Respire, Fire and Ice, RFI, a wellness center, opened its first San Luis Obispo location in March. Through intense rotations between sauna and cold plunges, RFI invites the community to come in and challenge their bodies and minds.
The San Luis Obispo facility is RFI’s second location, with the original opening in Visalia, California, in 2024.
In bringing the business to San Luis Obispo, General Manager Jacob Bilvado hopes RFI will serve as a social setting that fosters a renewed sense of community.
“I essentially see us as being like a wellness social club where people come to not just get in the sauna or ice but to hang out and chat and have coffee and tea,” Bilvado said.
The idea for RFI began in 2020, when two brothers, Brit and Tyler Baxley, hosted ice bath hangouts in their backyard during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As their hangouts grew, the brothers also decided to purchase a sauna. Over time, they welcomed a total of more than 200 people to their home.
After uniting a whole community of cold plunge and sauna lovers, the brothers decided to turn the idea into a business.
RFI San Luis Obispo has four cold tubs, maintained at different temperatures, which range from 35 degrees to 50 degrees, and three six-person saunas, which are set between 200 to 230 degrees.
RFI customer Evan Macelwee likes to rotate through the sauna and cold tubs specifically after surfing or working out as a form of recovery.
“You can feel your muscles relaxing, the sweat, everything kind of loosening up, and you just feel better and, like, more energetic” Macelwee said.
“There’s a very strong community aspect, part of it, if you want to come, you want to meet people, you want o push each other together. Doing anything hard is a lot easier when you do it in a group,”
Evan Macelwee, RFI customer
The intention is for members to move through cycles of these contrasting temperatures, working their way up to the most extreme levels over time.
Jackson Faries, an RFI front desk employee, explained that incorporating the sauna and cold plunge into his daily routine has slowly become easier for him.
“Before I worked here, I came with my stepdad, and I was barely able to do the warmest one,” Faries said. “But now I am able to get in there and rock the cold one for four minutes.”
Getting back to connection
Aside from the physical experience of the cold plunge and sauna, Bilvado explained that the saunas create intimate pods that spark conversations between people who may have otherwise never interacted with one another.
He noticed that when his customers left their phones outside the sauna, they were ultimately encouraged to get back to true social connection.
In alignment with part of RFI’s mission statement, which is “to revitalize the human spirit through community and the vigorous pursuit of presence,” Bilvado hopes to connect with local businesses and host events that bring people together.
He envisions bringing in live music and DJs as well as organizing coffee shop pop-ups in the future.
For customer Masaki Wakui, the business also offers a familiar experience and culture he says was difficult to find after moving to the United States from Japan three years ago.
“Japanese people take a bath every day. Especially younger people really love to go to sauna, and so when I first came here, I was really disappointed that here in the USA there is no sauna culture, but now I am really so excited.”
Benefits of cold plunges and saunas
Research pamphlets and books are displayed around RFI for customers to learn about the various health benefits that cold plunges and saunas, also known to some as “contrast therapy,” can provide.
“I would say that when it comes to the sauna and cold plunge, kind of combining them together, it’s a really nice kind of black and white yin and yang of comfort and discomfort,” Macelwee said.
As stated on their website, RFI claims that the combination of heat and cold can help the body in many ways, including reducing inflammation and chronic pain, decreasing stress, lowering blood pressure and improving sleep.
Bilvado describes the cold plunge as a “nervous system reset” that can help people “snap back into your equilibrium.”
Some find that a cold plunge is a good way to get their blood pumping and wake up the body first thing in the morning.
“It’s really good if you’re a morning person and you just need to get that start,” Macelwee said.
On the other hand, customers can spend the majority of their time in the sauna for sleep benefits.
Wakui says that the sleep he gets after the extended sessions in the heat is exactly why he does it.
“After taking a sauna, I really have a good sleep, and that is the most beneficial point to me.”
While some customers may find it can be difficult to force their body into the extreme temperatures, Bilvado explains that customers leave feeling a sense of accomplishment for challenging themselves.
“So there’s 1 million different benefits, but honestly, at the end of the day it also just feels good,” Bilvado said. “You can’t deny the way you feel after this.”
This story originally appeared in the September printed edition of Mustang News. Check out more stories from the issue here.