonder, therefore, that the temperature appears to go down.