Do hot baths improve endurance? Will creatine bolster your brain power? Does pickle juice prevent cramp? Here’s what we learned about living well this year
Sun 28 Dec 2025 06.00 GMT
The best advice for living a healthy, well-adjusted life – eat your vegetables, get a good night’s sleep, politely decline when the Jägerbombs appear – never really changes. Other nuggets, such as how much protein you should be eating or how to maximise workouts, seem to change every year. But as we wonder whether we should really give sauerkraut another go, science marches on, making tiny strides towards improving our understanding of what’s helpful. Here’s what you might have missed in the research this year, from the best reason to eat beetroot, to how to ruin your five-a-side performance before the game even starts. There’s still time to break out the pickle juice shots before 2026 …
Collagen might help you jump higher
Collagen’s effects on your skin might be slightly overstated – a 2023 review of more than two dozen trials concluded that supplementation has benefits for hydration and elasticity, but the effects aren’t huge. However, there’s another reason to take it: a 16-week trial on healthy young men, the results of which were published in July, found it can enhance muscle-tendon stiffness, which appears to improve explosive strength. Start with 10g a day: you might not look any younger on the pickleball court, but there’s a chance you’ll improve your Erne shot.
Hot baths might be the next best thing to training up a mountain …
If you want to do altitude training to improve your endurance in the UK, you’re out of luck – even Ben Nevis, at 1,345 metres (4,413ft) tall, is a bit short of the 2,000 metres or so where oxygen really starts to thin. But there might be another option: a study published in May on cross-adaptation, where the training effects from one stressor (such as heat) might carry over to another (such as altitude), put 20 well-trained adults on a high-intensity interval training programme and then dunked half of them in hot water after their sessions. After six weeks, they tested the athletes under low-oxygen conditions and found the hot-bath gang’s time to exhaustion was 25% longer than the control group’s. Jumping in a 42C bath after a bunch of sprint intervals probably isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time – and proper hydration is crucial – but if you’re training for an altitude-based race, it’s worth trying.
… and cold after training is probably bad
If you’ve spent time on Fitstagram, you’ll have seen people jumping into everything from Alpine lakes to wheelie bins full of ice to boost post-training recovery – but evidence is mounting that it might have the opposite effect. A study published in September found that when young athletes plunged one leg into chilly water after a resistance workout it reduced blood flow and the delivery of amino acids – which would actually stunt, rather than promote, muscle growth.
Read the full article: Soak it up: everything science taught us about health and wellness in 2025 | Life and style | The Guardian