Today’s New Zealand Herald presents an interesting idea: Monkeys taught us to bathe in the heat.
In an interview with the owner of Bliss Stone Spa, a new ganbanyoku establishment in Auckland, he says the Japanese idea for the ganbanyoku by watching monkeys. Photos of Japanese macaques bathing in the country’s hot springs are extremely common. What is not as widely known is that the monkeys, after leaving the baths, lie and sleep on the flat geothermally heated stones near the pools.
From the article:
“These monkeys live long and healthy lives, so the early Japanese thought lying on hot rocks will be good for people too,” said Mr Sekikawa, who brought the Japanese stone spa concept to Auckland in 2009.
If you aren’t familiar with it, ganbanyoku is a heated slab of stone placed in a humid room. You lie on the stone and the heat causes you to perspire profusely in a few minutes. You can read more about the ganbanyoku in our post “What is a ganbanyoku?”
Ganbanyoku spas have become very popular in Japan, especially with young women. Some of these spas are built as “drop-in” locations in city centers where you can have a quick sweat on your lunch break or while waiting for the train home in the evening. Others are built into elaborate bathing facilities where you can make like the monkeys, alternating between a hot bath and hot stone with a massage in between.
The New Zealand Herald reporter Vaimoana Tapaleao describes her experience at Bliss Stone Spa:
I’m lying face down on a hot stone slab only just covered by a couple of towels.
The room is dark and I’m almost drowning in the heat it’s so overwhelming.
At first you wince as your skin touches the stone, but you soon adjust and it becomes less intense.
I’ve been five minutes on the stone bed and already I’m drenched with sweat.
I’m told it’s not the ordinary sweat you get from exercising – or doing hard work – and you’re encouraged to not shower afterwards, for best results.
Unlike ordinary sweat, which is sticky and has an odour, this feels more as if someone has poured hot water over me.
As you lie on the stone bed, it gently heats you from the inside, spreading the heat around your body before releasing impurities and dead skin cells, leaving the skin glowing.
Sounds good to me. I’m in there for an hour, switching from my tummy to my back now and again.
I notice at the end of the session that the “sweat” disappears within minutes of leaving the spa room and my skin is not only dry but baby-bottom smooth.
Sounds good to me. If you’re looking to try a ganbanyoku, there are a few scattered throughout the world. You can find them in our database.
I’ve been a Lifehacker fan since its beginning. While some of their topics are obscure geekdom, the occasional tip about a new piece of software or website that ends up saving me hours makes it a daily stop on my morning review of the news. I was really interested this morning when I saw their new post “How to Hack Your Bathroom into a Home Sauna.”
I had to check the calendar to make sure today isn’t April 1. It isn’t.
Holy sh*t Lifehacker. What will you stoop to for linkbait?
The post is chock full of lots of crazy ideas and very few concrete details, like:
If you plan to install a wood-burning stove, you’ll need to fire-proof the walls and roof around the stove. Particle board isn’t cheap, but this is one area you don’t want to skimp on.
If you don’t have an air vent in the bathroom, don’t make one: the gap under the bathroom door will work just fine.
Um, NO NO NO NO NO!
If you’re putting a wood burning stove anywhere enclosed, you need to make sure you have proper ventilation. If you don’t you’ll end up at best poisoning yourself and at worst asphyxiating yourself and your whole family in your project. Especially if you follow their instructions to build a sauna stove:
A wood burning stove can easily be made from a junk yard gas canister. Use a cheap angle grinder to lop off the top, then just find a metal bucket, cut a hatch and fit the flue.
Those are the instructions. All of them. Now go forth and build one of these and put it in your house!
Please don’t follow these instructions. We value you as a reader too much to have you kill yourself in a home-made deathtrap.
If you don’t want to shell out the dollars for a book, then visit Sauna Times or Kalle Hoffman’s Sauna Pages. Both offer plenty of free advice and detailed plans for building your own saunas and sauna stoves.
And unless you really, really know what you’re doing, build your first DIY wood stove sauna in a shed, far away from your home and anything else flammable.
Meanwhile, watch for these exciting posts coming soon to Lifehacker: “Improve your mood: Hack your bathtub and a toaster into your own electro-convulsive therapy system” and “Hack your own Botox from cans you fish out of your grocer’s dumpster!”
