Hot Tub vs Sauna Unlock Better Recovery & Performance
00:00Today we're going to be talking about the benefits of sauna hot tub. [Music] Okay, I've been in the hot tub. I've been in the sauna. Which one is better? Well, it's not really about which is better. It's about how are they different and how can we use both of these as tools for recovery, health, and performance. So, as always, I'm Dr. Bo Beard. If you like what you hear today, you learned something, please like, subscribe, and share. What are the benefits of both? So both increase circulation. This is something that gets talked about all the time that um you know as you get hot your heart rate increases. You vasoddilate. You move blood around. Um why is that important? We'll talk about that a little bit more here. Um it's going to relax tight muscles and joints. Obviously we know that sitting in a hot tub feels good. Maybe we don't realize how much heating up our body in a sauna is actually relaxing us. But they both do put our bodies into a state of parasympathetic or kind of that rest and digest or recover mode. Um but beyond
01:00that they start to work in different ways. So let's go after sauna specifically. So how does um sauna whether it's dry or infrared um both make you sweat but they create real physiologic stress and that's a good thing. So the first thing you do is both will make your core temperature go up. Uh an infrared sauna like we have an infrared sauna here in um the office. I have a hot tub at home. The infrared sauna here in the office can get up to around I think it's like 171. It's an odd, you know, max temp, but that's what it gets up to. If you look at some of my uh what to call them, health and wellness heroes, man crushes, whatever, like Lar Hamilton, people like that. I mean, the guy's in a a traditional finish sauna with elamits on on an aerodine, you know, at 220 degrees exercising in there. There's things that you can do at that higher temperature that will not occur in an infrared sauna that will not occur in a hot tub with a hot tub around 104 to 105 degrees. So, your core temperature is going to be able to rise higher if I'm in a higher temperature because of the time exposure. So, if I'm
02:00in uh 220 degrees for 10 minutes versus 170 degrees for 10 minutes, um your core temperature is going to get a little hotter. So the thing is here I you know you have a time exposure thing on all these to where you know the benefits or the negative outweighs benefit. So it's around you know 7 to 10 minutes in a sauna maybe a little bit longer in the hot tub because the heat's uh or the temperature is lower. Your core temperature goes way up. Why is that important? One of the big benefits is the the refractory effect later. So if I get in a hot tub in particular in the evening a couple hours before bed and I spike my core temperature is I go to sleep which is promoted by all these sleep these chili pads and sleep eight is I want my core body temperature to drop off as I get into deep and rim sleep. So around you know depending on when you go to bed middle of the night your core temperature should be the lowest it's going to be. That's why I want to sleep at a low temperature in the home you know 68 you know 69 degrees. So, I get that refractory. So, I've peripheralized all my blood when I
03:00get hot. I'm trying to cool myself off. Well, then I I bring all that blood or shunt it back um you know, centrally um in the middle of the night and I'm going to kind of cool myself back down. So, that's one of those things we want to see occur if I do a uh a sauna later in the um evening, which you're going to get the same effect from the hot tub, just not as profound. Um you the second thing which gets talked about an awful lot is this production of what's called heat shock proteins. So these proteins are released when we are exposed to heat both from things like exercise, when you get a fever, also when you fast, you get some of these heat shock proteins. And these heat shock proteins are basically your cells. Think of it as like an emergency repair crew. So they're fixing, they're cleaning, they're protecting when life gets tough. In particular, they're repairing protein structures within our body. And that is huge when we're in a disease state. So when we have a fever, that's why that kicks up. But we always have some cellular damage going on and we have more and more cellular damage as we age,
04:00which is one of the theories of why we age and why we eventually die. So if we can help offset that through the production of heat shock proteins, both through exercise and sauna and maybe even sauna after exercise, um, which we'll talk about here in a second, we can, you know, improve that a little bit. So going along with the core temperature rising we do get a increase in your heart rate which we said that both these things are going to do which can mimic a low um intensity cardio. So zone 2 gets talked about all the time nowadays. So if I raise my heart rate into that zone two which we would say is like slightly conversational. So basically you want to you can talk but you don't want to is what we'd say for zone two. So maybe it's a little bit lower than that but you get a a spike in heart rate. So it can mimic some of the effects of lowle cardio. The other thing that we can do is we can do sauna infrared or traditional aftererobic exercise and it's actually been proven that um you will have more mitochondrial biogenesis which gets kicked up when we get in the sauna by itself or we do aerobic exercise for around 30 to 45 minutes or
05:00beyond by itself. But when we pair them together you actually amplify both of them. And then if I do sauna after aerobic exercise I'm going to get the core temperature body um elevation. I'm going to get the vasoddilation. I'm going to get all these the heart rate rising again, which is going to help basically flush my body back out. So, get some Venus return as I kind of get that shunt mechanism going back uh for the same reasons it's going to improve sleep and drop core body temperature later after the sauna. You know, long-term studies, a lot of these coming out of Scandinavia where, you know, people in Sweden and Norway are using uh Finnish or traditional saunas uh more often than we are here, show this significant decrease in heart disease. And there's one thing to talk about this with these studies is that in those countries, they are typically doing more things that are beneficial to their health than we are already. So there's a bias towards health in those areas of their food is different. Even though their food is different, they eat different foods than us. And I'm talking
