Sauna Best Temperature, Length for Blood Pressure & Health Benefits
00:00hey y'all welcome back so in today's session we're going to talk a little bit more about the health benefits linked with regular islamotherapy and answer the question that a lot of people want to know how long should you go in the sauna how many sessions should you do per week and what is the ideal temperature for those sauna sessions so first i just want to welcome you all back we are at or in in my backyard sauna that i built built and i shared with you exactly how to build this uh we started sauna bathing back at our gym in 2013 we bought an infrared sauna in 2016. i sold that uh in 2020 to build this and when i say this we're talking a classic finish on a with a wood fired stove from kumalampa it gets up to about 230 degrees again made everything in here bought the glass for the windows made custom frames made the door uh made the benches this is the only thing i didn't make and i didn't make the thermometer but anyway let's get to your question okay your question a lot of people want to know okay you have asana you have access to a sauna how do you really go about thinking about this and i like to
01:00approach this and i guess i i frequently approach many things as like how i approach exercises how i approach many things in life you want to do a little warm-up right your first session is not going to be the hottest or or the the most intense your second session might be and what do i mean by session well for example our sauna right now it's it's about 80 degrees right now okay it's slowly warming up i just started the fire and i wanted to make this video for you so if it was at 220 degrees my phone would not be able to work right now and i couldn't talk i'd be stripping sweat right so what i'm gonna do and what our what our family usually does especially on sundays is we'll come in here as it's warming up right so we slowly start to break the sweat just like you slowly ease into your workout or you slowly ease into your piano practice session or whatever your ski slopes right whatever sport or thing that you do for your body you don't just dive in head first so what i the mistake that i've made over
02:00the years thinking hotter is better longer is better is what i use we used to do is i used to just go right here and the hottest part of the sonics is right by the stove pour water everywhere and just you know and i could only stand for about eight minutes and i thought man maybe i'm just not strong enough and i often like felt stressed and a little bit more tired than normal and now and i've learned a lot of this from listening to people that have been doing this for decades glenn arbot over at sauna times he has a great podcast i highly if you're into sauna you gotta check out glenn he's a really cool guy and he by the way his ebook was how i built this asana that we're in okay so i've learned you know through making stupid mistakes and through conversations that he shared on his podcast your first session should be your longest and you should warm up to it right so as your sauna is warming up you should warm up with your sauna you might say well gosh i don't have time well here's what i do okay
03:00all the videos that i create for you all it's i'm reading papers in here so i just come here my daughter you know she's got all kinds of books and stuff like that this is her little kid bench she has a little slider here so she can um you know if it gets too hot for her she has she has two vents and so on but we'll warm up together in here we'll play games we'll tell jokes and it's like 20 30 minutes and we're relaxed we're calm you know then i get the fire really rocking okay and that's my second set so i'll do like 20 30 minutes and it's going to be about i don't know 100 excuse me we'll come in here when it's about 120 degrees which i know some of you might think wow that's so hot it's really not it's not once you get used to this it's not that hot it's warm for sure but you can stay in that temperature for a good 20 30 minutes right we'll go out we might drink some water we'll go bounce on our trampoline we'll go play with the dog give it 5-10 minutes something like that then we come back in and that's when i want to bring the heat okay because we're warmed up we've we've
04:00done this uh and if i don't have enough time to do another let's just have one all i have is 30 minutes that will be it right i no longer just go in here and go straight to 220 degrees because it's it's a major shock to the system and it's another stress so you want to slowly warm up to this but my second round what i'll do is i'll wear my my wool hat let me let's grab that grab the uh the sauna cap here's the room here we've got some elk antlers for towels and whatnot but um so i'll take this wear this guy okay and i don't know exactly what this does but i i've heard that it helps prevent your hair from burning because it can get especially up in these you know levels of like your your hair and eyes it gets really really hot so i'll wear this wool hat and we're pouring water on the rocks creating that steam that leoli and that by the way let me just pause here that's what makes a wood-burning stove sauna a little bit
