From Greece to Italy the advanced centers that offer treatments in the total absence of weight, in water, or suspended in mid-air, are multiplying. A physical and mental experience with a high rate of emotional
Suspended. Hanging textiles, fabric, elastic, or lulled by hammocks while performing stretching exercises, meditation, yoga. In mid-air, but also in the water. Floating sustained by the embrace of an operator that rotate, stretch, twist the limp body in his arms. The only way the spine can experience a flexibility that’s difficult to beat with exercises performed on the ground: the world is a caress, and slowly back children. They are called antigravity yoga, woga, watsu, Oba, zero gravity pilates, the new spa treatments are borrowed from the circus arts, and proposed, with a declination wellness, the Spa and more advanced. The purpose of this? Cancel the weight. Physical and mental health. Improving strength, balance and flexibility, and with a wink to the beauty, because, according to experts, reactivate the lymphatic system and circulation, it also stimulates the collagen in the skin.
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The Spa where you can regenerate in zero gravity
Wellness zero gravity: suspended in Greece
“The experience of flight gives relief to the back and to the spirit, and it is a panacea for the self-esteem, because it pushes you to exceed your limits while having fun,” explains Patrizia Bortolin, consultant, Spa expert and wellness. An example of that? Euphoria Retrait, destination, holistic, and open to Mystras, Unesco world heritage site near Sparta, in Greece. Here you practice aerial yoga and suspended among the olive trees, in hammocks or cocoons aircraft, and swims in the Sphere pool, a swimming pool with spherical underwater music (the songs of whales and dolphins): it is inspired by the architecture of the church of Hagia Sophia, the only one of Mistra, which in the Turkish period was the mosque.
Yoga in the water and swimming in the cave
Experiences of lightness even for Belmond Villa San Michele, charm hotel in the hills of Fiesole, above Florence: paintings and antique furniture, a Spa and a swimming pool where Luca Renzini practice yoga in the water. In the magnificent terraced gardens Camilla Carmagnini teaches, instead, yoga in flight: “I Combine the suspension with the asanas (postures related to this discipline, ed.). Today there is a desire to detach his feet from the ground. To dream and play with small stunts and exercises within everyone’s reach”.
At Grotta Giusti, in Monsummano Terme (Pt) Luciano Tanini accompanies guests throughout the year in the lake of the cave to the Natural Spa Floating, which gives the feeling of a sweet embrace of a mother. Lulled by the thermal water and surrounded by a natural architecture without equal (the eighth wonder of the world, Giuseppe Verdi), not one would come out more. Here are swimming, even scuba divers, who after the massage in the water, load the bottles in the shoulder and go to explore the seabed, between formations of calcite crystals similar to stalagmites and corridors divers.
Sensory isolation: the float in the tank
Floating Therapy, Rest, sensory deprivation… whatever you call it, the new frontier of wellness is floating in a tank with 25 cm of a solution supersaturated of magnesium salts (Epsom salts). The feeling is to no longer experience the start of the body and where it ends in the water. The sensory isolation frees the mind and the brain releases huge amounts of endorphins, hormones of happiness. This practice is experienced in the six centers Float Your Mind in central and northern Italy.
There are many Spa, in the pools, creating conditions similar to zero gravity. The Relais San Maurizioat Santo Stefano Belbo, in Piedmont, the water has a salt concentration 30 times higher than that of the Dead Sea. It floats without the risk of sinking is the“effect ball”, the same who experience the astronauts in the simulations, in the bathtub, in the absence of gravity. The Forte Village Resortin Santa Margherita di Pula, in Sardinia, offers The legs in the sky, walk the marina, high-density saline, and the Thalasso massage, float in the absence of gravity under the supervision of Angelo Cerina, founder with Umberto Solimene, of the Italian School of thalassotherapy.
The biggest surprise is however he lives to L’albereta, relais in the heart of Franciacorta a vocation of wellness (it is home to the Spa Espace Chenot), where the Oba (Oceanic Bodywork Aqua), technical water, “comes from the massage shamanic hawaiian, and combines movements above and below the water,” explains Maurizio Ugo Rodriguez, kinesiologist and naturopath. A night in the Cabriolet Suite (the legendary room 404) crown the dream: by pressing a button above the four-poster bed, the roof opens up and gives space to a ceiling of stars. For those who have no fear of flying.