How it Works
The Elevated Recovery Flow!
Elevated Athletic Wellness offers a structured recovery flow that’s designed to feel great and work intelligently with how the body responds to compression, heat, cold, and light. This flow sequence is intentional, but always flexible to your individual needs. On a first visit, the experience is guided, welcoming, and simple. A staff member will check you in, review your intake, explain each modality, and answer questions so you feel clear and confident before starting.
You’ll be walked through the classic one-hour sequence—compression, infrared sauna, cold plunge, and red light therapy—with coaching at each step. The team will help set pressures, times, and temperatures, guide your breathing in the cold plunge, and show you how to settle into the sauna and red light so the session feels effective but not overwhelming.
The flow is structured to fit into about an hour for optimized recovery, yet remains flexible. Because recovery is personal, staff will gladly adjust the order, intensity, or focus areas to match your comfort level, goals, and experience.
Our classic recovery flow
The standard flow moves through four steps:
Compression
Infrared sauna
Cold plunge
Red light/PEMF Mat
This order is designed to gradually mobilize fluids, elevate circulation and core temperature, then introduce a controlled cold stress before finishing with a calm, restorative light or PEMF-based treatment.
Why this sequence works
Starting with compression helps stimulate circulation and lymphatic flow, gently moving fluid out of tired muscles and supporting the clearance of metabolic byproducts from hard training or long days on your feet. This primes your legs, hips, or arms so they feel lighter and more open as you move into the next phase.
Next, the infrared sauna raises core temperature, increases blood flow, and promotes a deep, detoxifying sweat. Heat helps relax muscles and connective tissue, improves vascular function, and can support cardiovascular conditioning while encouraging your nervous system to downshift into a more relaxed state.
Moving from heat to cold plunge creates a powerful contrast effect. The sudden cold causes blood vessels to constrict and drives blood toward your core, which can reduce inflammation and muscle soreness while stimulating a strong nervous system response that many people experience as sharp mental clarity and elevated mood afterward. This hot–cold pairing is widely used for recovery, resilience, and circulation.
Finishing with red light provides a calm, non-stressful stimulus after the intensity of cold. Red and near‑infrared wavelengths support mitochondrial function (your cells’ energy production), circulation, and tissue repair, making it an ideal way to “seal in” the benefits of the session while helping the body settle back into a relaxed, parasympathetic state.
Personalizing your routine
While this is the classic recommended order, recovery is ultimately a personal practice. Some people feel best ending on heat, others prefer to start with cold, and some may choose to focus on only one or two modalities on a given day. Elevated Athletic Wellness recognizes that each body, schedule, and training load is different, and the team will gladly help adjust the sequence or timing so members can use these tools in the way that feels most effective and sustainable for them.