How Sauna Use Can Impact Brain Health and Longevity
At The Rise, we use state-of-the-art professional Infrared Saunas which offer a wealth of benefits. They are wonderful for detoxification, helping your body flush out toxins through sweat via near, middle and far infrared light. The gentle heat promotes relaxation by helping to balance your body's primary stress hormone, cortisol. It also helps soothe sore muscles , boosts circulation , and helps purify your skin. For a great summary of Infrared Sauna benefits, we like Dr. Amy Myers' overview on her website:
- Detoxification: Deep heating causes sweating, flushing out heavy metals and toxins from deep within the body.
- Relaxation: Balances cortisol (the stress hormone), relieving tension and promoting mental calm.
- Pain Relief: Increased circulation and heat penetration aid in healing, reduce inflammation, and alleviate pain.
- Weight Loss: By raising your heart rate and increasing blood flow, a session can burn calories, mimicking moderate exercise.
- Improved Circulation: Dilates blood vessels, supports healthy blood pressure, and provides a cardiovascular workout.
- Skin Purification: Near infrared light helps remove deeply embedded toxins, oils, and bacteria, promoting clear skin.
If you ever want to dig deep into the world of research around sauna use, there's plenty to discover and learn. Last month, Health and longevity expert Dr. Peter Attia sat down with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D, to talk about the benefits of sauna use. Both, especially Dr. Patrick, are proponents of Sauna use. But they certainly go much deeper into the detailed ongoing research. The below clip is a ~13 min excerpt from their entire 2 hour discussion on The Peter Attia Drive podcast (Episode 369) where they dug into infrared vs. traditional sauna and its impacts on the cardiovascular system. A few highlights:
- They discuss protocols for maximizing the benefits of heat therapy for the heart and brain. The number one takeaway is that combining regular sauna sessions with endurance training has been shown to result in greater improvements in VO₂ max—a critical measure of cardiovascular fitness—than exercise alone.
- Enhanced Fitness Gains: Research suggests that when sauna use is paired with endurance exercise, the improvements to cardiorespiratory fitness (VO₂ max) are greater than with exercise alone.
- Target Temperature: Exposure to a traditional dry sauna in the 160°F–175°F (71°C–79°C) range is suggested to be highly effective for robustly activating heat shock proteins (HSPs), which aid in cellular repair and resilience.
- Comparing Modalities: Both traditional and infrared saunas are beneficial, but the data indicates that for cardiovascular effects specifically, infrared saunas may require roughly double the session duration compared to traditional dry saunas to achieve similar cardiovascular effects.
- There is ongoing and interesting research about the different benefits of different sauna types (infrared vs. traditional, dry vs. wet). GQ Recently wrote about this. We'll likely dive into some of those details in another blog post, but for now the research points to many benefits for sauna use in general.
We encourage you to listen to the entire clip:
