TL;DR: Routine heat exposure is a great way to offer your body a whole of health and performance benefits. Utilize a sauna regularly in order to increase lifespan, general wellness, and quality of life.
Introduction
Welcome back Biohacker. Today we will be discussing the amazing benefits of heat exposure – especially sauna usage. As a quick glimpse into what is to come in this to-the-point article, sauna usage, through the process of hormesis cause and allow the body to activate heat-shock proteins. These unique cellular linebackers add to a better biological environment for all cells in the body to thrive long term. Additionally, while saunas are creating the good guys in your body to activate and switch on, sauna usage also boasts the benefit of helping your body rid itself of toxins that really do threaten both your lifespan and your quality of life – especially if you’re a man.
This article aims to introduce you, the reader, to not just the benefits of using a sauna, but also the drawbacks of not using one. This article will also detail the differences between the two main sauna’s on the market that one will come across in both the public usage and consumer-grade market. Finally, it will wrap up by explaining what your next steps and options are in terms of how to implement this age-old longevity and relaxation practice into your life so tha you can start experiencing the advantages of its application, immediately.
With that said, let’s jump straight in to an explanation of what hormesis actually is.
Hormesis
Technically speaking, hormesis is defined as follows:
Hormesis is a characteristic of many biological processes, namely a biphasic response to exposure to increasing amounts of a substance or condition. Within the hormetic zone, there is generally a favorable biological response to low exposures to toxins and other stressors.
“Okay, but what does this actually mean and how does this apply to heat/sauna exposure?” you make be asking. Well, essentially the main idea here is that stress at certain doses can be a good thing. In fact, if we take a second to think about this, it becomes fairly obviously true. Consider that when you go to the weight room, your putting your body under a certain amount of stress. This process then put stress on the microscopic level of your muscle fibres, which in turn, encourages them to grow back more resilient.
Alternatively, when you go running for 10 minutes, when you first start this practice you may gas-out and exhaust immediately. On the other hand, if you do this every day for a week – that is, exposure yourself to controlled levels of stress every week – your body adapts and becomes more equipped for this stress. Both of these cases would be considered forms of hormesis and both of these cases contribute to the body’s biological resilience.
Interestingly, hormesis can occur at multiple levels of the body. For example, catching a strain of the common cold could also be considered hormetic and is its it the same basic principles underlying the process.
How do sauna’s fit into the picture of hormesis?
Saunas expose the body to a prolonged form of stress. In a sauna, you are supposed to sit, stand, or exercise/stretch (if you’re really hardcore) while the temperature of your enronment is quite a bit hotter than usual. This places a hormetic stressor on the body that it is not used to. Naturally, the body will have to learn to adapt to this environment and thus must change on the biochemical level, in order to better adapt to the stress.
The benefits of saunas can largely be divided into two groups: fitness and wellness. While this article will talk about wellness in a moment, let’s briefly touch on fitness.
Saunas and Fitness
When you’re in a warm environment like a sauna for a prolonged period of time, one of the first physiological changes that will happen is a dilation of the veins and arteries. This leads to a direct drop in blood pressure, increases arterial pliability, and decreases what is known as “arterial stiffness.” These are already two of the heart-related benefits associated with cardiovascular exercise but think of them from a different angle. Cardiovascular/aerobic exercise conditions the heart by, loosely speaking, putting the heart through a workout and thus makes it more efficient and pumping blood throughout the body. Saunas on the other hand, causes a natural dilation of the blood pathways giving the heart a break from having to pump as hard as it normally does (relatively irrespective of your fitness level).
But that’s not all!
In a sauna your heart rate doesn’t just remain at one level, the way it likely would if you sat in a room temperature environment. Instead, it slowly climbs to a point of higher and higher BPM, ultimately reaching a place of moderate exercise, where it should stay. This means then, that not only are you providing a cardiac environment that is optimal for heart health, but you are also applying a hormetic stress to the heart allowing it to improve at its job the way it would on a jog! What we have here then, is an environment that can actually lead to increased physical performance as a result of allowing the heart to train in conditions where both the blood pathways and the heart itself can be maximized for efficiency.
Saunas and Wellness
Saunas are world renowned for their health, longevity and quality-of-life benefits. With things from removing toxins from your body, to encouraging heart and blood pathway health, saunas seem to only be a good thing for a human being to expose themselves to.
