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Inside Kevin Love's Wellness Room With a Hyperbaric Chamber

As a center and power forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers, it is part of Kevin Love’s job to stay in tip-top physical shape. But the athlete is also an advocate for mental health, and in a new video, he welcomes AD into a corner of his Ohio home which is completely dedicated to caring for both his mind and body. (His longtime girlfriend, model Kate Bock, also makes an appearance, helping him record the self-taped spot.)

In his wellness room, the NBA star has a hyperbaric chamber, an infrared sauna, a red light therapy device, a bed for vibration therapy, a Power Plate, a large inflatable circle called a Waff, which he uses for meditation, and, of course, some candles to set the mood for yoga and pine-scented incense to remind him of his native Oregon. He uses the various equipment depending on what his body needs to recover from strenuous training sessions on any given day, and while navigating the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mental aspect of his self-care routine has been especially vital.

“We are so fortunate to have this stuff here and I am so glad that I invested in that type of room,” Love tells AD. “I always know I have a safe space to go to and I have a very healing place not only for the body, but spiritually as well. The space has helped with making things a habit, somewhat of a ritual in my life.”

Each gadget has different benefits, but red light therapy is a go-to when Love finds himself strapped for time due to a busy practice schedule. The long panel of red LED lights “has a heating component to it, so it warms my body up in the morning and makes my joints feel lubricated,” he explains. “From there I typically get ready to go, and if I am going to the training facility or a shootaround or a workout it just accelerates the process of getting my body ready and warm before I stretch.” The best way to reap the device’s benefits, he says, is to stand in front of it for ten minutes on both the front and back of your body—while fully naked.

See the video.

A 12-year NBA veteran, Love credits his methods with helping him fight the effects of aging and the physical toll that being a professional athlete takes on the body. He also stresses how much physical and mental wellness go hand in hand. “I truly believe that if you have inflammation in your body or if you keep killing your body, it is going to keep affecting your mind,” he says. “For me it is about feeling good. If you’ve ever had a back injury or something it can be incredibly disheartening and it can take over your mind and be all you think about, and it can become a slippery slope.”

Recently, Love and his teammates returned to practice for the first time since the pandemic began. Catching rebounds from an assistant coach clad in a mask and gloves was strange, but Love says “it is not lost on me that everybody is dealing with something throughout this time.” So as we all begin to look to the future, he’ll continue to focus his efforts on mental health advocacy through the Kevin Love Fund. “There was just a Washington Post article saying that because of the coronavirus, a third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety and depression,” he says. “It is more and more apparent how critical the work that we are doing is. It really affects young people more than anything, so we will just continue to do this work and pay it forward.”

Watch Now: Architectural Digest Video.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest