Aromatherapy is useful for a lot of things. The use of essential oils from various different plants can do wonders for you if applied correctly. Aromatherapy can help with your mental well-being, it can help with anxiety, depression and insomnia but can it be used for your physical health?
We ask the question is aromatherapy useful for exercise or is it just non-compatible?
Aromatherapy for injury prevention and recovery
As is common with a lot of complementary therapies, aromatherapy is not only great for mental health, but also for repairing the body. It is with this in mind we start answering the question above.
There are various different essentials oils that can be used to relieve pain and help with the healing process. Some oils will have an analgesic property which has been shown to relieve pain; others will have anti-inflammatory properties, great for pain relief and recovery. What this means is when you’re exercising you can use oils before and after a session to minimise the impact your body takes but also use of oils will allow you to recover more quickly.
When it comes to exercise having a body in good condition is quite useful and by speeding up the recovery process, it enables you to start exercising more often and therefore improve your physical performance.
Already it can be said that aromatherapy goes well with exercise, but what about improving your physical performance not after but during exercise?
How it can help during exercise
This is where the question and following answer becomes more interesting. Whilst injury prevention and recovery is extremely important to an athlete it doesn’t directly improve their physical performance. What is the effectiveness of essential oils during exercise?
The human body relies heavily on the circulation of blood during exercise, in particular distributing oxygen and nutrients to the areas of the body that need it the most. The good news for aromatherapy is of course that essential oils can help your circulation flow and will improve it. This means you can use it to improve a basic function of your body and a vital one during exercise; ultimately resulting in improved physical performance.
It seems as if aromatherapy is very useful when it comes to exercise and certainly not irrelevant. Not only can it improve the rate of recovery and reduce pain it can also help improve the circulation of blood during exercise and almost improve the efficiency in which your body ‘oils the system’.