Famously, Finland leads the race in terms of studies showing the benefits of regular sauna usage. One such study provides the following summary to its findings:
“Scientists in Finland have shown that sauna bathing is associated with a variety of health benefits. Using an experimental setting this time, the research group now investigated the physiological mechanisms through which the heat exposure of sauna may influence a person’s health. Their latest study with 100 test subjects shows that taking a sauna bath of 30 minutes reduces blood pressure and increases vascular compliance, while also increasing heart rate similarly to medium-intensity exercise.”
While there are plenty of studies out there to find on the benefits of sauna usage, they are all fairly unanimous in that they agree saunas increase blood flow to the body including all its vital organs, aid in muscle recovery, decrease stress, and lower the levels of inflammation in the body. However, when we delve further into the science we find even more interesting findings, which go to even further support the notion that to optimize one’s health for longevity and high quality of life, one ought to implement a sauna routinely. One of these interesting findings are called: Heat shock Proteins
Heat shock Proteins
As mentioned before, when introduced to hormetic stressors, the body responds biochemically. Examples of other stressors that cause a similar reaction (and not always for the better) are: cold temperatures, ultraviolet light, heavy metals, ethanol, low levels of oxygen, tumors, and wounds or damages tissues in the body. There are several different types of heat shock proteins: HSP10, HSP40, HSP60, HSP70, and HSP90 and the number corresponds to their molecular weight. The ones titled 40 and under are called small heat shock proteins.
(Image of HSP70 below)
To understand the benefits of what heat shock proteins do, I offer you this quote which perfectly summarizes the purpose of heat shocks proteins:
“As a general rule, these proteins act as guards to other proteins, preventing them from misassembling while they are forming larger proteins. You could say that one of their most important functions is protein homeostasis, or keeping the proteins in the proper form and structure for cellular function to happen. In non-stressful situations, heat shock proteins regulate the synthesis, transport, assembly, folding, and unfolding of the cell’s proteins. When there’s stress in the cell, proteins may become misfolded – and the heat shock proteins step is to restore their original shape. These stress proteins are true cellular crisis stress managers. You can count on them to reduce the effects of oxidative stress, regulate inflammation, and inhibit cells from walking down the path towards cellular death. For example, HSP40 discovers an amino acid chain that has become unfolded in the cell. It then passes off the unfolded chain to HSP70, which then reforms it and releases it. Presto! Now you’re back to business as usual inside the cell.”
These molecular bad-boys are basically microscopic janitors that do a great job keeping our body in check. If you’re someone who values fasting and the benefits of autophagy (article found HERE), then you’ll love that saunas also boast some of the similar health benefits in terms of upkeeping out cellular vitality. On that note, however, saunas do just just cause our body to engage in beneficial processes, it also encourages our body to rid our internal environment of negative stressors.
Estrogenics
In his book Estrogeneration, How Estrogenics Are Making You Fat Sick and Infertile, Dr. Anthony Jay highlights several compounds that we come across on a daily basis, which have an estrogenic effect in the body. Essentially when estrogenic compounds are in the body, as the name suggests, they act as artificial estrogen. While this can lead to several undeniable cosmetic issues in men, the problems do not just stop there.These issues range from brain fog and low libido, all the way to cancers and high-level endocrine disruption.
In a podcast interview, Dr. Anthony Jay draws our attention to a study where the put patches on the arms of 2 distinct groups. Both of groups consumed roughly the same diet and had roughly the same daily practices for 30 days. After the 30 days, one group was then told to have a 30 minute sauna session, and the other group did not. The researches then analyzed the urine, stool and sweat-patches placed on the arms of the participants. What they discovered was that most estrogenics are not expelled through the urine, nor the stool. Instead, the researchers found huge amounts of phthalates, and parabens (among other estrogenics) on the patches of the sauna group. What this clearly illustrates is that sweating is essential for optimal health and that saunas are one of the best ways to achieve a good sweat, regularly and for a prolonged period of time. In the next section we will offer you, the reader, our personal first choice when it comes to the type of sauna, as well as how to use it.
Now that we’ve covered many of the benefits of saunas, move onto the three main types of saunas as well as some general UpRiver advice and suggestions on sauna usage for the best possible results and experience.
Types of Saunas + Approach To Usage
When it comes to the types of saunas you will find at your local pool or have the ability to buy for yourself, the market is largely broken down into 3 main options.
The first of which is the wet sauna. While colloquially speaking, most people call this option a steam room. The idea here is that water is heated up to the point that steam forms. The leads the room to be usually extremely hot and typically is the hottest of the 3 options found in public spaces. While this is not necessarily better than others for the reason of being hotter (as some might think), this comes more down to preference. Some people, especially over time, prefer a warmer environment as they find either the challenge more fun, or the temperature more relaxing. Therefore with no unique benefits to boast of when compared to the other two options we think that this option is best for you, if it subjectively and physically feels the best for the user.