It’s a new year. Time for resolutions. Here’s hoping that all of you have resolved to spend more time in the sauna, steam room or your other favorite heat bath this year.
For those of you who are looking to learn a language for your new year’s resolution, the website Russian for Free has a series of lessons that teach you Russian while also learning about the banya, the Russian version of the sauna bath.
The beginner lesson teaches you to understand sentences like:
The Russian sauna is a place where Russians go to relax, meet friends and wash themselves. Banya is very similar to a sauna but has its own peculiarities. Every tourist should visit a banya!
In Finland, the Christmas sauna has been a tradition for longer than Christianity has existed. Today, millions of saunas are heated throughout the land on Christmas Eve for the population to enjoy. In the book Christmas in Finland, the authors estimate that 70% of the population of Finland will enjoy a joulusauna on Christmas Eve. Many of Finland’s public saunas even have special Christmas Eve and Christmas Day hours for their patrons who don’t have their own sauna.
The sauna in Finland is not just a place of refuge and relaxation. It is a bath. So the Christmas sauna has a practical purpose. With Christmas celebrated at the winter solstice, close to the new year and symbolized with the birth of Christ, it is the perfect time to cleanse your body to symbolize that rebirth. In Finland, the sauna is the preferred place to bathe yourself. The temperature in Helsinki rarely gets above freezing this time of year, so having a nice hot place to bathe can help get the chill from your bones.
While the sauna is heating, many capture those kilowatts by cooking in it. Two Finnish-Canadian women published The Sauna Cookbook a few years ago with recipes for both enjoying while you sauna and cooking in the sauna. Another Finnish-Canadian, Sauna Pekka reminisces about a Christmas dinner of his youth:
At Christmas time in Finland we bake a 12 kg (26 lb) ham “kinkku” in the equivalent of 100°C (212°F) sauna heat for eight hours. For the ham we do not pour löyly, as it cooks better without it. When I sit in North American dry heat saunas, the poor ham comes always in my mind.
Christmas is a more recent invention than the sauna. Christmas came to Finland about 700 years ago. When Christmas arrived, it took on some of the existing midwinter celebrations that had existed for thousands of years before. Throughout much of Scandinavia, the old beliefs held that on the night of midwinter, the dead returned to walk the earth. Many still keep the sauna warm and throw another ladle of water on the rocks to make it comfortable for when your ancestors, elves and gnomes visit.
Modern health practitioners caution that you should not take a sauna too close to a large feast like that eaten on Christmas eve. They caution that you should use the sauna in the afternoon. However, people who know Finnish folklore understand that after dark, the sauna is reserved for the dead. Some say the devil himself walks the earth to find a sauna to bathe in at midnight on the winter solstice.
Other old beliefs say that the midwinter celebration is a time to thank the gods for the past season’s bountiful harvest and ask them for a fertile growing season in the spring. Some believe that throwing beer on the sauna stove helped appease these gods.
If you can, heat up your sauna this Christmas (or whichever winter holiday you celebrate). May it bring you peace, luck and a good harvest in the new year.
A sauna is traditionally hot 170 to 220°F (75 to 105°C), but now there is a new type of sauna that goes cold: The cryosauna.
The cryosauna uses a counter-intuitive notion: By quickly cooling your whole body you can shock your internal temperature control system into overheating it. In a modern cryosauna, you remove your street clothes and don skimpy underwear, thermal socks and gloves and possibly a ski mask to protect areas on your body sensitive to frostbite. Then you enter a chamber chilled with liquid nitrogen between -60 and -110°F (-80 and -170°C) for up to 3 minutes.
The extreme cold of the cryosauna cools your skin to 32°F (o°C), which sends your body into overdrive. In the cold, your body reacts as though you’ve fallen through the ice, sending all your blood to the vital organs to preserve life and increasing your heat production. When the session ends and you return to room temperature, your body can’t turn off its heat generating systems fast enough. Blood rushes to your extremities in an attempt to cool your internal organs. For a few minutes, your internal temperature spikes to as high as 104°F (40°C), like you had just spent a half hour in a hot sauna.
