One of the downsides of staying on top of your personal fitness regime is that sore muscles can often be an unwelcome distraction that can plague the days after a physical session with unwanted pain and tightness.
There is, however, a better way to help your body heal its sore muscles and accelerate your recovery - and it’s arguably the most relaxing and comfortable way to do it.
Saunas, in particular, infrared saunas have been proven to be beneficial when it comes to helping your sore muscles heal, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
In previous blog posts, we’ve covered how saunas can be a great treatment for acne, a way of detoxifying your body, burning through calories, and fortifying your lymphatic system to help your body fight pathogens with a strengthened immune system.
These health benefits have been backed up with peer-reviewed medical studies, and illustrate the many ways you can treat injuries and diseases with the use of an infrared sauna.
Today we’re going to be focusing on the topic of sore muscles, and how you can treat your sore muscles in comfort and style with the use of an infrared sauna.
The health benefits of infrared saunas reach far and wide, but first, let’s first discuss what a sauna does to our muscles, and how they help to repair sore, tired muscles in a short period of time.
What Does A Sauna Do To Your Muscles?
If you’ve wrapped up a strenuous workout and your muscles are feeling sore, stepping inside an infrared sauna can be one of the best ways to relieve the pain and tightness of sore muscles.
A study found that saunas helped to increase blood flow and relieve tension in the joints and sore muscles of those living with chronic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis over a four-week period.
This pain relief is largely driven by the dilation of your blood vessels, as well as the increased rate at which your body pumps blood as your cardiovascular and lymphatic systems are both prompted to accelerate inside the sauna.
Exposure to heat, be it with a traditional or infrared sauna provides relief for muscle tension during recovery, and helps provide it with the conditions and nutrients needed for an accelerated recovery phase.
Dr Rhonda Perciavalle-Patrick, PhD says that boosting your body’s heat-shock protein levels “is a clear win in the injury and recovery department.”
How Do Saunas Help Muscles?
Saunas, particularly infrared saunas are extremely helpful at tackling the aches and pains of sore muscles after a workout.
This is due to the fact that inside an infrared sauna, the increased blood circulation helps to carry off the metabolic waste products your body built up during exercise.
This increased circulation of oxygen and nutrient-rich blood helps your body recover its oxygen-depleted muscle tissues, and helps to accelerate how quickly you repair those tired, aching muscles.
Muscles relax best when tissues are warm, and this allows greater mobility, flexibility and range of motion from that muscle.
Far infrared heat relieves this muscle tension, which, combined with the deep heat of far infrared light inside the sauna, helps your body’s peripheral blood vessels dilate.
This in turn relieves the majority of the pain associated with sore muscles, as the tissue ditches the post-workout waste products and is replenished by fresh blood, and nutrients and is energised by a higher operating temperature which lowers the pressure in the muscle tissue.
It’s worth noting that infrared energy also helps to reduce soreness within and between nerve endings, which helps in combating the symptoms of muscle spasms while the joints and connecting fibres become warm and energised from the infrared light.