00:00is a sauna really worth the hype I feel like we live in an era now where everything is sensationalized it's so difficult to ascertain if something's legit or not I did a similar video to this on cold plunging because is cold plunging worth the hype like people tout all these crazy benefits but when we Dove deep into it there's not much literature to back it up all of it seems to be anecdotal or just mental which counts for a lot don't get me wrong like mental fortitude and building that resilience there infinite potential with that but is sauna the same thing like if I talk about Asana or I see someone else talk about Asana people just really jump on them saying you're a tinfoil hat wearing weirdo because you think saunas are cool well when I looked at the literature it was pretty crazy I'm a big sauna guy and I wanted to make sure I wasn't drinking my own Kool-Aid because my anecdotal experience is amazing anyhow the first one is simple cardiovascular health right with that when you jump in a sauna you feel like you're working out like
01:00realistically your heart is pumping you're breathing heavily you're vasodilated it feels like you're working out like it feels like you're running when you jump in a cold plunge it's hard but you don't feel like you're working out you just feel like you're suffering like I feel like I'm working out Nicole in a sauna now with this there's data there's a study published in Jama like a huge study took a look at over 2300 finished participants and attract them for over 20 years 20.7 years okay and it looked at their sudden cardiac disease risk like their sudden cardiac death they also looked at just regular coronary heart disease regular cardiovascular disease risk and all-cause mortality what they found is that compared to one time per week sauna going in Asana for two to three times per week led to a 22 percent decrease in sudden cardiac death and about the same decrease in the other categories too but in those that went in Asana four to seven days per week there was a 63
02:00percent less risk of sudden cardiac death and again very similar percentages in the other groups as well okay that is very very strong data so no matter who you are from a General Health cardiovascular perspective it makes sense but we have to understand mechanisms to really get excited about it so what's happening in your body well with that there's a study that was published in the Mayo Clinic proceedings but we still need to do more work like mechanisms are tough the first thing they notice is that okay there's a huge vasodilation effect so you end up having what's called endothelial dilation which is going to decrease the blood pressure and that just takes the pressure off the heart the back pressure so the heart doesn't have to work as hard because there's less pressure that it's pushing against now additionally there's other things going on you also have reductions in inflammation and reductions in reactive oxygen species oxidative stress which of course put pressure on the entire body not to mention the cardiovascular system so when you reduce the inflammation then you have less risk of arterial plaque turning into these foam cells which can ultimately cause an
03:00issue and lastly there's a decrease in arterial stiffness now this is a classic issue with cardiovascular disease where the arteries become stiff because the vascular life the cells the endothelial cells actually die and become dysfunctional and basically the heart is now pumping blood through dysfunctional stiff arteries which is hard on the whole system right so we have that now let's talk about some more fun stuff though growth hormone now this unfortunately is where people end up getting absolutely hammered online and sometimes it's well deserved because I've seen people do it people talk about Asana and they say it's these exponential benefits by because there's exponential increases in growth hormone and it's going to make you put on gobs of muscle just by drinking lemonade and the reality is that that's not how it works but the literature is pretty darn strong with growth hormone so let's look at it there's a study published in experimental gerontology which sounds like kind of a scary thing it sounds like they're doing experiments on old
04:00people but anyway what they're doing in this study is they took a look at not necessarily old people but they took a look at people that went into Asana for different bouts of time so in this case they did two 20-minute bouts at 80 degrees Celsius with a 30 minute break in between okay so lower temperature for 20 minutes they found that doing this increased growth hormone pulses 2X then they found that going in for 15 minutes slightly shorter bout at a higher temperature 100 degrees Celsius with a 30 minute Gap in between these two sessions led to a 5x increase in growth hormone and this lasted for a few hours after the session so we now see that higher heat seems to elicit more of a growth hormone response because probably it's changing intracranial pressure is probably having an impact on the brain that way so it's changing how you actually secrete growth hormone okay well what's really interesting is then they said okay what happens if you do this twice a day for one hour like one
05:00hour sessions in the morning and at night for seven days kind of unrealistic for most people with time but there was a 16x increase in growth hormone which ultimately demonstrates that if you're consistent not necessarily doing two times per day all the time but consistently hitting a sauna maybe in the morning maybe in the evening booking it that's going to have a huge impact on growth hormone that doesn't mean you're going to build a bunch of muscle no it probably means realistically that you might prevent some sarcopenia some muscle breakdown if your protein intake is high enough it will probably help support that but also it just helps stimulate repair and Recovery because your immune system also relies a lot on growth hormone as well so you just got to pay attention to all this it's a huge piece but it doesn't deserve us shouting from the rooftops that you're going to magically become Jay color I also put a link down below for the sauna that I use at home it's a company called Redwood Outdoors if you're trying to get a classier sauna that looks good in your backyard that's really good quality wood that's not going to be like I'll tell you realistically like the big friction that I have with my wife is my wife is