The second option for a sauna is another impractical one if you’re considering getting one installed in your home. It is the dry sauna. A dry sauna, also known as a conventional sauna, is the type of heated wooden room/box that you normally picture in your mind when you think of a sauna. Usually, these saunas are heated by lots of large rocks upon which small amounts of water is dripped into order to cause the room to heat up to varying temperatures. The option is great because, just like its wet counterpart, can heat-up to pretty significant levels.
The third and best option, in our opinion, is the coveted infrared sauna. These amazing machines work be outputting various strength of infrared waves, which do not harm the body, but actually help it sweat. It does this by causing the molecules in your body to move a slightly quicker rates, which causes a thermogenic effect in the body. Essentially, the edge that infrared saunas have over its competition is that the waves penetrate the skin much deeper. As a result, the body is heated from the inside out, allowing for sweat (i.e. toxins etc.) to more readily leave the body. Additionally, the actual temperature of the sauna does not reach, nor need to reach, the temperatures needed from a sauna that heats the outside air, instead of the person inside the box.
In terms of how to actually implement sauna use in your life, we recommend jumping right in as soon as possible after a workout. The reason for this, is that as your body temperature and heart rate respectively are likely already elevated, you can take advantage of this state and maximize the time spent sweating, and properly conditioning your heart. Moreover, it has been shown that saunas offer some similar and overlapping endocrine advantages to those seen when one waits for a couple hours after physical exercise to consume any calories. These benefits are largely to do with elevated growth hormone levels, as well as elevated total and free testosterone levels. For this reason, we recommend skipping your post-workout shake and jumping straight in the sauna for a minimum of 20 minutes, in order to maximize recovery, cardiovascular conditioning, and toxin elimination.
Pro Tip:
We would be remiss if we did not mention the importance of water consumption before, during and after your sauna sessions. In order to carry as much waste out of your body as possible while being in the sauna, it is imperative that the body has enough fluid in it to easily achieve maximum perspiration. If you took our sauna approach from the last section of this article, then you will have likely just finished your exercise for the day before readying yourself for your sweatbox of choice. As many know, drinking loads of water during a workout usually isn’t the best idea, so downing at least a litre of fluid before you jump in the sauna is a good idea. Furthermore, during the sauna session, one should continue to drink water freely (at room temperature, cold water may have the opposite effect and cooling the internal body temperature), to encourage the body to sweat as much as possible. Finally, once exiting the sauna (especially infrared), your body will continue to sweat for a time and so it is beneficial to replenish yourself with another tall glass of water soon after the sweat-sesh.
Pro Tip Tip:
Use a glass or metal water bottle inside of the sauna. Heated plastic (as most plastic for that matter), is estrogenic…
Author’s Motivation
Before my 25th birthday, despite being somebody very interested by the whole field of biohacking, I hadn’t paid too much attention to saunas at all. Notwithstanding, on my 25th birthday my best friend and girlfriend got together to buy me an in-house infrared sauna. After I received this incredibly thoughtful gift, I took an interest in learning really what I had on my hands. The more and more I delved into the anecdotes and actual science on saunas I had realized that this gift is incredibly versatile in the benefits it boasts (as i hope you’ve been able to discover by reading this article). Nowadays, the sauna has been something I use almost every single day directly following some sort of physical exercise. I use it as a way to recover quicker, improve my health and stamina, and just simply relax and read a book or listen to a podcast. Whether you’re an athlete, a health-nut, or just really like to relax while enjoying improved cardiovascular health, saunas are you everyone!
(Want your own sauna? Check out UpRiver’s list of recommended products to boost your journey HERE!)
Conclusion
Saunas are fantastic tools for a whole host of things. These benefits range from cardiovascular health, to endocrine optimization, to relaxation, to muscle recovery and everything in between. Studies have been put out to show that saunas not only lead to a happier life, they lead to a longer life as well. Exposing oneself to heat on a regular basis to the point of intense sweat has the hormetic effect of helping our bodies stay healthier longer. There are many different options when it comes to inducing a good sweat, but in our opinion, saunas reign supreme for the vast amount of benefits they offer a variety of different groups and goals. We hope this article has opened your eyes to the power of heat exposure and sauna use, more specifically.
If you have any questions about where to get your very own sauna, or about anything this article failed to cover, please message us in our forum section found HERE.
Best of luck biohacker, and keep moving UpRiver.
