Saunas are a good way to relax and relieve stress. The steam from a sauna can ease the strain on muscles and calm the mind. You’ll feel a noticeable difference in the way that you feel as those aches and pains melt away.
These are both immediate benefits that you gain when you use one. But that’s not all that you’ll get. There are long standing medical studies that link the use of saunas to some pretty incredible long term heart health benefits.
The Way Saunas Work
You might have enjoyed the use of a sauna before and felt extremely relaxed afterward. Maybe you know that saunas are great for helping you to lessen the stress, but you might not really understand all the various ways that a sauna can help your heart. Saunas begin on the outside with the benefits that they offer. The first thing that they do is cause you to sweat. This is the kind of sweat that people don’t normally do and one of the reasons is because no one really likes to do the kind of outside activities that cause them to get as hot and sweaty as you get in a sauna.
Being inside in air conditioning houses or gyms and working out won’t give you the same king of health benefits that a sauna can through sweating. Thanks to the elevated temperature in a sauna, your body immediately begins to expel toxins.
This occurs because when your body temperature becomes elevated, it forces the blood to reach the surface of the skin. This is a normal process that your body uses to keep itself from overheating.
But what happens when you sweat in a sauna is all those toxins and chemicals and junk are being drawn out of your body and this helps your heart to not have to work so hard. Your skin is the body’s largest organ and its purpose is to protect you and that includes your heart.
But when your skin isn’t treated well, it can’t do the job it’s supposed to do. Most people think that regular bathing and treating the skin with lotions or other products is enough, but it’s not.
When you put lotions and other products on your skin, it can interfere with the process your body uses to get rid of bacteria. This can make your skin look older and not feel as soft.
What sweating does is to cleanse out the layers of the skin and revitalize it, leaving the skin free to work properly to fight off invaders, bacteria and get rid of toxins. The heat from a sauna can often help treat skin conditions as well.
Also by using a sauna, your skin works the way it should and frees up the heart from having to work overtime to try to get the toxins out. Because the time that you spend in a sauna helps the body get rid of stress, this offers a world of benefit to your heart.
Stress is one of the major factors in a lot of conditions and diseases that impact your heart. The flood of cortisol can damage your organs as they try to deal with the influx of this stress hormone, and if it’s done on a continual basis, you’ll have even more damage to your heart.