SaunaScape

Sauna (Photo credit: Muchobra)

“I like the sauna, but does it have any real benefits?” is a popular question we hear on SaunaScape. The answer is yes! In recent years, a number of studies have shown a regular sauna gives many benefits. Here are our top ten:

10. Saunas make your hair look great

We spend a lot of time and money on different hair care products to keep our hair looking natural. The truth is, we don’t need to. Our body has many specialized organs that condition our hair better than the synthetic products on the marketplace. The trick is getting them out.

A few minutes in the sauna will activate the sebaceous glands on your scalp, releasing a set of compounds that moisturize and condition your hair. If you wash the dirt away and spend some time in a sauna, a quick rinse is all it takes to reap these benefits. Our sauna and hair care post has more information.

9. Saunas are cardio everyone can do.

Saunas are a unique way to get your heart pumping. As your skin heats up, your heart goes into overdrive to bring cooler blood to the surface and lower your skin’s temperature. Inside of a sauna, you can raise your heart rate up as much as mild exercise while not moving.

Saunas benefit people with high blood pressure, recovering from heart attacks and other “lifestyle diseases”.

8. Saunas help you reach a healthy weight

There is a myth that you can burn up to 600 calories an hour while sitting in a sauna. That is not true, however it comes from a medical study that proved sauna users are more likely to stay on a diet and reach a healthy weight. Overweight people who used the sauna regularly lost much more weight than a control group who didn’t use the sauna. That same study found underweight people who used a sauna were more likely to gain weight than people who didn’t.

Read our post “Weight Loss in the Sauna” for more information about how saunas benefit those trying to lose weight.

7. Sauna users catch fewer colds

An Austrian study found that people who use the sauna regularly are less likely to get sick than people who don’t. In fact, the group who used the sauna regularly caught half as many colds as the group who didn’t.

Read our post Fewer Colds for Sauna Users for more information.

Of course, if you already have a cold, stay out of the sauna.

6. Saunas can get rid your acne

Acne, pimples, blemishes, blackheads, spots – the bane of our teenage years – can be caused by your pores getting blocked by buildup of oils from your skin or dead skin cells. The heat of the sauna and your sweat can help your skin mobilize these contaminants leaving you with clean, clear skin.

For details and a procedure for using the sauna to eliminate acne, read our post Sauna your skin clear

5. The sauna boosts your energy

We’ve already told you that the sauna is a type of exercise, and exercise always gets your heart pumping to give you an energy boost. The sauna does more than that. If you rid yourself of your tight clothes, and use your time in the sauna to clear your mind, it can reboot you from your busy day and give you that boost you need.

Regular sauna use can have longer term effects that boost your energy too, lowering your stress levels and helping you sleep better. These are two of the largest drains on your energy according to our article Boosting your energy with a sauna

4. The sauna helps you recover from a workout

There is a reason most good gyms have a sauna: It’s a great way to recover from a strenuous workout. Sweat is one of the ways your body eliminates its metabolic wastes. Sweating in a sauna while your muscles are at rest quickly mobilizes all the waste products your muscles just generated and gets them out of your skin. This cuts way down on the stiffness many people experience later in the day after they’ve worked out.

Other post-workout benefits include increased blood flow. Blood flowing to your tired and strained muscles helps them recover more quickly. The heat itself helps as well. Just applying heat to sore muscles can block their pain messages for a half hour or more.

See our post Heat – It’s good for your health for more information.

3. The sauna makes you look younger

Our skin is the largest organ on our bodies, but how can you exercise it? In the sauna of course.

As we age, our skin gets less elastic, and more likely to hold onto dead skin cells. A few sessions in the sauna every week gets blood flowing to your skin. This spurs new skin growth and helps exfoliate all the dead cells that are building up. The heat of the sauna also mobilizes the oils in your skin which are natural moisturizers and antibiotics.

2. The sauna lowers your stress level

When you’re sitting in a hot sauna, it’s hard to concentrate on anything else other than your immediate environment. Spending time in a sauna is like meditation: It clears your mind of all the little things that are bothering you while you’re inside. When you emerge, your mind has been “rebooted,” letting you start fresh with a new focus on your tasks.

Dr. Stephen Colmant, a licensed psychiatrist, talks about this and other psychological benefits of the sauna in his sweat rituals video

1. The sauna makes you feel great

Spending a half hour every few days in the sauna is going to leave you relaxed, refreshed, healthier, ready to lose weight, and looking radiant. Those things alone should make you feel great, but there is more to it than that. The time you spend in a sauna reboots your brain, and actually can change your mood. People who use the sauna on a regular basis are happier than people who don’t.

So what are you waiting for? Find a sauna near you and get started. There are too many reasons not to.

“I like the sauna, but does it have any real benefits?” is a popular question we hear on SaunaScape. The answer is yes! In recent years, a number of studies...

Image via Wikipedia

A sauna, at its simplest, is a hot air bath. The word sauna has its origins in Finnish, but in English it has become a generalization that describes a number of different ways to take in the heat that were developed by cultures throughout the world, including the Finnish sauna, Russian banya, Japanese mushi-buro, North American sweat lodge, South American temezcal, Korean jjim jil bang, Roman caldarium, and the Arabic hammam.

