The Far Infared Carbon Flex Sauna by Saunatec

For this Fun Friday Blog I decided to ditch the competitive theme that seems to resurface on a reoccurring basis. Past blogs have regularly featured myself, Content Director for Family Leisure, playing a fellow employee in darts, billiards or basketball. But today I wished to relax and de-stress, so I decided to focus on an item that creates one of the great relaxing experiences you can have in your lifetime: Saunas!

Not familiar with saunas? Yikes! A sauna is a small room inside or attached to your home, or a free-standing structure designed to offer dry or wet heat sessions. What is a sauna heat session? It can be an individual experience or formal affair, where warm air or warm objects induces the body to relax and sweat. There are two styles of saunas: conventional or traditional saunas that heat up the air inside the sauna, and infrared saunas that utilize a light to heat up objects within the sauna.

Ancient saunas were pits etched out of the side of hills featuring a fireplace where stones and rocks were heated to high temperatures. Once water was poured over these hot rocks, steam was produced increasing the participant's sense of heat, causing relaxation and increased sweating. Finland is known for these early earth saunas, and many are still used today by Finnish families.

Online sources cite the industrial revolution where the first major changes to saunas occurred. Traditional chimneys were replaced by metal woodstoves with chimneys, making each sauna more efficient and trustworthy. The Finns, along with the inhabitants of the Baltic States, used the saunas to rejuvenate and revive their minds, spirits and bodies. The atmosphere is so relaxing some Finnish women choose to give birth in a sauna.

When these European sauna pioneers left their homelands for other countries, they brought these sauna traditions, introducing them to other countries and cultures. This, combined with the electric sauna stove in the 1950s, has led to Saunas being welcomed by many American households in the last fifty or sixty years. 

For today's blog post I hopped into the Far Infrared Carbon Flex Sauna by Saunatec. Infrared saunas have more health benefits than conventional lava-rock saunas. Infrared saunas can help with weight loss, pain management, skin purification, body detoxification and stress reduction. It's recently been discovered that infrared saunas can provide relief to patients suffering from arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and certain skin conditions.

Infrared sauna therapy invades the body and penetrates deeply into joints, muscles and tissues, speeding up oxygen flow and increasing blood circulation. The heat in this sauna allows detoxification at the cellular level, granting you the ability to purify cells of heavy metals including mercury, lead, cadmium, aluminum, arsenic and other industrial chemicals. If you're not familiar with infrared, and feel like the term sounds dangerous, like radioactive material, you should know infrared light is part of the Sun's invisible spectrum. One of infrared light's characteristics is the ability to easily penetrate human tissue. When this happens, it creates a natural reverberation, which has many beneficial results. You can be exposed to infrared heat for hours and it will never cause your skin to burn. In fact, it's used to warm newborns.

The Carbon Flex Sauna I jumped into is cutting edge, with cool options including an indoor control panel, CD player and radio. It's an ETL approved sauna, with 2,000 watts of power, oxygen ionizer and lights for nighttime use.

I spent roughly 15 minutes sweating out this week's stress. I can report the control panel was easy to use and once I felt I was getting too hot I was able to easily adjust the setting to cool down the interior a bit. Plus, I jammed out to a local radio station, singing Bob Seger, Led Zeppelin and John Mellencamp songs like I was alone in my shower for the entire 15 minutes. My coworkers probably think I'm crazy!