Who subjects themselves to this kind of treatment? Athletes for one. Many have found that using the cryosauna can help them recover nearly instantly from the pounding their bodies take. A recent article in the LA Times talks about the many proponents of the cryosauna including basketball star Kobe Bryant, baseball pitcher C.J. Wilson and many of the Pittsburgh Steelers American Football team. The London Telegraph reported in 2009 about how Mark Webber, the Formula 1 driver, credited regular cryosauna sessions for his rapid return to driving after a broken leg.
Research has shown that in addition to helping athletes recover, cryosauna sessions can help with arthritis, weight loss, circulatory problems. Like a traditional sauna, cryosauna users report glowing skin, great sleep at night and an overall feeling of great well-being.
The idea of cryotherapy came out of Japan in the 1970′s. For years many have used less extreme techniques like ice baths and standing under cold waterfalls to chill their bodies. The Japanese idea was imported to Poland, where it was refined and the current generation of ultra-cold chambers were perfected.
Relatively few cryosaunas exist in the world now. We’ve added several of them to our database if you’d like to give one a try.
I’m a traditionalist myself, but I will admit, I’ve been inside an infrared sauna or two in my day and it was an enjoyable experience. I can see the advantages of an infrared sauna. The low prices, easy assembly, quick heat up and localized heating all make it an option for many people who may not otherwise be able to enjoy a sauna. I get it.
Just please tell me, why do you insist on discrediting the sauna industry with lies? It damages all our credibility.
My point is illustrated by this quote from a business offering infrared sauna sessions that aired on a Fox affiliate a few days ago.
“If you sweat profusely, clinical studies show that you can burn up to 600 calories in a hour of being in there,” says [redacted].
The infrared sauna makes the same rays that come from the sun, but filters out UV radiation.
“The traditional saunas of the past go a half inch into the tissues,” [she] says. “This goes an inch and a half, so three times deeper. Even the sweat produced for this is different.”
That’s because the heat is different. The infrared sauna reaches temps up to 140 degrees and breaks up the water molecules that hold toxins in your skin. So when you sweat in here, you sweat toxins out.
Four paragraphs, lots of false claims. Let’s look at them:
“Burn up to 600 calories in an hour.” This is false. In a sauna, you don’t burn many more calories than you would otherwise sitting on a couch. You’re definitely not going to burn the same number of calories that you would during a strenuous workout on a stair climbing machine.
The truth is saunas do help with weight loss. Researchers don’t completely understand it, but regular sauna sessions help your brain better regulate your appetite to get your body back to a healthy weight. If you are overweight, the sauna will help you lose weight. If you are underweight, the sauna will help you gain it back.
“The infrared sauna makes the same rays that come from the sun…” This is partially true. All hot things give off infrared rays. Light bulbs, the sun, even your body now is emitting infrared rays to heat something in the room cooler than you. Infrared saunas use specialized heater panels to create their infrared rays, while a traditional sauna uses heating elements and rocks to create infrared rays.
“Infrared sauna radiation goes deeper into your skin than a traditional sauna.” Unfortunately, that is not true. Traditional saunas have, if anything, more sources of infrared radiation than a “pure” infrared sauna.
“The sweat produced is different.” True, but unfortunately not the way they would like you to think. Because the heat in the infrared sauna is lower and the heat is localized to the parts of your body closest to the heating panels, the sweat is less intense than in a traditional sauna.
“The heat is different” This is partially true. Infrared saunas use infrared heat only from special radiant panels. A traditional sauna heats with infrared heat from the stove, the walls and even the water vapor in the air surrounding you. In addition, the heat of the air directly transfers heat to you.
“The infrared sauna breaks up the water molecules that hold toxins in your skin” False! The heat of a sauna does not break up the water in your skin. It also doesn’t break up the fat in your skin. What all hot baths do is send blood from your internal organs to your skin to help keep your body cool. This changes your circulation and can help move toxins in your blood stream past specialized organs in your skin that will eject toxins as part of your sweat. These toxins are mainly metabolic wastes, but can include some other environmental toxins.
So, infrared sauna industry, you’ve made a big point of making claims which are nonsense, yet on closer inspection, turn out to be not that far from the truth after all. It would do us all a lot better if you came clean and purged your marketing material of this junk.
We’re all in this together. The more people who are aware of saunas and their legitimate benefits, will give you more potential customers. Sure some of them will choose to get a traditional sauna, but for those who don’t, you’ve got a pretty decent product for them.
