Infrared sauna

How infrared heat works

A traditional sauna is a hot box: the stove heats the air, the air heats you, and you have to endure a room hot enough to do that. The limiting factor is usually how it feels to breathe.

Infrared skips the air. The emitters produce infrared light in wavelengths your body absorbs directly, warming your tissue from the surface inward. Because you are not relying on hot air as the carrier, the cabin can sit thirty to fifty degrees cooler and still raise your core temperature and produce a solid sweat.

For most people that means the same effect with a much easier half hour.

What thirty minutes actually does

Heat makes tissue more compliant. Warm muscle stretches further with less resistance, which is why heat helps a stiff back and why a session before an adjustment can leave you easier to work on. Blood flow to the skin and superficial muscle increases as your body works to shed the heat.

Then there is the part nobody measures well but everyone reports: half an hour in a warm dark box with nothing to do is a genuine break, in a way that half an hour on a sofa with a phone is not. People come out of it calmer, and calmer people sleep better.

Which is worth saying plainly — a good deal of the value here is that you are warm, still and unreachable for thirty minutes. That is not a lesser benefit.

Practicalities

Sessions run thirty minutes and cost $30 for the cabin, which seats up to four. A complimentary shower is included and we recommend using it; you will want it.

Come hydrated and drink afterwards. Wear whatever you like. If you are new to it, sit for twenty minutes rather than thirty on the first visit and see how you feel.

You do not have to be a chiropractic patient to book the sauna. Plenty of people use it purely on its own, particularly through a Minnesota winter, and that is entirely fine.

Alongside your care

If you are being treated for something chronically tight, timing helps. Booking a sauna session ahead of an adjustment means arriving with tissue that is warm and willing rather than braced, and most people find the adjustment more comfortable that way. Ask at the desk and we will line the two up.