Hey Athletes! Want to know the benefits of a sauna? Tune in to this week’s episode!
Episode 17 of Ask Me Anything is Up!
Sauna Benefits?
This week Jerred answers Chris’s question. He asks “what do you think are the benefits of a dry sauna?” Jerred talks about the health benefits and why he finally pulled the trigger on a sauna.
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Jerred
Transcript:
AMA 17: Saunas
Welcome to garage gym athlete. Ask me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to garage dot com slash AMA let’s get started.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. Jared moon here doing an ask me anything today. Uh, this one is from Chris and Chris says, I love being able to sit in a sauna, but have never really. But never really knew the benefits of it. I did some digging, but would like to hear what you think is the greatest benefit to using a dry sauna.
Thanks for the amazing programming, Chris. So Chris, first off, thank you for using the programming and be a party being a part of the community. So why a sauna? You know, this is kind of funny because I’m very much like you. Uh, I grew up working in. Gyms, and a lot of these gyms were bigger gyms, you know, more Globo style gyms and, and even YMCAs and things like that.
And they all did have a sauna. So I did just enjoy sitting in it more from an enjoyment standpoint. I never really knew the health benefits of . A sauna or like what the, you know, what was behind any of the mechanisms behind it. Uh, but once I found out, that’s what led me to actually purchasing a sauna and putting one in my garage when I realized not just that there was like one or two health benefits that there’s like a hundred health benefits to having a sauna.
That’s what pushed me over the edge to actually buy one. And if you want to see my sauna, my setup, or even get a link to where I purchased it, I have no affiliation. If you use that link, uh, you can go to the YouTube channel and check my garage gym tour, one of my most recent more recent videos, and it’s of my current setup in my garage gym.
And I, you do get to see kind of my sauna in there and you even have a link to it. It seems like the best deal for these saunas from having other friends and garage gym athlete members who’ve purchased them, it seems to be Costco or home Depot. They kind of go back and forth on who has the lowest price on these deals.
If anybody’s thinking about getting a dry sauna, and again, I have no affiliation, but I do enjoy doing a sauna, a, my wife and I, we sent a sauna a few times per week. Um, really almost every night for about 20 minutes, and it’s a pretty hot. Now why do I do sauna? What kind of pushed me over the edge? Well, S, you know, starting with some smaller things like detoxification, and I’m not talking about some sort of detox or cleanse.
That sounds ridiculous. I’m talking about actual scientific backed. Uh, you know, your detoxification of. Ridding the body of like heavy metals, you know, through excessive sweating and sauna use. You get rid of a lot of that, a lot of heavy metals. There are a lot of studies on this. And I’m going gonna I’m going to give you guys a resource at the end if you want to read every study that’s worth knowing about saunas.
I’ll let, I’ll give you the resource at the end. Uh, but detox and heavy metals, I thought was a big one just because those things pop up and really it’s. It’s something that’s important just to your overall health. Um, improved fitness. So I’ll kind of read off a study here. One small intervention study looked at the effects of repeat sauna use on athletic performance and other physiological effects in six male distance runners.
The findings showed that one 30 minute sauna session twice a week for three weeks. Post-workout increased the time that it took for the study participants to run until exhaustion by 32% compared to their baseline. So in there, a lot of just. Uh, you know, physical fitness improvements, cardiovascular health improvements, and not to mention all the different hormones, one of those being growth hormones.
So sauna use promotes growth hormone release, which varies according to time, temperature and frequency. For example, to 20 minute sauna sessions at 176 degrees Fahrenheit separated by age. 30 minute cooling period, elevated growth hormone levels to fo fold over baseline, but to 15 minutes on a sessions at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
Dry heat syrup separated by a 30 minute cooling period resulted in a fivefold increase in growth hormone. So that’s crazy. I mean, you, you could dive into all that growth hormone does for your body and how that can be a good thing, but getting that through sauna usage and just put that in perspective.
My wife and I are pretty much getting into the low two hundreds every time we do a sauna session for about 20 minutes each time, and then it’s. It’s, uh, it’s pretty high. So that 212 is, is getting up there. Another one. Um, muscle preservation, which I thought was a really cool, um, just a cool benefit to sauna use.
