Luis had been quietly building something in Minneapolis before the world caught up with him. sauna Strong — a community-centered contrast therapy space — was the manifestation of a conviction: that heat and cold, applied with intention and experienced in community, can change a person's relationship to their own body and mind.
This conversation on The Art of Living Well podcast moves between the physiological and the deeply human. What happens to the body in a sauna or a cold plunge is well-documented. What happens between people who share that experience is less so — and Luis has been paying close attention.
When asked his single non-negotiable to start each day, Luis answers without hesitation: cold water. Not coffee, not meditation, not journaling — though he values all of these. The cold plunge is the anchor around which everything else organizes.
His reasoning is not performance optimization, though the performance benefits are real. It is something more fundamental: the cold establishes his relationship to discomfort for the entire day. When the hardest thing you do happens before sunrise, the ordinary difficulties of the day appear in different proportion.
This is the psychological architecture of the morning cold practice — not a hack, but a recalibration of what counts as difficult.
Luis speaks about heat with the ease of someone who has spent thousands of hours in the sauna — both personally and as a guide for others. The sauna, in his framework, is not primarily a recovery tool. It is a sanctuary.
What he observes in the sauna is a kind of permission: permission to be still, to sweat, to be present without an agenda. The heat enforces a kind of honesty. You cannot be on your phone. You cannot rush. The body sets the tempo.
The physiological effects — cardiovascular conditioning, heat shock protein activation, cortisol regulation, sleep improvement — unfold in the background of this intentional stillness. The ritual creates the space; the biology does the rest.
Contrast therapy — alternating heat and cold — is the practice that Sauna Strong is built around, and Luis describes its effects as qualitatively different from either heat or cold alone.
Moving from deep heat to cold water triggers a full-spectrum physiological response: the cardiovascular system cycles between dilation and constriction; the nervous system oscillates between parasympathetic and sympathetic activation; hormones and neurotransmitters flood the system in sequence. The result is a profound sense of aliveness — a felt sense that the body is fully engaged with the present moment.
Regular contrast practitioners report changes in their baseline: improved sleep, more consistent energy, reduced anxiety, a greater ease in navigating stress. Luis sees this consistently in the Sauna Strong community. The practice changes people.
Something distinct happens when people share these experiences. Luis built Sauna Strong as a community space, not a spa, for this reason. The presence of others in the sauna or the cold plunge changes the experience — not by making it easier, but by making it more meaningful.
Shared discomfort creates connection at a speed that casual social interaction cannot match. People who have entered cold water together have a reference point — a shared moment of vulnerability and resilience — that becomes the foundation for genuine relationship.
This is not incidental to the health benefit. Social connection is itself one of the most powerful predictors of longevity and mental health. Building a practice around community is not a marketing decision. It is a design principle with real physiological implications.