00:00i've always thought that people who use the saunas at gyms are just lazy people who don't like to lift weights don't like to hit up the treadmill get some cardio in and just wanted to sit in a nice cozy warm room so i thought i'd stop in at lumos infrared saunas in rochester this is my fourth session this week in the saunas and find out if that's true or could saunas be a disease preventing longevity tool that brings health and happiness so let's get into it many places that offer sauna sessions usually promote a multitude of benefits ranging from detoxification skin rejuvenation and weight loss all the way to improved cardiovascular health immune system function and stress management but the scientific evidence to back up all these claims can be sparse at times so let's start off with the proven benefits for sauna usage and what i've found is that there's really two reasons why saunas are proven to be so healthy first saunas mimic exercise saunas are really hot reaching temperatures over 150 degrees fahrenheit sometimes upwards
01:00of 200 degrees and if you stay in them long enough your heart rate's gonna rise you're gonna start sweating profusely and it's gonna become uncomfortable to stay inside the sauna in many ways sauna usage mimics moderate intensity exercise and this surprised me because i thought that going inside the sauna would be similar to relaxing laying on a couch but it wasn't as i stayed in the sauna longer it became physically stressful and it became more difficult to stay in the sauna the longer the session went and my heart rate ended up rising to close to 150 beats per minute which was pretty high and so because of this there's a lot of similarities while your body's inside the sauna compared to if you're doing moderate intensity exercise so you can see how a lot of the benefits that you would get from exercising can also be achieved through sauna usage and second was the alone time while it was physically stressful to be inside the sauna and stay in there as time progressed it was kind of mentally stressless at the same time it was pretty relaxing and i hadn't considered this beforehand but using a sauna is kind of like a dedicated time period of alone time where there's no technology there's no
02:00distractions there's no notifications or anything going on and so you can practice mindfulness or meditation or read a book and this is where i started to realize a lot of the psychological benefits that could happen from sauna usage and how it could influence our cognitive health too and based on these two reasons of sauna usage mimicking exercise and providing dedicated alone time i could start to better understand why so many studies were showing a lot of benefits to using saunas so let's get into the scientific literature most of the research has been performed in finland because they have about one sauna per household which is more saunas per household than any other country in the world it's a lot of saunas so a lot of the research has been performed in finland and so i started to go through a lot of these finished sauna studies and here are the main benefits that i found cardiovascular health and a study comparing the effects of sauna usage frequency using 20-minute sauna sessions at 174 degrees fahrenheit it was found that people who performed two to three sessions per week had a 27 reduced risk for cardiovascular disease compared to people who only use the sauna once per week and if you raise that to four to six
03:00sauna sessions their chance for cardiovascular disease was reduced by 50 compared to people who only perform saunas once a week and so you can start to see the benefits that sauna sessions have on cardiovascular disease on top of that sauna usage reduce the risk for a sudden cardiac event and coronary heart disease and so really the entire scientific literature on cardiovascular disease is pretty strong and pretty positive all the way around dementia and alzheimer's in that same study people performed four to six sauna sessions per week reduced their risk for dementia and alzheimer's disease by 65 percent immune health i also found a lot of research that showed increased immunity with sauna usage too and so another study showed that people who performed sauna sessions one to two times per week for four to six months reduce the risk for the common cold by 50 compared to those who didn't use the sauna at all and decrease risk for all-cause mortality this should come as no surprise if you're reducing the risk for cardiovascular disease dementia alzheimer's and many illnesses that any reasons for death are probably going to
04:00be decreased too and so what this means is that when you use the sauna more you have a greater chance of living longer and healthier and the crazy part is with a lot of these studies that show these benefits is that they concluded that sauna usage has a dose-dependent effect what this means is that the more you use the sauna the greater the effect will be the less likely you're gonna have cardiovascular disease the less likely you're gonna have dementia alzheimer's or any illnesses the more time you spend in the sauna and that could be time spent in a sauna per session 20 increasing maybe from 10 minutes to 20 minutes or 30 minutes or that could be frequency of sauna sessions per week maybe going from two to four sessions or four to six sessions are going to provide more benefit than just one session or just 10 minutes in the sauna it is warm in here it is toasty it's warm and toasty this is nice and while there isn't concrete evidence that sauna usage can help with psychological effects like stress management and depression and anxiety i think it's just that there hasn't been enough studies performed on it there was only a few studies that i found and they
05:00did show positive effects but there just wasn't a lot of research on it and that goes with a few other benefits i saw linked to sauna usage like blood pressure and cholesterol respiratory disease and cancer too they had shown some links but there just hadn't been a lot of research done on it yet and despite all these benefits there are some claims where i just couldn't find any evidence to back it up and so that could be that there's just not enough research performed on these areas or that the current research out there just didn't show positive effects with these few items so let's start with detoxification many saunas claim that profuse sweating will remove toxins from the body but i just couldn't find that to be true through much of my research sweating's main purpose is to cool the body it's not to detoxify the body and so while some toxins come out through the skin and through sweating you're going to have a lot more detoxification in the liver and the kidneys on an everyday basis and so i saw dr schwartz compared this to somebody worrying about drowning while sitting in a bathtub if you were to remove a dropper full of water from the bathtub theoretically you're reducing someone's risk for drowning in that bathtub