06:00outside of the agriculture and production of the food. They're outdoors more than us. They exercise more than us. Like there's all these things. There's a reason that, you know, Scandinavia is one of the happier countries. I don't think it's just or areas in the world. I don't think it's just that they're using sauna. I think that's part of it. But when we look at some of these studies, it does show that sauna users have lower risk of heart disease, lower risk of Alzheimer's and dementia, and even all cause mortality. So, you know, it's not just this health and performance today. It's also maybe a little bit longevity play, which is maybe why it's become so popular because everybody's talking about longevity nowadays. So, let's switch gears. Let's move over to hot tubs. You get all of the benefits of sauna just at a much lower level. So, you're going to have some heat shock protein production, just not as much because it's a much lower temperature. You do get vasoddilation. You do get an increase in heart rate. If you ever saw a hot tub, you know, you're going to realize like, oh, your heart rate goes up. And this is why, you know, maybe we can't have small children in a hot tub
07:00because this mechanism kind of runs out of control. But here's the big difference with a hot tub that it does stand on its own uh I guess I was going to say two feet some you know hot tubs not feet but whatever we'll use a different analogy. It's a hydrostatic pressure. So if I sit in a body of water the the gradient of pressure of that fluid pushing on me does it a couple things without the heat right it's going to help Venus return. So, if you've ever seen normate compression boots or compression socks or things like that, those are creating a uh a static gradient without hydrostatic pressure. They just have, you know, the garment pressure to help Venus return to get some of that blood back out of your extremities after exercise, if you're on feet all day, if you're on a plane. We can do the same thing in the hot tub. The other thing that's interesting, especially if we have jets and a current, is it's almost like lymphatic massage. So, if you're familiar with uh your lymphatic system, you've probably heard of lymph nodes, the things that can swell when we get sick and things like that. It's basically your sewage system of your
08:00body. And the sewage system uses movement in uh your heart rate and heat to keep the sewage system moving. That's where if you've seen like the rebounders or lymphatic massage, lymphatic massage can be as light as the pressure of a nickel on your body. So it's not the most like ooh you know deep tissue relaxing massage but it's very light and it's great for getting lymphatic flow. Well hot tub is doing that through the hydrostatic pressure through the current and then the heat helps with baso vasoddilation. So it's even a more potent effect. So in terms of blood circulation and lymphatic drainage that's where a hot tub is going to win. But again you get a little bit of that with sonnages just you don't have this this uh pressure gradient. So again, when we break these two things down in a side to side which one's better, it's it's goal dependent. It's not better, it's just different. So it's like we say in the office here, we have, you know, 100 different tools. We have to determine which tool is appropriate for that patient in that given time. Same thing like what questions are you asking of? What are you trying to solve? If
09:00you're looking to buy a sauna, you're looking to buy a hot tub or go use one someplace. So for heart health, metabolic boost and heat adaptation, suns like that's, you know, you can even mimic altitude exposure by um inducing heat exposure during exercise. So we can go run in the Alabama heat where I live for an hour without drinking water and get um a little bit of altitude mimicking. We can do that a little bit with saunas as well for muscle recovery. Venus return lymphatic flow. Hot tub takes it. So we I use both of them. We have a sauna in the office. I have a hot tub at home. I'm glad I do. Um, you know, I rotate them. If you don't have access to either one, guess what? Like we said, exercise, heat, if it's hot outside, exercise in the heat. Um, fasting, you get some of this heat shock, protein, movement, you get lymphatic flow. So again, do you have to have these things like it's maybe sometimes seems like in the social media world, no, you get a lot of the benefits. Are they amplifiers of things that we can basically do physiologically on our own? 100%. Um, so if this helped
10:00you understand the difference, please hit the like button and subscribe for more strategy to blend movement, nature, and science. That's what I'm all about here. Uh, let me know in the comments. Are you team hot tub? Are you team sauna? Are you doing a little bit of both? Um, if you want me to talk about ice baths and things like that. I feel like that's just uh beating a dead horse at this point. But I can go over anything you want. So, also let me know in the comments ideas, questions that you might have on other recovery, health and wellness things, muscularkeeletal injuries. Try to cover it all here. Um, also realize you can head over to bobearder.com to get a free chapter of my book, The Age of Movement. You can also head over to Amazon and uh buy a copy for yourself there. And if you're on my website, you're onbo.com, you can also sign up or subscribe for a bi-weekly newsletter called Fieldnotes where I basically cover tips on health and performance and a little bit of random thoughts from uh here and there in my mind just for fun. So, I'll see y'all next time. Thank you.