4 Powerful Sauna After Exercise Benefits

You might be a professional athlete or a 50-year-old high-performer who wants to improve their recovery after workouts, or you may be injured and want to heal as quickly as possible.

Or, you may simply want to relax after an intense exercise session.

In all of these cases, you're probably thinking about "what's the ultimate sauna after exercise routine?"

And: "what benefits do I get by getting into a sound after an intense workout session?".

In this blog post, I'll describe 4 benefits you'll get by using an infrared sauna after your workouts:

Sauna After Exercise For More Power

No matter what sport you're practising - unless it's a mental sport like chess or gaming - you'll never have enough power and endurance.

And sure, even in chess or gaming, you'd better be in perfect physical shape because your physical performance affects your mental performance and vice versa.

Let's break down the results of some studies:

In one study, participants bathed in a 35-50 degrees Celsius far infrared sauna for 30 minutes, at a maximum humidity of 35% (1).

The participants who used an infrared study in this sauna had an improved "countermovement jump", 30 minutes after the sauna session, compared to participants who didn't use a sauna.

The countermovement jump is a classical test for explosive power.

Meaning?

Well, explosive performance is a key indicator of how you're doing in sports like soccer, football, baseball, sprints, martial arts, and many others.

If your countermovement jump improves - a key indicator of explosive athletic performance - your overall performance goes up.

Studies that are exclusively performed on traditional saunas, however, also show improvements in endurance.

For instance, using a traditional sauna improves overall endurance, such as "increased run time to exhaustion by 32% [...]. Plasma and red-cell volumes increased by 7.1% (5.6-8.7%) and 3.5% (-0.8% to 8.1%) respectively, after sauna relative to control."(2).

In plain English, the ability to run for long periods of time improves, which can potentially be explained through an increase in the oxygen-carrying number of red blood cells.

Remember that a greater number of red blood cells, and greater quality, ensures that your body is more easily transporting oxygen throughout your body, which is a precondition for energy production.

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