Hot stone massage uses soothing oils, warm basalt and sometimes cold marble stones to relax your muscles, allowing for a deeper and more intense all-over massage.

In hot stone therapy, your therapist applies smooth, water-heated basalt stones to key points on your body. This direct heat relaxes your muscles, which means that the massage itself is more effective and intense than it would be otherwise. The size of the stones varies, according to which part of the body your therapist is treating.

It is generally accepted that alternating treatments of warmth and cold are beneficial, and help to soothe an aching body. What we often need to do is combine both hot and cold. There’s a method behind the apparent madness of leaping from a toasty sauna into an icy pool: hot stone therapy uses the same principle. Heat expands the blood vessels, cold constricts them.

The combination of relaxing warmth and refreshing coolness is thought to encourage the body to detox and heal, increasing lymph flow and helping to flush out waste. With the addition of heat, your body becomes relaxed in a much shorter space of time, and your therapist can focus on a deep working of the tissues using both the stones and her hand strokes.