"Dude, my head is killing me!" my Dutch friend Jitte winces in pain. We are at a swimming pool in Amsterdam. Last hour I saw his blurred figure popping in and out of the sauna and steam rooms like Woody Woodpecker. I nip my urge to preach in the bud and just rub his shiatsu points with some Tiger Balm.
See, I was brought up with saunas and steam baths. In Russia it is a natural place to get warm and socialise when it's cold and snowing out there. You grow up with the whole "banya" ritual and you take it seriously. There are ground rules that you obey for a good reason.
1. Take it slow.
The temperature in the sauna is 90 degrees, your blood curdles at 45. Your body goes through a massive shock and goes into an emergency mode. It starts sweating profusely trying to prevent your blood from turning into black pudding. The situation is a bit extreme but it is a calculated risk. This is how we trick our body into sweating out the toxins that normally would just stay trapped inside.
Give your body ample time to come around. Just like working out shocks your muscles to grow later when you eat and rest, sauna heat triggers your body to purge when you lie around sweating afterwards. Running out straight from the sauna to a dinner appointment without cooling down properly is equal to depriving yourself of food after a workout.
2. Drink
As you sweat, you get dehydrated, depleted of liquid. Replenish it generously. Sip, don't gulp: otherwise your kidneys will just evacuate the excess that was meant for your sweat glands.
Drink hot or warm tea, not cold water from the cooler. Cold bacteria and flu virus sit in your throat. When it is weakened by cold water, you catch the nasty illness that will plague you weeks afterwards.
Alcohol dehydrates and toxifies you so it defeats the whole purpose even if it gives you the kick.
3. Keep yourself warm.
Dousing yourself with ice-cold water or diving into a cool pool is fine but stay away from the air-conditioning and drafts at all cost. The are the short cut to flus and colds . Ideally, wrap yourself up in a bathrobe or a thick body-length towel.
In Ancient Rome public baths were a social institution. Romans would go there daily and spend hours scrubbing and bathing. They would enter through the atrium, undress in the apodyterium, warm up in the tepidarium, get hot in the caldarium, even hotter in the sudatorium, then plunge into cold water in the frigidarium. Then they would go in reverse and hang out in the warm tepidarium to ease the transition to the cooler air of apodyterium where they would put their clothes back on. That was a practice tested over centuries.
Unfortunately, most people who install saunas and steambaths in our gyms these days had neither tepidarium nor sudatorium on the council estates where they grew up. So we are forced to bend to their idea of how to enjoy bathing. We are this close to being limited to a weekly sponge rub.
In a certain chain health club in Brixton where I live, the relaxation area consists of a narrow walkway between the shower cubicles where two people can barely pass each other. I had to cool myself down standing for half an hour in the shower, whilst gradually reducing the water temperature.
After our Clean Body Sunday ended up in a severe migraine, Jitte swore to never enter a sauna again. It is a shame so I am going send him this article. I hope he will change his mind!
No comments:
Post a Comment