There are millions of people who battle a health concern that impacts the heart. Many of these conditions can be helped by the healing heat of a sauna. One specific condition that a sauna can help with is high blood pressure.
When you have high blood pressure, your heart is working harder than it normally would to get the blood pumped throughout your body. Long term, this strain on your heart can impair its ability to function and the decline can take a toll on your entire body.
A suggested treatment that doctors often prescribe for people with high blood pressure is exercise. Though some people think high blood pressure is no big deal, it can lead to heart disease, heart attacks, stroke and kidney disease.
When your blood pressure numbers stay high, that means that damage is happening to your internal organs and you need to lower those numbers. But the problem with exercising is that many people don’t have the health to be able to exercise.
And there are times when exercising just isn’t feasible for some people for reasons not associated with health. Sometimes high blood pressure goes hand in hand with other issues that can make exercise a struggle and so people end up feeling a bit discouraged.
But there is another way that you can lower your blood pressure. Saunas can give you the cardiovascular benefit of exercise, especially if you use one on a regular basis. The way that saunas work to help people who’ve been diagnosed with high blood pressure has been shown in various medical studies.
The heat from the steam in a sauna causes the blood vessels to relax and what this does is allow the blood to flow easier, faster and more freely. It immediately lowers the blood pressure.
You end up feeling better and your heart isn’t working as hard. Studies have also shown that the regular use of a sauna can lower certain conditions that can put your heart at risk.
One of these conditions is cholesterol numbers that aren’t conducive to good heart health. A sauna can help lower the total cholesterol count and that means that you’ll lower your risk of developing heart disease or having a heart attack.
And the use of a sauna doesn’t just lower your cholesterol, it can help to raise the level of your HDL or the good cholesterol. The reason that a sauna can do this is because the elevated temperatures in the sauna make your heart beat faster, it pumps more oxygen throughout the body just like it does when you exercise.
It has the same cholesterol lowering potential that a workout can give you. Helping your heart with issues like high blood pressure and cholesterol aren’t the only health areas where a sauna can bring healing.
Medical studies have shown that saunas can help those who struggle with heart failure. The regular use of a sauna can boost the ability of the heart to function. When someone who has been diagnosed with heart failure uses a sauna five out of the seven days in a week for between 15 to 20 minutes, his or her heart is greatly benefited.
The benefit that it gives is that the heart can pump blood more easily. The inability to pump blood easily is one of the reasons that heart failure is so devastating. When your body doesn’t get the right amount of blood supply, it means that your organs aren’t getting the proper amount of oxygen.
With that reduced oxygen ability, it’s more difficult for someone who has heart failure to be able to exercise because they end up feeling winded very quickly. Since a sauna can give the same benefits as exercise, this helps their heart be able to work better.Studies have shown that people with heart failure who do regularly use a sauna can experience an increase in their ability to do tasks as well as exercise. Studies have also shown that the regular use of saunas can work to stimulate the production of certain cells that can improve the heart’s ability to function.