Many felt the burning sensation and consequences of pushing themselves with delayed muscle soreness. But is there a way to reduce muscular pain after a workout and speed up recovery? There are many methods you can use to do this, like stretching or taking recovery supplements. However, in recent years, infrared sauna therapy has been used to speed up recovery. Keep reading to learn more about how infrared saunas increase recovery post-workout.
What is an infrared sauna?
Infrared saunas have a similar setup to traditional saunas in that they have a room you would sit in for a long time. However, infrared saunas utilise infrared light to heat your body directly instead of steam. You may not know it, but your body is exposed to infrared light daily from the sun. With an infrared sauna, this light is more concentrated and controlled. The light waves gently warm your body, deeply penetrating your skin and muscle tissue. Infrared saunas usually operate at lower temperatures than traditional saunas, too, reaching temperatures of between 43°C to 60°C on average.
The difference between Saunas
Currently, there are three main types of saunas used in conventional gyms or health centres: a traditional sauna, an infrared sauna, and a steam room. While they may seem fairly similar, here are their differences:
- Traditional Sauna: Uses heated rocks or steam to warm the air. The air gets very hot, and you sweat because of the hot environment
- Infrared Sauna: Uses infrared light to heat your body directly, not the air. It feels gentler, and the temperature is lower. You still sweat, but it happens because your body is heating up from the inside
- Steam Room: Filled with steam, which helps with congestion and skin hydration, but doesn’t raise your core temperature the same way as a sauna
Benefits of using an infrared sauna after a workout
Infrared saunas have some clear benefits for athletes and fitness enthusiasts, especially post-workout. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits that using an infrared sauna offers you after a workout:
- Speed up recovery
After an intense workout, it’s common for our bodies to fatigue and store large amounts of lactic acid, which slowly works out of our system as we recover. Unfortunately, during this process, our muscles can often feel sore and have difficulty moving. The deep, penetrating heat from an infrared sauna helps increase blood flow, transporting more oxygen and nutrients to the muscles to kickstart the healing process. This can reduce muscle soreness and stiffness and speed up your overall recovery.
- Improves blood circulation
While we’ve already touched on how improved blood circulation carries more nutrients and oxygen to your muscles to help speed up recovery, this isn’t its only benefit. When you’re exposed to the heat from infrared light, your blood vessels dilate, allowing larger volumes of blood to flow through them at a time. This results in your body’s entire circulatory system improving, including its ability to remove waste products, namely, lactic acid, which is often considered one of the chemicals contributing to muscle soreness and fatigue.
- It gets you sweating
Aside from alleviating muscle pain after exercise, using a sauna can help you work up a sweat. As you sweat, your body removes toxins like heavy metals, chemicals, or other impurities.
- Helps you relax
Post-workout stress can keep your nervous system in overdrive. The calming heat from an infrared sauna can help your body shift into “rest and recovery” mode. It helps lower cortisol (the stress hormone), slow your heart rate, and ease both mental and physical tension.
Book an infrared sauna session in Brisbane
The main challenge with infrared therapy is that people often don’t know where to go for it. Stretching can be done at home, but using an infrared sauna needs to be done at a professional facility. If you’re in the same boat, we recommend looking at the private infrared saunas in Brisbane at TH7 Body Labs. Here, you won’t only have access to the infrared saunas but also a range of other therapies that can assist you with recovery and a team of professionals to help you use them safely and correctly.
Final thoughts
While there is still more research to be done on the impact of infrared saunas on our health, the fact that infrared light assists in recovery has reasonable evidence to back it. If you’re training hard and need a solution to recover faster, using an infrared sauna may be your answer.
