First, thank you to the doctors for all their helpful insight. You’ve substantially changed the way I think about health and fitness claims.
Do you have any thoughts on saunas? I use a garage gym for barbell training but was considering joining a local fitness center for the use of a pool (for general conditioning) and sauna. Besides just enjoying it, are there legitimate health benefits for regular sauna use? If so, what’s the best way to integrate it into training/recovery?
Glad you’ve found the information useful.
Unfortunately I don’t have thoughts on this topic, as I have not read enough of the research literature to have a strong opinion on it. I do know that there are many other folks in the industry who make inappropriate and/or hyperbolic claims about the benefits of sauna (such as “reduces your risk of death by 25%” and other nonsense based on study designs that cannot show direct benefits).
The Finns make some truly astounding claims about the health benefits of Sauna, but it seems to be a mostly Scandinavian cultural phenomena. There’s both a social aspect to it as well as the purported physiological benefits, but I’m not aware of anything to suggest it is a useful adjunct to your regular fitness training, aside from being a relaxing winddown to help you sweat off the last of your preworkout buzz. It definitely increases blood flow to superficial tissues and causes widespread vasodilation, which can lead to lower blood pressures in someone who can’t compensate for the larger blood pool size. So people with low baseline BP or who are B-blocked should weigh those factors before getting in a sauna. If you can’t elevate your HR easily, there’s some mild risk there (that’s probably not anyone reading this forum). Anyone who is using the sauna after an exercise session that prompted a lot of sweating needs to pay close attention to adequate rehydration before getting into the sauna; there are plenty of reports of people passing out from orthostatic hypotension secondary to dehydration in a sauna.
I don’t have an specific data on saunas and weightlifting, but theoretically I would be wary of drawing blood way from the major muscle groups you just exercised immediately after stressing them; I wonder if that would result in more severe DOMS from worsening lactic acid accumulation. Perhaps that study has already been done, to see if preworkout vs. postworkout sauna sessions result in more significant subjective sense of DOMS, or even measurable performance differences one or two days later. I don’t know the answer.
Since you use a home gym for your barbell training, you might want to evaluate a home sauna setup; there are commercial sauna kits available to install in your garage, some with footprints as small as 2’ x 3’, basically just enough space for one person to sit down on a small wooden bench.
It’s winter here and our sauna is located near the pool. Getting up a good sweat then trotting over for plunge in the pool is ‘ivogerating’ to say the least.
Kind of like the Russian Banya without the black bread, dried fish getting flogged with birch branches.
But holy shit, the current hype surrounding sauna is breathtaking, and as usual, the most prominent biohacko-neers have embraced and promoted it with full force on enormous platforms. A Phd claiming you can excrete heavy metals via sweat? Really??
If any benefits are discovered, great, I’ll take em, but I do it because it feels good and not, for example, to lower my risk of Alzheimer’s. For Christ sake…
Tagging this older post with a follow up question. I recently heard the claim that activities like sauna give cardiovascular benefits akin to LISS because it keeps your heart rate elevated. Is there any truth to this? I.e., can I replace LISS workouts with equivalent times in the sauna (assuming equal HR intensity) and expect similar benefits?