During the Pandemic we were all denied access to public gathering spots and people rearranged their lives around home. Everyone worked at home, played at home, and socialized at home. When the dust settled, we all saw some advantage to this reclaimed space in our lives. The big winners in all of this were home improvement contractors and suppliers, including myself. My phone has not stopped ringing since 2019.
One huge area of growth for saunas has been the home gym market. Even now, when most public gyms are back in full swing after a few years of cautious access—including no sauna use— people are approaching public gyms with trepidation. Tight, airless locker rooms, equipment shared by hundreds of people, and saunas with a little too much “patina”, all went from being tolerable to a complete turn-off. A shoulder injury on my real bike has sidelined me to using only the recliner bikes at my local Y. Sitting in a room full of people breathing heavily, in our isolated headphone bubbles is not what I call exercise bliss. Neither is the sauna anything approaching the desired experience I write about in these pages. I avoid it completely.
So, it is no surprise that those with the means are investing in their homes and building elaborate gyms with saunas and even pools, where exercise and sauna can be a blissful experience. Where you know you are breathing only your own air in a space that has been cleaned to your standards and where you can sit meditatively in the sauna and not feel the whoosh whoosh of the treadmill on the floor above. In your own sauna the blue light screen of an illicit cell phone will not disturb you, and conversations with random strangers won’t stray into political abrasiveness.
After the pandemic gave us pause and the opportunity to reflect upon what is really essential in this life, it is no wonder that I have been so busy helping people realize this vision of a sauna in their homes. Sauna is essential, as is control over your own health and fitness. Creating the personal environment for it all to come together is a luxury beyond financial means, it is a luxury of thought and intention, of knowing what to value first. If you want to have a quality of life where being healthy and fit can lead you to being able to experience so much more, then make it priority to have a space at home where you can exercise and practice mindful bodily experience. A yoga mat in a corner and a few weights or exercise bands is all you need to get started; adding a sauna would be the icing on the cake.
A recent project was for clients whose priorities of fitness and health and family led them to me. I built them a roomy sauna in the their home gym, which is one to die for. But what mattered most was not the nice set up or expensive equipment, it was that they had made being healthy together a priority—and that is something we can all afford. Even though I would love to have their gym set-up, when I am cranking it out, sweating buckets on my old bike-on-a-trainer next to the water heater in our basement, I am just as happy and alive as I could be in their gym (and my wood-fired sauna out back rocks!) As we age, there is no going back to reset the clock; you have to simply keep moving and use your body. Movement and exercise can be done with little or no equipment; having a Sauna is a nice reward and perfect compliment. Your body will thank you!