Hammam Al-Basha in Israel, where the only bathers are made of bronze. Image via Wikipedia
Mention sauna and everyone knows what you are talking about. A sauna is that hot, wooden room that nearly every spa, hotel and gym has for its guests. The sauna is a meme in commercials for mundane things like car insurance, eyeglasses and food safety. Sauna is so common that it describes anything hot or that makes you sweat.
The hammam meanwhile is a novelty found only at luxury spas and a few obscure locations in the Middle East. Yet two centuries ago the hammam was common throughout the entire Ottoman Empire which nearly encircled the Mediterranean and extended well into the modern Arab world, while the sauna was almost unheard of. What happened to change this?
The area known as Finland had been a territory of the Kingdom of Sweden since the 13th century. In the early 1800′s, the Russians conquered Finland and annexed it as a Russian state. By the mid-1800s, a nationalist movement began within Finland to restore its identity. The Finnish language was revived, books of Finnish folklore were published, and the sauna was adopted as a symbol of all things Finnish. Mr. DeForest explains how the sauna was the ideal symbol for Finland:
The sauna works here in totality. In the sauna all are equal and without rank. Nudity is a means of breaking down social barriers by removing all evidence of one’s rank. Finnish identity also means individualism, self-reliance and sometimes isolation. This ideal is expressed through a forest/nature discourse, in which the ideal is a cottage in the woods, next to a lake, with a sauna, and the requisite supplies to live. Here the Finn lives alongside and is integrated with rugged nature, even defined by it, as free and equal.
He notes that although the Finns adopted the sauna, its origins are not exclusively Finnish. Several other cultures had long traditions of bathing in a hot wooden cabin, like the Russian Banya. This did not matter to the Finns. They had something to rally around.
In the years since then, the ideal of the Finnish sauna, “made of natural materials only, wood, stones and water, and it smells of nature when the birch is released into the air, or the logs become well-used,” has been used by many to denounce the hot baths of other cultures with a stronger pedigree, and even modern conveniences like the electric stove and infrared heating.
The hammam took the other route. At the time the sauna was gaining popularity in Finland, 1350 miles (2160km) to the south, the hammam was the center of the culture at the time. Again, from Mr. DeForest:
Hammams performed a variety of functions in Ottoman society from the 16th until the 19th century. They catered to the basic hygienic needs of neighborhood residents, their first and most important function; Muslims performed ritual ablutions in them on Thursday evenings and Friday mornings before mosque; certain rites of passage occurred in their halls (connected to marriage, birth, conversion to Islam, etc.); and they were important public spaces in the Ottoman city, especially for women. Typically, a hammam was a central feature of the mahalle, which centered on the local mosque (or church), a small plaza, school, and bath. Usually some 100-150 wooden houses clustered around these public buildings, which were made of stone. Some hammams gave their name to entire neighborhoods, and by 1768 so many had been built that [the Sultan] forbid the construction of anymore, since they were consuming too much of the city’s water supply.
In the 1800′s, the nationalism within the Ottoman Empire attacked the hammam. The Ataturk began a program of westernization: widening streets, building modern apartment buildings with bathrooms in the apartment, and a program of secularization. Each of these led to the demise of the hammam by removing the drivers that brought people there and demolishing many of the baths to make way for the construction projects. By 1939, fewer than 25 hammams remained in Istanbul. Today hammams are a novelty, mainly supported by foreign tourists.
If you know the Muppets, you know the song “Mahna mahna.” It was the first act of the first episode of the Muppet Show in 1976 and closes out the 2011 movie The Muppets. But did you know that “Mahna mahna” got its start in the sauna?
You can’t search for articles on “steam room” on the internet very long without coming across infomercial style weight loss claims: “Lose weight fast! With our new Super Steam Bath, you’ll be burning up to 600 calories every half hour, all without moving a muscle! Act now! Operators are standing by!”
Meanwhile, the fitness gurus, like Chris Klebba all say “the effects of a steam room on weight loss are due to a loss of water from sweating, not actual fat loss. Bottom line, forget it for fat loss.”
So who’s right? Well in a strange twist, both of them are wrong!
Steam rooms don’t burn many calories. But they do help regulate hormones that drive us to overeat. Interestingly, a steam room also helps those who don’t eat enough to eat more.