All of these have a rich history dating back thousands of years. Today, most fitness centers, many hotels, and several public sauna businesses all have saunas available for their patrons to use. What is a sauna and why has it been so popular?

What is a sauna?

A sauna is a hot air bath or sweat bath. You take a sauna in a special, insulated room that keeps the air still and heat in. There is a heat source in the room to transfer heat to your body: The heat in a sauna comes from rocks heated in a fire, stove, or an infrared radiator. The heat source may only heat the air, or it may also produce steam which makes it feel hotter.

In the sauna your skin gets heated well above its normal temperature. In response, your body begins sweating profusely to keep yourself cool. To get the feeling of heat all over your body and to prevent clothes from being soaked with sweat, the sauna is typically used nude, or with as little clothing as practical.

It is a type of bath. Many cultures, notably the Finns and the Russians, will have a tank of heated water inside of their sauna which they will use to wash themselves while in the heat. The Russian platza and Arabic hammam are elaborate cleansing rituals that take place while in the hot room. Other cultures wash outside of the sauna room, but use the sauna’s heat to release dirt and toxins from deep in their skin.

Why sauna?

When you look at all the different people throughout the world who came up with the idea of a sauna, there must be a common thread. There is: We humans have several features which makes us unique from any other creature on Earth.

First of all, we are naked. Unlike other mammals, we have very little hair on our bodies that protects us from the elements. When it gets cold or wet outside, we need to wrap ourselves in clothing of some kind to protect us from the cold, wind and rain. When it gets really cold, we need an external heat source, like a fire to keep us warm.

It does not take much imagination to think about our ancestors, covered in wet clothes from a day of surviving, returning home to their hut, burrow or cave and stoking their fire to create a lot of heat, then shedding those wet clothes to feel warm again. As their clothes dried next to them, the steam released, made the warmth of the fire much more pleasant.

The ancient Greek, Roman, and Arabic cultures also had sauna baths. These were typically enjoyed in the middle of the day, when it was hottest. In the summertime, many of these places are close to the temperature in a sauna. Why would these cultures enjoy bathing in the heat?

Sauna as a sweat bath:

We humans have another unique feature: We sweat to cool our bodies. As you can remember from your teenage years, there are lots of problems that can develop with your sweat glands if they aren’t kept clean.

Without modern soaps, one of the few ways to clean your personal cooling system was to get really sweaty, then rinse off your body. The Romans have a well described history of the process at their baths. Like a modern fitness center of today, they began by exercising in the courtyard of the baths to work up a sweat. Then they covered their bodies with oil and dust, then scraped them off. With the oil and dust came all of the other dirt and grime they had picked up on their bodies since their last bath. After that, they entered the baths proper, where they alternated between hot and cold rooms and pools to finish the cleansing process.

So what is the modern sauna?

The modern sauna that is in your gym locker room, or if you’re really lucky, your backyard is a combination of all these historical baths. The room is typically lined with wood. The open fire is gone, replaced with a sealed stove that is safe to use indoors. Some sauna stoves are still filled with stones. They help keep the temperature even inside the sauna, and allow you to splash water on them to make steam. Others do away with the stones, and use infrared panels to heat your body directly.

Modern medicine is coming to discover that the sauna can help with a number of ailments like heart problems and high blood pressure. Regular sauna baths help improve your endurance and heat tolerance and can help remove metabolic wastes post-workout. It also has psychological benefits: Regular sauna users have more energy, are happier, sleep better, and can maintain a healthy weight. It is also one of the few exercises for your skin — your body’s largest organ.

What is the sauna to you? Is it a sacred space? A place to recover from your last workout? Part of your beauty regimen? Or is it just a place to get away from your clothes and the modern world for a while? Let us know in the comments.

A sauna, at its simplest, is a hot air bath. The word sauna has its origins in Finnish, but in English it has become a generalization that describes a number of...

Image by Trendmatcher via Flickr

Some people say they just can’t stand being in the heat. Heat saps your energy and makes it impossible to work hard goes the conventional wisdom.

As usual, it looks like science has proved conventional wisdom wrong. A new study in the European Journal of Applied physiology shows that people, if deceived about the temperature, perform as well in the heat as they do in temperate conditions.

In the article “Deception of ambient and body core temperature improves self paced cycling in hot, humid conditions” the team from the University of Bedfordshire in the UK details a test that they ran with seven different male cyclists.

The cyclists were tested once at a comfortable 71°F (22°C) and 40% humidity and twice at a sweltering 88°F (31°C) and 65% humidity. In one of those hot tests the temperature and humidity displays in the room were offset to show the room conditions to be 79°F (26°C) and 60% humidity. Each cyclist was given the tests in a random order.

They found that the cyclists performed the same when they thought the temperature was 79°F as they did when the temperature was actually 71°F. When they temperature was accurately displayed at 88°F, they did not travel as far, and exerted 10% less energy.

So how hot you think it is has more to do with how you perform than how hot it really is. Keep that in mind the next time you think you can’t stand the heat of the sauna.

via Lifehacker.

Some people say they just can’t stand being in the heat. Heat saps your energy and makes it impossible to work hard goes the conventional wisdom. As usual, it looks...