Blog by All Weather Leisure

How a Hot Tub, Swim Spa, Infrared Sauna and Ice Bath Can Transform Your Wellness

While it often gets pushed down the list of priorities, a good recovery routine is fundamental to any effective fitness or injury management plan. To neglect recovery can lead to overtraining, longer healing times, an increased risk of injury, and diminished overall wellbeing.

After exercise, especially intense workouts, the body undergoes significant stress. Proper recovery allows the body to repair and rebuild, leading to increased strength and improved performance. When recovering from an injury, rest and rehabilitation are crucial for healing, restoring function and preventing re-injury. Whether you’re a seasoned athlete, a fitness enthusiast, or simply someone seeking to enhance their overall wellbeing, optimising your recovery can significantly impact your physical and mental health. But what if you could take your recovery schedule to another level? The good news is, there are many accessible ways to revolutionise your recovery.

Let’s explore how incredible wellness tools like hot tubs, swim spas, ice baths and infrared saunas can help unlock a happier and healthier you.

Hot tubs

With their powerful waterjets, hot tubs can make an important contribution to your recovery routine. The jets and warm water of a hot tub combine for hydrotherapy, which has many benefits, including:

Muscle relaxation and pain relief

• Warm water helps dilate blood vessels to improve circulation, which helps to deliver oxygen and essential nutrients to muscles and tissues. This helps to loosen tight muscles, prevent muscle spasms and reduce pain.
• The buoyancy of water also helps to take pressure off joints and exercise, or when recovering from injury, as well as providing relief for people suffering with arthritis or other joint related issues.

Stress reduction and improved sleep quality

• Soaking in a hot tub helps promote relaxation and can help to reduce stress and anxiety, relaxing the body and the mind.
• The change in body temperature from hot to cool also helps prepare the body for sleep. Sleep is an essential part of recovery, so using a hot tub before bed can have a very positive effect.

Essentially, a hot tub creates a soothing environment that promotes both physical and mental recovery. Hydrotherapy aids your body in repairing itself naturally, whilst also helping your mind to relax, and promoting a higher quality of sleep.

Swim spas

Swim spas offer a unique blend of exercise and relaxation to aid recovery:

Resistance swimming

• The adjustable current of a swim spa provides control over swimming, allowing for as challenging a workout as you need.
• Resistance training such as swimming helps to build muscle strength and endurance, whilst also improving cardiovascular health. Building strength and fitness contributes to preventing future injuries.

Low impact workouts for injury prevention

• Whilst swim spas provide a current to swim against, the buoyance of water reduces impact on joints compared with other types of resistance training, such as running.
• Low impact exercise is especially beneficial for those recovering from injuries or suffering with joint problems, and helps people to maintain fitness levels while minimising the risk of further injury.

Hydrotherapy

• Swim spas also provide the same benefits of a hot tub, with hydrotherapy jets that provide targeted massage for sore muscles.
• These jets help to relieve muscle tension, reduce pain, and promote relaxation, combined with the benefits of warm water, such as improved circulation.

Swim spas provide a very versatile way for the body to recover from exercise or rehabilitate after injury, providing a combination of exercise and relaxation that promotes healing and pain reduction, whilst also maintaining fitness and overall wellbeing.

Infrared saunas

Infrared saunas offer the same benefits as traditional saunas, using infrared light and waves to heat the body directly, rather than relying on hot stones to heat the air around you. They have many benefits for recovery, including:

Detoxification through sweating

• Saunas are designed to induce deep sweating, which helps the body to eliminate toxins and other waste products, contributing to faster recovery and better overall wellbeing.

Improved circulation for pain relief and muscle recovery

• Infrared heat penetrates directly into the body’s tissues, causing the blood vessels to dilate for better circulation. This helps oxygen and essential nutrients to reach muscles and injured areas to promote healing, and reduce inflammation.
• The deep heat of saunas also helps to relax the muscles, and alleviate pain, which is especially beneficial to people experiencing muscle soreness after exercise or recovering from injuries.

Relaxation

• Sauna use promotes relaxation and reduces stress, both of which can hinder the healing process. 

Modern Jacuzzi infrared saunas provide a gentle but effective way to support natural healing processes, combining well with other therapies.

Ice baths

Chill Tubs ice baths are another powerful recovery tool. Utilising the principles of cryotherapy (cold water immersion), there are many benefits to introducing ice baths to your recovery routine:

Reduced inflammation and muscle soreness

• Cold water constricts blood vessels, helping to reduce inflammation and swelling in the muscles and joints.
• After intense exercise, the construction of blood vessels contributes to reducing muscle soreness, and helps promote faster recovery.

Improved circulation

• Whilst initially constricting blood vessels, the body’s response to cold water immersion is to then increase blood flow to warm the core. 
• This process is known as reactive hyperemia which helps to flush out metabolic waste products from the muscles and deliver fresh oxygenated blood to the tissues.

Reduced pain

• Cold water helps reduce pain by numbing nerve endings.

If you are new to using ice baths, it’s important to start gradually, initially with shorter immersion times of only a minute or two, gradually increasing the duration of your cold plunge sessions as you become more accustomed to the cold. It’s important to avoid staying in an ice bath for more than 10 or 15 minutes, and you should always listen to your body, exiting the bath if you start to feel uncomfortable.

Creating a comprehensive recovery routine

A multi-faceted approach to recovery helps to optimise the body’s natural healing processes. A swim spa, hot tub, sauna and ice bath work very well together as part of a comprehensive recovery routine. Combining and strategically sequencing various therapies helps to maximise the results of each, contributing to successful recovery after exercise, or from injury.

If you have access to a swim spa and have a session of resistance swimming to improve your fitness and flexibility, adjusting the current gradually to lower resistance is excellent for a gentle cool down. Following exercise, hydrotherapy jets from a swim spa or hot tub promote muscle relaxation, and a soak in the warm water can further soothe tight muscles and reduce stress.

An infrared sauna session can aid deep tissue relaxation and promote better circulation, and a brief ice bath session can be incorporated to minimise inflammation from injury or after exercise. 

It’s important to customise your recovery to best address your individual needs and goals, making sure to pay attention to your body. Consistency is also important – sticking to a regular routine helps aid your recovery, so learn what works best for your body, and follow that plan.

Invest in your recovery and wellbeing

Whether you are a high-level athlete, or simply doing what you can to take the best care of your body, at All Weather Leisure, we can supply and advise on a wide range of products from leading manufacturers to help you stay fit and ensure your body recovers well from exercise, and from injury.

Browse our website or visit our hot tub showroom in Staffordshire, or our location in Shropshire to find out more about Jacuzzi hot tubs and swim spas, along with Jacuzzi infrared saunas and Chill Tubs ice baths.