Better still, regular steam room users have improved circulation, which can help prevent atherosclerosis, and reverse the effects of coronary heart disease.
These are conclusions from a 2003 study by Kagoshima University in Japan, where a team of researchers studied the effects of steam bath therapy on lifestyle diseases. The study began as a test to see if steam bathing could be used to improve the health of patients with congestive heart failure. The team noted improvement in both the symptoms and cardiac function of their subjects after a single steam bath, and continued improvement with more, regular steam baths.
When they examined the underlying mechanism of these improvements, they hypothesized that a similar improvement in the health of patients with lifestyle-related diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, smoking and obesity could also be improved with regular steam bathing.
They tested a group of “at risk” people, who each had one or more of these conditions, and were not receiving treatment for any of these. What they found surprised them. After 2 weeks of daily steam room use, where they raised their body temperature by 2°F (1°C) for 30 minutes, they found that every member of the group had a lower blood pressure. Fasting plasma glucose and body weight also went down for the group.
To study this further, they repeated the study with a group of 5 men and 5 women. For 2 weeks, they all ate a controlled diet of 1800 calories / day, and each took a single steam bath each day. At the end, all 10 had lost weight. Their collective body fat fell from an average of 42% to 37%.
They did not attribute these results to calorie burn in the steam room, but instead to better regulation of the hormones that controlled their appetite. During the study, the subjects did not get hungry as quickly, and did not tend to overeat or snack between meals.
Coronary heart disease patients who were under eating as a result of their disease did the exact opposite: Regular steam baths improved their appetite, and they ate more to get them back to a healthy weight.
So, if you want to drop a few pounds, spend time every day in the steam room or sauna at your gym. You aren’t burning calories, but you should lose weight. Isn’t that what counts?
Photo of the Kotiharju Public Sauna in Helsinki. Image by Sami Oinonen via Flickr
A reader wrote us this question:
Dear SaunaScape:
I’m going to a resort with some friends this weekend. In the spa area, they have a sauna. I’ve never used one before. There is one in my gym locker room and I don’t use it because it intimidates me. I don’t want to make a sauna faux-pas.
What is the etiquette for using a public sauna or a steam room like this?
Thank you,
Jordan
Jordan:
You shouldn’t get anxious about the sauna. It is a place to relax and do what is comfortable. Yes, it is a new experience for a lot of people, but as long as you remember the golden rule – Do unto others as you would have them do unto you – you’ll be just fine.
If you are looking for some more specific rules, here is our top ten list of the most important etiquette rules consider when using a public sauna or steam bath:
10. Close the door.
Nothing upsets me more than when I am getting a good sweat on and someone else gets up to leave and does not close the door behind them. Nearly as bad is when someone is on their way in, and stops to chat with someone else while holding the door open.
When the sauna door is open, it does not take long for the heat to spill out of the sauna. It’s even worse in a steam room. If your gym or resort was stingy while sizing their sauna heater, it may take ten minutes or more for the sauna to recover from the door being open for just a minute.
If you are going in or out, please do it quickly, and make sure the door closes firmly behind you.
9. Sit on a towel.
Nothing is worse than walking into a sauna and having to find a spot to sit among the sweaty body prints others have left on the sauna bench. Saunas are not hot enough to kill germs, and in a high-use area like a public sauna, there may be a sealant or a protective barrier of gunk that neutralizes the disinfecting properties of wood.
Bring a towel in the sauna or steam room that is large enough to make a barrier between your body and the benches. If you’re sitting upright, a hand towel is big enough. If you’re going to lay down, you probably need a beach towel. It will protect you from what others have left behind, and keep you from leaving things behind.
Make sure you have a second towel that you leave outside the sauna to dry off with afterwards. You won’t want to use a sauna towel, and you can’t use a steam room towel to dry off after you’re done.
8. The sauna is not a clothes dryer.
There is a person at my gym who believes that the sauna is his personal clothes dryer. He does cardio, then goes for a swim. He brings in his sweaty clothes, wet bathing suit and towel and hangs them on the railing around the sauna stove to dry while he showers. Please, whatever you do, don’t do this.
7. Silence is golden.
I use the sauna as my place for relaxation and introspection. If you are going to talk, please do it quietly. Of course, if it is your own sauna, or you have the sauna to yourself, you can yak it up if you want. Just respect that in a public place, other people may want quiet.
