Please be careful doing saunas alone. Especially when getting out or standing up. The heat can make us light-headed and we are in a slippery environment with lots of hard corners (sinks and stuff). So please exercise caution when doing saunas at home.
This is not medical advice and I am not a doctor. These are just my personal thoughts and experiences.
Ok, so by now most of you in the longevity community have heard that saunas appear to be very good for us.
Finnish saunas are associated with a 70% reduction of cardiovascular disease for those that did 4-7 saunas per week.
There are many other benefits that frequent sauna bathing is associated with as well.
Doing saunas seems to lower the risk of dementia, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases in a dose-dependent way. Or at least they did for tens of thousands of Finnish people.
And while I do sauna in proper saunas (which are fairly common at hotels and gyms here in Switzerland), I have also developed a few tricks to doing saunas at home.
Let me just again state that this post with the fact that I am not a doctor and this is not medical device.
While I believe my approach to saunas at home provides benefits, I have seen little to no research on “wet” saunas. Most Finnish saunas are low humidity (10-30%). Mine are more like 90-100% humidity.
In this post, I use a personal metric of 2-3x my resting heart rate, which is 55-60. This is either a direct thing to be measured relevant to doing saunas or a pretty good proxy.
Of course heart rates are all very different (my max is 205 at age 41 which many people don’t beleive). I think the key here is having an elevated heart rate for an extended period of time. So use your own numbers.
I do personally believe that I get all or almost all of the benefits of Finnish saunas though. And in this post I will explain why.
Broad Overview
You have probably guessed that the way you can sauna at home involves a hot shower.
Here is how I sauna at home:
- Run my shower at the hottest and higher setting in my smallest bathroom for 5-10 minutes or until the bathroom is very steamy
- Sit in the shower for as long as you can stand
- Ensure my heart rate is at least 2x my resting heart rate for the duration but shoot for ~3x (roughly 80% of my max)
Additional Sauna Tips (what I do)
- Seal the bottom of the door if the bathroom isn’t getting hot enough
- Keep the shower door shut if you have one
- Run very warm water over my palms and bottoms of feet (see below for why)
- Sometimes the steam feels hotter than the water. So I adjust the stream of water to land in front of me thus blowing me with steam
- Stand up periodically to keep my heart rate high if I’m struggling to elevate my heart rate enough
- Turn the temperature down a bit after ten minutes or so once my heart reaches a “high” level (for me). I think this is when my whole body has really heated up — ten minutes or so. This is roughly the same for me in a “normal” sauna.
Use a Heart Rate Monitor
I use an Apple Watch to monitor my heart rate while doing saunas at home (fully waterproof).
I believe that an elevated heart rate is either one of the benefits of doing saunas or a symptom of the benefits.
I want to keep my heart rate at least 2x (but preferably 2.5x-3x) my resting heart rate.
2x higher than my resting rate is roughly the number I would have if very quickly walking up a slight incline. And 3x higher is about my 80% of maximum heart rate (slow running for me).
A hack I developed to get the Apple Watch to be a heart rate monitor for saunas is to start an indoor (or otherwise stationary) workout. It needs to be a stationary workout because if it isn’t (for instance an outside run or bike ride) the watch will prompt you every couple of minutes about whether or not you want to stop your workout. It thinks you’ve stopped exercising if you’re stationary during a workout that involves moving positions.
Heat the Palms of Your Hands and Bottoms of Feet
I’ve found that it’s actually harder to get hot enough in a shower at home. I don’t let the shower run long enough. So I’ve developed a few ways of expediting the heating up process.
Either the water is too hot to sit directly under or the steam and room is not hot enough.
So one thing you can do is to let very warm water run over the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet.
These are the parts of our bodies that are the most responsible for heating and cooling us.
They’re the most direct connection to our blood (that’s why our hands turn white if we form a tight fist and immediately turn red again when we release the fist). Our feet bottoms are also very red and turn white when pressed. This is us preventing the blood flow.
But anyways, by keeping my palms and feet in hot water I heat my body up faster. This does still take a few minutes though.
If you’re interested in the science behind this I strongly recommend watching this Huberman Lab podcast. In the podcast, one of the researchers who has done the most work on heating and cooling of the human body is interviewed. Very fascinating stuff.
Hot Steam and Water is Effectively Hotter than Hot Air
One reason I think that doing wet saunas is very similar to if not equivalent to (assuming the same overall heat exposure) lower humidity Finnish saunas is because water transfers heat better than air.
This property is called specific heat capacity. Water’s specific heat capacity is 4.23 times more than air’s. So I am actually hotter in a long hot shower than I am in a lower humidity sauna.
We Still Sweat in Higher Humidity Saunas
There are three obvious effects of saunas, whether dry or wet:
- A high heart rate
- Exposure to heat
- Sweating
There is some belief that the sweating we do during saunas is one of the beneficial aspects of them.
And while I can not say for certain that I am sweating while doing a very high humidity shower sauna at home, I know for a fact that I sweat like hell when I get out.
I usually have to open a window or something to cool off. Though I do wait ten minutes or so to hopefully accumulate more benefits. My heart rate stays at least 2x higher than my lowest heart rate for 5-10 minutes.
But some Canadians did some research on whether or not persistent organic pollutants were expelled through sweat. And the answer was no.
So again, doing saunas this way achieves the heat and heart rate that dryer saunas cause.
Standup Once A Minute to Boost Your Heart Rate
I noticed (in any type of sauna) that when my heart rate is not super high (say 2x resting), even if I just stand up it will instantly boost to 3x or so.
So one thing that I sometimes do, if I am not heating up fast enough is to stand up once every minute or so. This has the effect of making my heart rate go from 120-160 or so.