06:00because there's less water but you've removed so little water that it's effectively meaningless and so that's kind of how detoxification works in the sauna sure sweating does remove toxins but likely not in a meaningful way skin benefits i just couldn't find a lot of studies that showed benefits to skin health from sauna usage and in my four sessions i kind of noticed that my skin was pretty dried out afterwards but i guess it's possible that a lot of the research has been performed on finished saunas which heat the air around the body and many of the sauna facilities that claim the benefits are infrared saunas that use light to heat the body but even that sort of seems like a stretch to me and weight loss all the studies that i saw that showed weight loss from sauna usage had to do with sweating that were just gained back once you had water after the sauna session and so there wasn't any real long-term effects for decreased weight loss from sauna usage that i could find at least and the last thing i'll mention is that although sauna usage mimics moderate it doesn't necessarily mean it's a replacement for moderate intensity exercise when you're doing physical exercise
07:00you're also strengthening bones strengthening muscles increasing your neuromuscular coordination improving posture there's many other benefits that come from physical activity that you're not necessarily going to get from sauna usage about halfway into the session right now starting to work up a good sweat heart rate is hovering climbing just above 100 right now we got some nice light therapy depending on your type of vibe we got some speakers in each corner of the room for the t swift for the justin biebs whatever you're into so far so good but i can certainly see many use cases force on a usage whether that's supplementing it with your current fitness routine or it's using it as an exercise substitute for people who can't exercise and that could be due to extreme obesity arthritis osteoporosis or any other limiting factors that would prevent you from exercise so now that we know what the actual benefits are for sonic usage and what they might not be what are the optimal parameters how can you get the most out of your sauna session and like i mentioned a lot of the studies showed a dose-dependent effect for sauna usage so the longer you're in a sauna session or the more sauna sessions you have per
08:00week the greater the effects are going to be and in many studies i found the optimal benefits being achieved using a sauna at 174 degrees for a 20-minute session at almost daily so five to six times per week and in many cases this can only be achieved in a finished sauna compared to an infrared sauna because finish saunas are able to get up to extremely high temperatures up to 200 degrees where a lot of infrared saunas are limited to 150 160 degrees but the good thing is you can still achieve all these benefits with the infrared sauna if you just increase your duration time so if your infrared sauna gets up to 164 degrees you can stay in that sauna session for about 30 minutes and get the same benefits and if the sauna gets up to 155 degrees benefits would be achieved at approximately 45 minutes so whatever sonic you have available to you just adjust your session duration for optimal benefits so i did my sauna sessions at lumos infrared saunas in rochester and during my sessions i bumped up the heat to the maximum level and saw an average temperature of about 155 degrees sometimes getting close to 160 degrees
09:00so in that case i would recommend 45 minute sessions to get the optimal i learned about this research after i already scheduled my sessions so a lot of my personal research my personal experience was during the 30 minute session and so the sauna session was hard after 30 minutes and i'm looking forward to going back and trying out the 45 minute as i expect it to be even more difficult but i also expected to bring a lot more benefits too so here are just some measurements that i took before during and after my sauna session for blood pressure heart rate and weight what i saw is that i lost about a pound of weight in sweat from that 30 minute sauna session i saw my blood pressure remain about the same and you can see the heart rate slowly rise over time ending off at about 135 minutes and at least this chart some of my other sessions like i mentioned got up to almost 150 beats per minute and i'm interested to see what it looks like if i'm in there for 45 minutes how high my heart rate gets from those so here my final thoughts i found sauna usage to be a fantastic way to extend life prevent disease and facilitate alone time
10:00and are otherwise super busy schedules and i think there's so many use cases for sauna usage that i couldn't find any contra indications i can't find any reasons why someone shouldn't be using asana and although i couldn't find studies to back up some of the claims for detoxification weight loss and skin health i think there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that shows the benefits for alzheimer's stress management and a number of other factors that just make sauna usage extremely healthy in many cases so whether you're using it as a supplement to your already healthy lifestyle or are you using it as an exercise substitute for someone who can't i'm all for sauna usage so much so i kind of want to buy one i mean if i'm already spending 30 minutes a day reading why not do that in a sauna too to me that sounds like a life that's both healthier and happier thanks for watching at the end of the video if you like this video please let me know by hitting the like button if you have any questions drop them in the comments below and if you want to see more videos like this please subscribe to my youtube channel lastly if you'd like access to my health kit where i provide my top 10 sleep tips
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