Every week someone asks me: infrared or traditional? Which one should I get? And I understand the impulseâyou're about to spend real money, you want to make the right call. But the question itself reveals a misunderstanding. These aren't competing products. They're different tools for different jobs.
This video articulates that distinction cleanly. Finnish sauna runs 172 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit and delivers a short, intense heat stress that your cardiovascular system has to work hard to manage. Infrared runs 130 to 150 degrees and penetrates deeper into tissue, operating more slowly. Same categoryâdeliberate heat exposureâbut different mechanisms, different targets, different outcomes.
The Finnish sauna data is some of the most robust in preventive medicine. We're talking about nearly 1,700 people tracked over years in the KIHD cohort studies. A 65% decrease in cardiovascular morbidity. A 50 to 70% reduction in mortality risk. A 65% reduction in Alzheimer's and dementia risk. These numbers appear repeatedly in the literatureâRhonda Patrick has built much of her public health work around them, and Huberman has covered the mechanisms in detail. The cardiovascular benefits come from the intensity of the heat stress: your heart rate climbs to 100 to 150 beats per minute, mimicking moderate aerobic exercise, while plasma volume expands and vasculature learns to adapt.
The infrared data is younger and thinner, but compelling in different ways. The mitochondrial activation pathwayâspecifically AMPK and PGC1 alphaâresponds differently to infrared's deeper tissue penetration. For people with chronic pain, autoimmune conditions, or significant heat sensitivity, infrared offers a way into heat therapy that Finnish temperatures simply won't allow.
The honest tension in this field is about what counts as sufficient heat stress. Infrared advocates argue that deeper tissue penetration compensates for lower ambient temperatureâthat you're heating the body from the inside out rather than outside in. Finnish traditionalists (and the epidemiological data) point out that the longevity research was conducted at high temperatures, and we can't simply transpose those outcomes onto a lower-temperature modality. That's not cherry-picking. That's good scienceâyou can't extrapolate benefits from a study that didn't use your conditions.
The honest answer is: we don't have 20-year epidemiological data on infrared sauna users. We have mechanism studies, shorter trials, and reasonable inference. That's useful, but it's not the same as what the Finnish cohort data gives us for traditional sauna.
If cardiovascular health and longevity are your primary goals, prioritize access to a Finnish sauna. Four to seven sessions per week, 15 to 30 minutes. The intensity matters. If you have chronic pain, fatigue, or heat sensitivityâor if you're building a recovery protocolâinfrared is a legitimate and valuable complement. Many people benefit from using both over time, letting the infrared build tolerance and aid recovery while the Finnish sauna delivers the cardiovascular adaptation.
Here's what I find most interesting about this comparison: it's really a lesson in hormesis. The Finnish sauna works precisely because 190 degrees is hard. Your body doesn't want to be there. It activates heat shock proteins, floods you with norepinephrine, forces cardiovascular adaptation. The discomfort is the medicine. Infrared is easier to tolerateâand that's both its advantage and its limitation. When we optimize too hard for comfort, we sometimes optimize away the signal. The body adapts to what it's actually challenged by. Not to what merely warms it.