Entering a sweat-inducing steam room after perspiring on the treadmill doesn’t seem exactly pleasant, but you might want to consider doing just that. Exercise gives your body and mind so many amazing health benefits, but you can compound those benefits by visiting a steam room right afterwards. Let’s learn a bit more!

Are Steam Rooms and Saunas the Same?

Many people use the terms steam room and sauna interchangeably, although they are slightly different. Steam rooms and saunas both heat the body for relaxation and health benefits, but with one major difference – humidity. Steam rooms heat the body using moist, humid air. They usually boast 100 percent humidity. Temperatures range from 100 °F to 114 °F.

Saunas use dry air, with a lower humidity of between 5 to 30 percent. Temperatures in saunas are typically hotter than steam rooms, usually in the range of 160 °F to 200 °F. Many health benefits are shared between these two methods of heat-immersion bathing..

Here are just some of the many benefits of using a steam room after a workout:

Relieve your Tired Muscles

Working out can sometimes lead to tired muscles, especially if you push yourself to do exercises your body isn’t used to. Heat therapy has long been used to sooth sore muscles. A steam room is like using a heat pack on your whole body. A study from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, showed that steam rooms and saunas can help athletes recover from strength and endurance training.¹A Japanese study found that heat bathing also effectively helped patients diagnosed with chronic pain.²

Feel More Relaxed

Modern life is full of stress. Work, family demands, technology, and excessive worrying can take a toll on your mental and physical health. Exercise is a great way to relieve some of that stress. Using a steam room after exercising can help you relieve even more stress by putting you into a state similar to meditation. Some steam room advocates even say visiting a steam room helps them sleep better at night by making them more relaxed during the day.

The heat from the sauna causes the body to release endorphin’s and other ‘feel good’ chemicals that reduce the feeling of stress on the body. Many people feel rejuvenated and calm after they leave sauna and steam rooms, and are ready to tackle the rest of the day. 

Make your skin glow

Using your home steam shower can benefit your overall skin health. This occurs by bringing blood flow to the surface of your skin before you start sweating.

Regular sauna use makes the skin more robust, meaning it sort of firms it up and makes it more elastic, which is good for aesthetic reasons, but also because the skin acts like a general health barrier.

Relief from stiff joints and sore muscles

Using your steam shower is beneficial for workout recovery, as it’s going to result in loosening up any tense muscles after a workout.

The heat can make your muscles more pliable and elastic, so it would probably help with workout recovery soreness. Anecdotally, people with stiff joints and body aches also swear by saunas for easing pain. Steam showers use can also help with tension-type headaches, likely because it reduces muscle soreness that contributes to them.

Lower your blood pressure

In a steam room, some people’s bodies release hormones that result in a change to their heart rate. One of these hormones, called aldosterone, regulates your blood pressure. When aldosterone is released from sitting in the steam room, it can help you to lower your high blood pressure. This is part of the reason that the steam room makes you feel relaxed.

Remove Toxins in your body

The heat from our steam shower makes your body sweat. Sweating relieves the body of any toxins that are stored. It is known that sitting in a sauna or steam room for around twenty minutes can rid the body of the day’s sweat and waste products.

Find our more about installing a steam room here.