Sauna your way to a better health

One of the things I most cherish from my Finnish culture is sauna. If you didn’t grow up with it, it’s tough to understand why someone would voluntarily sit in a small room that’s heated up to about 100C (212F) for half and hour once a week, let alone more often.

Although sauna (or sauna bathing which it’s also called) has been traditionally used for relaxation, social and therapeutic purposes in many cultures from Romans to Turks to Finns, it has many scientifically proven health benefits that more and more people around the world are starting to look into.

Most of the studies in saunas have been done in the traditional dry Finnish style saunas where the rooms are heated by a wood burning or electric stove and you pour water on the rocks above the stove to create steam and moisture. The humidity ranges anywhere between 10-20% depending on how much water you pour in the rocks. If you’ve ever been to a health club in the U.S. that have a sauna, you can probably recall that they don’t usually provide you with the water bucket and a ladle, which is against the etiquette for a true Finnish sauna user :). Just to be clear, one of the main purposes of the traditional sauna experience is to be able to add moisture by pouring water on the stove. And no, it won’t set the place on fire, trust me! Of course there are also infrared saunas which have no humidity and the temperature is kept to a modest 120–140F.

Health benefits of sauna

Regular sauna use has numerous health benefits:
🔥 Increases cardiovascular health and longevity
🔥 Improves insulin sensitivity and glucose control
🔥 Helps pain management
🔥 Decreases cognitive decline and depression
🔥 Improves athletic performance
🔥 Boosts immunity
🔥 Improves sleep

Exposure to high temperature stresses the body eliciting a rapid, robust response called heat shock response. These heat shock proteins have a very important role related to repairing damaged proteins and protecting you from subsequent exposures to more devastating stressors. Heat therapy will increase the production of these proteins. Evidence from multiple studies also show that regular sauna has substantial cardiovascular health benefits from lowering both systolic and diastolic blood pressure, decreasing risk of sudden cardiac death, fatal coronary heart disease, and stroke. It has also shown to help metabolic diseases by lowering blood sugar levels.

Sauna enhances the release of beta-endorphins, a powerful pain suppressant. Sauna bathing has been shown to decrease the amount of C-reactive protein, a leading blood marker of systemic inflammation making it a promising treatment for chronic pain conditions.

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the fastest growing chronic diseases in the US and sauna can do wonders for your cognitive function too. It has been shown to help cognitive decline by increasing the production of protein BDNF which acts on neurons in the central and peripheral nervous systems and promotes the growth of new neurons.

As an athlete sauna can be used as a legal ergogenic aid to increase plasma and red-cell volumes. A regular sauna session increases your heart rate to 120–150bpm mimicking a moderate workout. According to a small study with male runners, the run time to exhaustion increased by a whopping 32% following a 3-week sauna protocol. Sauna can also be successfully used for heat acclimation which is important when preparing to compete in warm climates by lowering heart rate, core and skin temperature and even increasing VO2Max and speed. It has also been shown to reduce muscle glycogen use by 40 to 50% compared to before heat acclimation.

When it comes to immunity, sauna has a similar effect to your immune system as fever by kicking it into overdrive. Remarkably, sauna can decrease your risk of getting a cold or influenza by 30%, according to some studies.

And if getting a restful, good night sleep is hard to come by, an evening sauna session might be just what you need. The way it works is that after you get out of the sauna, your body works hard to cool itself, and it’s this rapid decrease in temperature that triggers the production of melatonin that induces sleep. Of course the secretion of feel good hormones such as endorphins and serotonin doesn’t hurt your sleep either! The release of those same hormones can also help with mild depression.

The best longevity combo

Sauna is paramount to my wellbeing. I cherish the opportunity to disconnect from the constant demands of everyday life, a time just for me, in silence, just letting the worries sweat away. I also believe it is a great life insurance against many chronic conditions and a way to increase your healthspan.

But although sauna can give you a great cardiovascular workout it won’t work your muscles, tendons and joints, or bones the way exercise does, so the biggest health benefits will come from combining regular sauna use with regular exercise.

Depending on your current lifestyle, health goals and challenges, there seems to be something any of us could gain from sauna use and it can all be done with 20–30 minutes of sauna bathing once a week or more often. “Lisää löylyä!”, as we say in Finland.