Red light therapy is used more and more in the world of athletics. This is because infrared light has many benefits for sports enthusiasts. But which ones exactly, and how can you optimally use it as an athlete? We'll discuss it below!

What is red light therapy?

As the name implies, red light therapy is a form of therapy that uses infrared light. This is because infrared light creates heat which stimulates the energy production of your cells.

In turn, this provides a host of health benefits that athletes can benefit from, such as: better sleep, faster muscle recovery and greater endurance.

Infrared light and sleep

Whether you're an athlete or not, we all need a good night's sleep to perform. When you are asleep, your body has time to restore all the systems you need during the day. The immune system, endocrine system (takes care of your hormones) and nervous system are examples of these.

The longer and better you sleep, the better these systems can be restored and the better rested you are. However, sleeping well and long is often easier said than done. Yet there are some things that can help with this, specifically: exercise and red light therapy.

You probably knew that exercising during the day ensures better and longer sleep. When you exercise too intensely, however, you can suffer from overtraining syndrome, which, in addition to your sleep quality, also lowers your mood and hormone production.

Infrared reduces risk of overtraining syndrome and improves sleep

Since athletes always want to push their limits, the sports world has been looking for a way to exercise very intensely without suffering from the overtraining syndrome and its drawbacks. This is how experts quickly stumbled upon the benefits of infrared for avoiding overtraining syndrome and improving sleep.

Research, which used a group of Chinese basketball players as test subjects, shows that red light stimulates the secretion of melatonin (the sleep-inducing hormone) and therefore better sleep. That study also showed that the positive effects of infrared on your sleep are greatest when you use infrared therapy in the evening.

Red light therapy against sleep inertia

However, those who get up early to exercise can also use red light therapy in the morning. In fact, in the early hours, infrared causes you to suffer less from sleep inertia.

The latter is the name for the state in which certain parts of your brain are still 'sleeping'.

If you wake up in the middle of the night, it is nice to have sleep inertia because it allows you to fall back asleep immediately. If you want to exercise, however, it's a completely different story; sleep inertia then causes you to be less alert and weaker in sports performance. 

However, you now know how to counteract that; use infrared therapy before your workout!

Red light therapy and sports performance

You already know that infrared helps you get a better night's sleep and combats sleepiness in the early hours. However, that's not the only thing infrared can do for athletes.

In fact, research is showing promising and exciting results in other areas as well. For example, studies show that the endurance of athletes who use red light therapy increases three times faster than those who do not.

Moreover, research also shows that athletes who use infrared therapy have a higher resistance to fatigue, in other words, they can go deeper during intense and long-lasting efforts.

From these same studies, we can also glean important information about when you should use infrared light to best improve your performance.

Are you aiming to become more powerful? Then it's best to do red light therapy before your strength training. Do you want to train your endurance? Then it's a good idea to lie under an infrared sauna blanket or infrared lamp both before and after your workout.

We can already hear you thinking, "how long should you do that every time?". The answer to that question is: no longer than 20 minutes.

Infrared and muscle recovery

Red light therapy could help your muscles recover faster, although there is some discussion about that. This is because according to some studies infrared therapy could shorten the time in which your muscles are stiff and sore after exercise, but other studies find less positive results and call for more research on the subject before we can say that infrared significantly affects muscle recovery.

In any case, infrared is never harmful for muscle recovery, so it doesn't hurt if it doesn't help.

Moreover, we are sure that infrared therapy positively influences the quality of your sleep.

Moreover, we do know for sure that infrared therapy positively affects the quality of your sleep and that in turn, sleep provides fast and good muscle recovery. So if infrared does not directly simulate muscle recovery, it does so indirectly by improving your sleep.

Conclusion

Infrared therapy is an excellent way to improve athletic performance. By using it, an athlete can experience benefits in terms of sleep, athletic performance and possibly muscle recovery.