These are a few of the tools that we use on a daily-weekly basis to help keep us feeling loose and comfortable. I’m not going to lie sometimes our workouts leave us feeling pretty dam sore.
Some of our Recovery tools:
We work out at least 3 times a week, and we try to be as active as possible on our off days. Lately though I’ve noticed that on my off days I want to recharge a little bit. So Freddy started to research some workout recovery, and that’s how we started to take our recovery more seriously. In doing do we found a few things that we decided to invest in that we feel paid off.
1. Yoga Mats
So if I’m totally honest here I definitely use the yoga mats more than Freddy, and he’s less limber for it. I personally love to do Yoga at least 5 times a week. I was doing it every morning which I always felt helped me stretch and get ready for the day. I kind of use it as a meditative moment to think about what I need to get done, and help me prioritize my goals for the day.
Lately I’ve struggled to get to that yoga mat. The only thing I can tell you is that since stopping the stretching I have definitely felt less limber.
As far as yoga mats go this is totally personal preference. Some people like the thick yoga mats and honestly, I have a really thick mat for when I’m feeling particularly sore, but there are also thin mats which are really cool. We have these really nice Star Wars yoga mats that my sister gifted to us for Christmas. I personally love the Japanese inspired design and the colors of the mats.
My Rebels themed one is my favorite of the two, for obvious reasons. I feel it really captures Ahsoka’s colors but it is also kind of feminine and delicate.
I Love waking up and stretching on it. I’ll try to remember to ask her for the link so that I can link it below, but I’ll also link the plush 1.5” yoga mats we got on Amazon for the people that like thicker mats.
Star Wars Mats
Thick Yoga Mat
2. Wet Sauna
So this Sauna is amazing. By amazing, I mean it is wake up and sauna time amazing. It’s 100 percent why I’ve been skipping my yoga in the mornings. I have been waking up and jumping in the sauna for 15 minutes first thing in the morning. When I get out I feel loose and relaxed and I feel like it has helped me better handle stressors in my life. I was iffy when we first got it because it looks almost like a joke. It’s this bag with a zipper that has holes for your hands and head to stick our so that you look like you’re sitting in something out of the 70’s. The bag has what is basically a glorified rice cooker connected to it and a small white circular thing that sits inside the bag.
The way it works is that you zip the bag shut and turn the rice cooker on to its highest setting and allow the sauna to basically preheat. Once it is nice and steamy inside you lower the heat level on the rice cooker to your desired setting. I personally like to do 15 minutes at level 5 (our machine goes from 1-9). The machine has a timer setting so I usually set it to 20 or 30 minutes depending on how long it will be heating up/ how long I plan to sit inside the sauna.
Once you’re done you come out sweaty and feeling good. Freddy is crazy and experiments with the sauna. He recently did 30 minutes at level 9 and posted it onto the Metanerdz stories. I personally can barely handle 15 minutes of level 5 so I will no be doing that anytime soon. The beauty is that there are different heat settings, so you choose what you want to do.
I’ll post a link to the sauna we own currently. Ours came with a really cheapy chair and we ended up changing it for another chair. We have been happy with the upgrade, so I’ll post the chair we got here as well. I’ll also link another sauna that we were looking at, it looks a little bit like ours, but I can’t tell you much about it as it’s not the same exact model that we got, but I like that the chair is already upgraded and thought it would be good to include it so that you can weigh some of your options.
Our Sauna:
Our Chair Upgrade:
Other Sauna Option:
3. Massage Gun
The Hyperice – Hypervolt GO Precision Massage Gun
That is the gun I ordered from BestBuy for pick up. We bought it today so I cannot say much about it yet, other than I bought it after reading the reviews of its big brother and some reviews online about it being pretty good for the price point and light which means easy to carry with you on vacations. I will update this with a review of the gun after we pick it up and use it, maybe I can attach a small video and of Freddy’s reaction. We bought it primarily because Freddy has been having some pain in his right side (right around his lats and “wings”) but we haven’t been able to really make it go away. He’s tried hot packs, cold packs, the sauna and even some topical creams. The only thing we have not tried is a massage gun and some icy hot.