06:00like I don't want to have a big ugly sauna in our backyard but most of them in a barrel they just don't look that good but the nice thing about redwood Outdoors is kind of makes the whole family happy like it's beautiful it looks really nice it smells amazing it's classy and they have a bunch of different varieties whether it's cubes whether it's barrels whatever so I did put a link down below and that link will get you 250 bucks off if you want to try out a sauna and people do ask me all the time I know it's not necessarily in the budget for a lot of people I totally respect that and totally get that and I think there's Alternatives like if you need an infrared or you need to use a sauna blanket to start like by all means or take a hot bath like that can get you a similar effect but having a sauna is a really nice thing if it's something that you really want to invest in and personally I think it's worth the investment no matter what company you use I just think Redwood Outdoors does it really well so that link is down below I think you'll really enjoy what you see there on their website with a different variety that they have the next one is an interesting one but the data is so strong and that's on the
07:00immune system there's a study that was published in the European Journal of epidemiology it took a look at over 1900 participants for 25 years okay and they looked at respiratory infections they looked at hospitalizations with respiratory issues just respiratory illness in general they found that using a sauna 2 to three times per week decrease the risk of respiratory illness by 27 percent okay I'm kind of a Believer here but it found that if you went up to four times per week the results were even crazier at four times per week not even more just straight up four 41 decrease risk of respiratory illness or hospitalization from respiratory illness so potentially decreasing intensity of an illness and even decreasing the ability to contract it in the first place but how is this working once again we get into mechanisms like we don't entirely know but we have seen some literature explaining what might be going on so there was a study published in medical microbiology and there's
08:00these things called antigen presenting cells and what they do is they help sort of find the pathogens and heat shock proteins which are increased when we are in Asana what happens is these heat shock proteins help kind of refine these apcs okay these antigen presenting cells and what they do is they if you had a laser-guided missile it basically refines your laser to make it X percent more accurate so you now have a more defined accurate laser to find a pathogen and neutralize it but heat shot proteins themselves are a chaperoning protein which means they help refine a lot of different things and make things more efficient including the immune system but they also help sound the alarms so it's like having a bunch of reconnaissance planes flying around that sound alarms if something is out of place or shouldn't be there so it lets the body know then additionally heat shock proteins can modulate what are called toll-like receptors and these
09:00toll-like receptors can help with the timing of things so imagine you have this laser guided missile that works super well and you need to shoot it at a Target but you need to wait for the enemy to actually be there like what good is shooting and neutralizing a Target Zone without the actual Target enemy there right so the timing becomes very important so these whole like receptors kind of help facilitate that so the mediation of these tlrs from the heat shock proteins really could be one of the reasons again we don't know this is mechanistic Theory but we have the larger scale data know that something's going on here but then one of the big reasons that I like to sauna is because of the muscle preservation potential I say potential because we never know for sure but the data is strong there's a study published in Frontiers physiology had subjects to a 60-minute whole body sauna session or a single leg sauna session like where they just basically isolated their leg and put it in high heat and they did muscle biopsy to see like what's changing they actually took a chunk of the muscle and looked at it they found that whole body sauna had
10:00huge impacts over just the single leg so it wasn't it was systemic it wasn't just isolated in the leg and what they ended up discovering is that there was an increase in What's called the phosphorylation or activation in human terms of the akt and mtor pathway what this means is that the environment in which which muscle protein synthesis occurs and muscle growth that entire environment was changed and it was tilted more towards a muscle building state it doesn't mean that you're going to build a bunch of muscle but it means that you are in theory putting yourself in a more opportune state to build muscle when you consume protein and have proper stimulus surrounding this could the sauna be the stimulus itself probably not but I do think that using a sauna post workout can increase the effect of the protein that you get as a result of the stimulus and another big reason from a performance standpoint there's a lot of data backing up running walking hiking just aerobic fitness in
11:00general and even though I look like a meathead I would probably consider myself more of a runner than a lifter realistically and when you look at the data here it's quite strong there's a study published in the journal science and medicine and Sport took a look at Runners and I had these Runners do three weeks of their normal running routine then it had them do three weeks of their running routine alongside 30-minute sauna sessions what they found is that the sauna group only had a 32 percent increase in their time to exhaustion so they were able to go for 32 percent longer before getting tired which resulted in a 1.9 increase or Improvement I should say in their time trial time so they actually got faster and they went for longer they had a 7.1 percent increase in their red blood cell volume that's like I don't know it's not quite the same but it's like blood doping I mean that's crazy that is a huge Improvement in the ability to carry oxygen so this has huge benefits for maybe uh well exercise obviously but
12:00maybe training at altitude like or if you're going to be doing some kind of mountaineering trip and you need to increase RBC count that's huge but let's talk about real people for a second too people that maybe aren't athletes this study was published in the American Journal of physiology took a look at 47 individuals okay and it had them either do exercise or exercise plus SATA they found that the exercise plus sauna group ended up having larger improvements in their overall respiratory Fitness their aerobic capacity and aerobic fitness but they also had a decrease in blood pressure so the heart was literally working less hard to support more activity to support more threshold and support more intensity so is sauna worth the hype yeah it is and if people want to rope cold plunging together with sauna that's doing us a disservice because saunas have literature behind them coal plunges just work because they might work I they do they don't there's nothing to really back it up but you're not a tin foil hat wearing weirdo if you
13:00sit in a sauna the literature is there I'll see you tomorrow