Sauna
85 °C · Cedar and oak · Six places
A wood-clad cabin for six, run at a temperature Finns would consider reasonable and Germans consider low. It is never busy because the recovery suite is capped at sixty subscriptions.
Recovery
The part of training that looks like nothing.
A sauna, a cold plunge, two quiet rooms and a scan that tells you something true twice a year. The recovery suite is a separate subscription because it is a separate room, and about half the members hold it.
The suite
Two rooms off the north corridor, kept at a fixed temperature and lit by one window each. Neither has a clock, which members complain about roughly once a year and then stop.
Cold plunge
9 °C · Charcoal stone · Two places
Filtered, circulated and held at nine degrees, which is cold enough to be useful and warm enough that people actually use it. There is a timer on the wall and nobody watches it.
Quiet rooms
Two rooms · One chair each · No telephones
Each room holds one reclining chair, a blanket and a window. They are booked in twenty-minute blocks on a paper sheet by the door, which has never needed replacing with anything cleverer.
Recovery pricing
- Recovery suite
- Sauna, cold plunge and the quiet rooms, added to a membership. Sixty subscriptions, no more; when it is full there is a list, and it moves.
- €79per month
- Body composition scan
- A DXA-equivalent measurement read by Tobias Brenner with an hour of his time attached to it. Twice a year is plenty; more often than quarterly and you are measuring the weather.
- €95per scan
About the scan
The scan is booked with Tobias directly, takes about fifteen minutes, and comes with an hour of his time to read it. He will refuse to run one more than four times a year for the same member, and will tell you why at some length if you ask.
What we actually suggest
Not a protocol so much as a short list of things that have held up. None of it is sold to you and none of it costs anything.
Heat after, not before
The sauna is used after training or on a rest day. Fifteen to twenty minutes, twice a week, is where the evidence is least argued about.
The cold is optional
Nine degrees for two or three minutes is pleasant afterwards and probably blunts hypertrophy if you go straight in after lifting. Leave an hour, or leave it out.
Sleep beats everything here
Halina will tell you before the scan and after it that no room in this building competes with an extra forty minutes in bed. We keep saying it because it keeps being true.
Measure rarely
Two scans a year, taken at the same time of day, fasted, on the same equipment. Anything more frequent measures hydration and calls it progress.