05:00different from a dry sauna like an infrared sauna from high-tech health or some other company is the moisture okay so heat is heat is heat right however when you add in that moisture it's like bone penetrating it's a little bit different you sweat faster it causes you to just it warms up the air around you and it just hits you like a ton of bricks it really feels good so that's i think the difference now there's nothing wrong with an infrared sauna there's nothing wrong with starting there uh and and doing that if that's all the space you have you know just know thyself i happen to love making fires right some people just like to push a button and be done with it i don't mind tinkering with the fire chopping wood collecting wood calling my buddies if they have a fallen tree and saying hey i'll come out there with my chainsaw and cut it up like that's just me like i'm cool doing that some people want nothing to do with that if that's you just hit the button there's nothing wrong with that get an electric stove or get a get an infrared sauna okay now your second round as i mentioned just to summarize it might be 10 12
06:00minutes for if it's really hot pushing 200 and so hot that when i pour water on the rocks it like burns my nose when i'm breathing basically i breathe really slow like so slow or else it can be too hot um that session might be six minutes and it it changes on the day if i'm a little bit over trained if i if i've been working out a lot that session is closer to five minutes if i'm feeling really good that session is 12 right and depending upon and this is what i like to do and why i like a wood stove is i let the coals tell me right so if i had already done two sessions and i had that much more wood left you know what i would do i would do another round it's just that's just how it is how i think about it you know um using nature using you know because i don't want to waste the fire you know so to speak so anyway that's how i think about it now as we finish off let's talk about who the sauna is for okay well if we think about who uses asana it's usually people who
07:00want to feel good who already are feeling good and they want to relax these are you know ceos executives authors creatives and also athletes okay so obviously it works for those people then it can work for people that maybe are struggling with type 2 diabetes or you have heart disease you have high blood pressure you have myocardial impairment or alzheimer's disease or you're susceptible to colds and flus all those things can be very helpful in fact i was just reading a paper here i want to do a deeper video on this this paper here i'll read it to you the cardio metabolic health benefits of sauna exposure in individuals with high stress occupations so folks that have worked the shift work uh work shift workers the night shift uh policemen firefighters uh those and also military personnel uh those individuals have a higher occupational exposure to stress due to the circadian rhythm disruption and the stress of the occupation that can increase mortality from heart disease and so it turns out that getting hot on
08:00purpose it actually is a wonderful way to help to support the health of your microvasculature and so by getting hot what you're doing is you're essentially moving blood flow and dilating your blood vessels in the same way that you would normally do with exercise so it complements exercise and it has that sort of tonic effect on your cardiovascular system in the same way that exercise does without having to do exercise so this doesn't supplant or you know obviate the need to exercise it's just it's an additive benefit okay now along those lines because what happens is when you get hot you're diverting blood away from your core to the rest of the peripheral of your body okay so you don't want to have like a major meal and then go right in the sauna i would say i've done that before you know you just do what you do with life and time and everything like that however if you're diverting blood away from your core you're not digesting your food so give yourself a little bit of time if possible you know before you go in a super hot sauna session
09:00let's see what else you also want to consider electrolytes and that's why we formulated those electrolyte sticks because you have your creatine you have your taurine you have your potassium albion chelated minerals uh really great and real salt because we found that just you know regular sauna bear bathing uh it it is a stressful it depletes your electrolytes you got to support your electrolytes but more to come on this there's some really interesting papers here yari lakkanen has done a lot of research on heart disease prevention and even dementia and longitudinal studies it's phenomenal so be friends with someone who has asana start saving 20 bucks a day 10 bucks a day whatever put in a bank put in a money market account make it a gold make it a vision board my friends this piece of land right here in my backyard uh in 2018 maybe it's 2019 in the summer of 2019 i believe i just put cinder blocks here and i said i am going to build a sauna of my dreams there i didn't have the money i had credit card debt i had all this crap right i just said i'm gonna do this i don't know how i'm gonna do it and three years later i did it right so
10:00you can do it too there's nothing special about this so starting to get hot as you might be able to tell i'm starting to sweat a little bit let's check in on the the fire here again kuma lampa they make this all american steel hand built by a third generation finnish family in tower minnesota so this sucker gets hot anyway friends have a great week thanks for tuning in we'll catch you all soon