6. If it’s in a locker room, it’s OK to got naked.
It seems like Tobias Fünke wrote most sauna etiquette guides. Most begin with a rant against seeing other people’s naked bodies in locker rooms. I’m going to rant the other way: It’s a locker room. You’re supposed to change clothes in there, which means you need to get naked in there. Until the early 1970′s, many high school and YMCA swimming pools throughout the US and Canada expected men to swim naked. Now, proper decorum says we aren’t supposed to show our bodies to anyone. This ad is indecent (but not this one).
They call it a sauna bath for a reason. You wouldn’t complain about people being naked in the shower, would you? So if the sauna is in an area where you can be naked, then go naked in the sauna! It’s more hygienic and better for you too.
By the way, a sweat suit or a sauna suit is never appropriate attire for the sauna. If you don’t want to get naked, see our post on what to wear in the sauna.
5. Keep your hands and eyes to yourself.
I may sauna naked, or with very little clothing. That does not mean that I amshowing off for anyone else. The Finns have a saying, “behave in a sauna like you would in church.” I’ve been in a number of saunas and seen some things that definitely aren’t church-like.
My attitude is, that if someone is coming on to someone else in the sauna, it isn’t hot enough. I go looking for the thermostat to turn up the heat. In a proper sauna, you can’t think about anything except “can I stay in here another minute?”
4. Leave your electronics outside.
The sauna isn’t good for your electronics, but electronics also aren’t good for the sauna. The heat and humidity (yes, even if it’s a dry sauna) in the sauna will damage your phone, iPod or other gizmo. The etiquette problem is nearly every device has a camera these days. I don’t know if you are just browsing through your music collection or if you’re taking photos of me. I’d rather not have to ask. The other problem is your music. Yes, you’re listening to it on earphones, but if it is quiet in the sauna, I’m probably going to hear most of it. And really, if that phone call is so important, why are you taking it in the sauna?
Use your gizmo while you’re working out, but leave it in your locker when you take a sauna.
3. No spitting on the rocks.
I’ve seen this happen before. I shouldn’t have to write it. Just don’t do it.
2. Shower before you sauna.
Reading through other sauna etiquette posts on the internet, it is amazing how many people see nudity as dirty, but don’t see dirt as dirty. I’ve seen it at my gym too: people remove their sweaty workout clothes to reveal a sweaty swimsuit underneath and head straight for the sauna. Or someone comes right out of the pool and heads straight into the sauna.
If you’ve been swimming, there is chlorine on your body that will volatilize in the sauna and can irritate everyone’s eyes and lungs who shares the sauna with you. If you have been out in public, your perfume or some other smell you picked up throughout your day will become stronger and more pungent in the sauna.
Be considerate to the others who use the sauna with you: Take a shower first. If you’re wearing a swimsuit or some other clothing in the sauna, take it off while you shower.
Don’t forget to take at least a quick rinse off after you sauna before you get into the pool.
1. Remember to ask first before you do anything that affects me.
This is a public sauna, and I’m going to share it with you. I may like what you want to do, like splashing water on the rocks, or using that secret trick that sends the heater into overdrive. I may not care about others, like if you prepare some secret skin rub that you’re going to use or if you’re going to exercise in the sauna. Or, I may not want to stay, and may ask you to wait until I leave before you start.
This is a public place. I have as much right to enjoy the sauna the way I want to as you do. If they conflict, let’s talk about it and find a way we both can live with. Everyone will be better off that way.
Keep in mind, these are the general rules for a public sauna. If you are lucky enough to have your own, you can make your own rules. If you are a guest in someone else’s sauna, then you should ask them what their rules are before making assumptions.
Good Luck!
Do you have any personal rules for the sauna that I missed here? Please let us know in the comments!
by Mikkel Aaland, 
by Rob Roy, or 
by Alan Sanderfoot.
, the authors estimate that 70% of the population of Finland will enjoy a joulusauna on Christmas Eve. Many of Finland’s public saunas even have special Christmas Eve and Christmas Day hours for their patrons who don’t have their own sauna.
a few years ago with recipes for both enjoying while you sauna and cooking in the sauna. Another Finnish-Canadian, 
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