Uh, so that is a, there was another small intervention study in humans found that daily heat treatments applied to locally to muscles during 10 days in a mobilization prevented the loss of mitochondrial function. Increased heat shock protein levels and attenuated skeletal muscle atrophy by 37% compare to a sham control droop group.
So really it’s gonna help you preserve that muscle mass, which I think is good. Just in general, especially if you’re doing more concurrent training. Like we, we do, I like to, I like to do conditioning. I like to be aerobic. I like to do all these things, but I do want to preserve as much muscle mass as I possibly can through proper strength training and programming, but also, you know, through any other, um.
Mode modality. I can. Another one is enhanced neurogenesis now, some of these other, these last two. And then I’ll point you to the, uh, kind of the resource that you should go check out is, I’m not a scientist. You know, I read about a lot of these things later, but, uh, just. Improved cognitive function is, is one of the benefits, you know, that the science is pointing to.
So heat, stress and exercise increase the expression of brain drive neurotrophic, neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein that acts on neurons in the central and peripheral nervous system to promote the growth of new neurons. BDNF, modulates neuronal plasticity and ameliorates anxiety and depression from early life, stressful events.
And then the last thing is heat shock proteins. Now, I’m not going to dive into heat shock proteins and pretend like I’m an expert on them, but to my understanding, heat shock proteins are heavily elevated or highly elevated. After sauna usage and they really help, um, clean up all of the, uh, like broken or folded over cells and things like that.
So kind of a. You know, you’re giving your body a, an ability to, uh, heal itself at a, at a cellular level, which I think is really cool. Now, like I said, I’m not, um, I’m not a scientist and I’m not trying to pretend like I’m an expert on sauna usage, but who is, and I don’t mind giving her all the credit at all.
Dr Rhonda. Patrick. So I’ve been listening to her podcast, uh, in general. I mean, I don’t, she doesn’t even publish that Reese, uh, that regularly, I don’t think. But I listened to a podcast should I say, of her ensena use like years and years and years ago. And I was like, wow. I just always loved the sauna. But then back then I was like, I’m not going to buy a sauna.
But then it just kept research after research, and then she eventually put . This would research on our website. Uh, so if you go to found my fitness.com, again, I’ve no affiliation. I don’t even know dr Rhonda Patrick, but you can go there. She has an entire thing on sauna usage. So you click on, uh, the sauna part of her website, and it just has every study I mentioned, you can actually go look at the science and all the reasons.
There’s, I listed a couple. There’s like 50 other reasons in this resource that she’s created that I think you should go check out. And I don’t normally, you know, heavily push other people’s content unless I think it’s really awesome. And what dr Rhonda Patrick has put together on sauna usage is incredible.
So if you’re thinking about getting a sauna, then do it. She’s also put out some recent information about coven 19 and sauna usage, um, and how they may, uh. How may be beneficial, not directly with Covin 19, but just a lung type issues and things like that. So definitely, definitely go check that out. Now if you’re like, Aw man, I don’t have a sauna.
I can’t afford a sauna, whatever. I’m not going to get us on, or my gym’s closed. I can’t go use the sauna that I would normally use. Um, she likes to point out too, that you can do, use a lot of these or see a lot of the same benefits through a hot bath. So what you have to do is get in a pretty hot bath.
And up to your neck level, and then you need to stay in it so you can’t really, you can’t like get out, you know, like you’re just enjoying a hot tub at the. You know, at the rib cage level, you need to stay in up to that neck level for the same time durations, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes, whatever you can work up to safely.
Uh, but you get a lot of the same benefits as a sauna because of that internal body temperature. That’s a. That’s increasing and all for all the same reasons that a sauna works. It’s just not ambient air temperature. You know, you’re surrounded with hot water, so you can still get a lot of these benefits just with a hot bath.
And most everyone I know has access to a bath, so don’t get bummed out if you’re like, man, I’m going to go read all these studies. It’s so awesome. I have to go buy a sauna. Just take a hot bath. And if you do want to go down the sauna route, highly recommended. I love having a part of the routine. But Chris, thank you for the question.
That’s why I love a sauna and have one in my garage. Now. If you guys have any other questions, please go to garage gym, athlete.com/ama if you’re watching this on YouTube, please subscribe. Give a thumbs up, let us know what you like, don’t like by leading in the comments. If you’re listening to this, please, five star review.
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