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In today’s podcast/newsletter we are tackling the subject of sauna. I look around and see sauna’s in gyms, in people’s homes, in people’s backyards, and even fitness programs where people are exercising inside saunas. So if you’ve been wondering “What’s the deal with saunas?”, then this is a good one to tune in to.
When we dig in to the literature, we settled on 4 areas where sauna appears to offer benefit. The first is that sauna has been shown to help improve sleep quality. The natural circadian rhythm of your body has your body temperature peaking at about 4-5 pm and then it begins cooling down in preparation for sleep. If you can spike your body temperature via sauna about 1-2 hours before bed, then your body will compensate by trying to rapidly cool you down and if you can capture this rapid cooling effect leading right up to when you are going to bed, it seems to improve sleep.
The second area where sauna has shown benefit is in the area of pain/muscle soreness (delayed onset muscle soreness-DOMS). There is really no surprise here and so we do not spend much time on it in the podcast. Sauna is an easy way to improve the feeling of soreness with really no detrimental effects.
The third area we discuss is how sauna has some studies showing it can dramatically increase growth hormone. There was a study done in 1986 that showed repeated bouts of sauna in one day produced a 16x increase in growth hormone. When they tried it again a few days later, it also increased growth hormone, but not nearly as much. It seems the more frequently you do sauna, the less of an increase you will get. So if you’re goal is simply increasing growth hormone, perhaps waiting several weeks in between bouts of sauna would seem to make sense.
Finally we take a look at the Finland sauna study where they looked at 2,327 men who did sauna regularly. On the low end, some of the men did sauna once a week, and on the high end they did sauna 4-7 times per week. The study found the heavy sauna users had a 50% lower risk of fatal cardiovascular disease compared to the light sauna users. We discuss the limitations of the study and how we are not necessarily taking these numbers to the bank, but it is still pretty impressive. We also discuss how sauna will increase your heart rate, just like exercise does, so is sauna mimicking some of the benefit of exercise and could your time be better spent simply exercising.
Simplified Takeaways…
Overall, doing sauna for 10-20 minutes at a temperature of 170-190 degrees fahrenheit several times a week seems to offer benefit.
Sauna has been shown to increase sleep quality by performing a sauna session about 1-2 hours before going to bed.
Sauna is effective at reducing DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness).
Sauna has been shown to dramatically increase growth hormone, although more frequent bouts of sauna seems to decrease the amount that growth hormone will increase.
There is a study out of Finland showing a massive reduction in cardiovascular events for people who are very regular users of sauna (4-7 times a week). This study has it’s flaws (as most studies will), but that is still impressive.
Doing a sauna session will increase your heart rate in a manner similar to exercise. This may be how some of the benefits come to be.
Further Reading…
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