Ideally, you would call upon your personal masseuse or masseur to come and help you out. And then you would enter your private sauna where a trained monkey would feed you grapes while placing cucumber slices on your eyes and pouring fresh herb-infused water on the hot rocks from time to time.
Okay I don't have anything for you that awesome (note to self: arrange for trained monkey immediately), but I do have an update on my previous post on the magic of magnesium.
Transdermal magnesium, when I first read about it, sounded a little ho-hum. Oh, you spray it on your skin? And it's another way to get more magnesium (one of the most significant missing links in almost everyone's diet) into your body? Okay great fine great. I am currently working on offering my body a gram of magnesium daily in order to remineralize my system, so pursuing more than one method of taking it seemed wise. I ordered some pre-made magnesium "oil" (so called because it's oily in consistency - there's no actual oil in it) and decided to give it a go.
I am not one to back down when trying something new, so I decided to really give it the old college try and see what transdermal magnesium could do for me. I picked a time when I wanted to spend 20 or 30 minutes chilling out. To avoid TMI I'll just say I thoroughly covered my skin with magnesium oil, grabbed a book, and sat down to wait for whatever was going to happen.
At first, nothing happened but a light stinging, especially on my hands and forearms. (This is salt water, basically, and our recent acquisition of two kittens means we always have scratches.) After five minutes, all my muscles began to relax. Basically, everything started to uncoil. The awesome thing is that this effect kept going for the next fifteen or twenty minutes.
Although some people claim they just put on lotion following transdermal magnesium application, I have found that it's a little bit itchy as it dries. If you put a lot on one area, there's a certain sticky tackiness that occurs. Because magnesium can pull toxins and heavy metals out of your cells, my thinking is that it's best to rinse it off. Just a quick rinse in the shower and you're good. I feel that the magnesium makes my skin a lot cleaner once it's rinsed off - squeaky clean, in fact.
There is no danger in putting on magnesium oil and then throwing on your clothes. It can leave a salt residue on the clothes, but this does not harm them and will rinse out when you wash the clothes. Typically I wait until after a workout, when I would normally grab a shower anyway. I delay the shower 20 or 30 minutes, use the magnesium oil, throw my workout clothes back on, and do whatever - a little writing or editing, dinner prep, what have you - and then shower. For a truly amazing experience, I've even followed the magnesium oil with a soak in an epsom salt bath. Yum.
I've had good luck with Ancient Minerals Magnesium Oil (no affiliation - it's a good product). There are also blog posts out there (like this one) that will tell you how to make your own magnesium oil from magnesium chloride flakes and water. (Note this is not epsom salt. There are mixed thoughts on this but some researchers claim that the magnesium sulfate in epsom salts is not as well retained in the body as the magnesium chloride. There is nothing wrong with an epsom salt bath, but it's ideal to use magnesium chloride if you're serious about getting magnesium into your system.)
If you want to take things to the next level (I do, and I did), you can also make an absolutely incredible body butter that is infused with magnesium. I used Wellness Mama's recipe. I have never made lotion before, but I made this, and it worked beautifully the second time I tried it. (The first time I got cocky and subbed out an ingredient and rushed the emulsion stage.) I use magnesium oil for a daily spa moment, but I rub the body butter on my feet last thing at night to help create a gorgeous, deep, relaxed sleep.
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