Transcription
Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. Steam sauna or infrared sauna? What's better for your health? And that's what we're gonna discuss in this video. So hopefully, by the end of this video, you can walk away and make an informed decision of what type of sauna is best based on your requirements and based on your individual circumstances.
Now, before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel and you click on the little alert button so you get notified when I publish more videos like this. I also want to mention, I'm not a medical doctor, and nothing in this video should be considered medical advice. However, I've done a lot of research. I have both an infrared sauna and a steam sauna at home here in our backyard. So what I tell you in this video is not just based on theoretical knowledge and based on what I've read, but also based on my own experience. In fact, I've done some experiments to see exactly how those two types of saunas would impact my cardiovascular system because that's important as far as figuring out what type of benefits you can expect from those two types of saunas. So let's get started.
Sauna bathing is an ancient tradition that dates back thousands of years. Traditional steam saunas have been part of the Finnish culture for at least 2,000 years, maybe even longer. Infrared saunas, on the other hand, are a relatively new technological invention, and they haven't really gained popularity here in the US until the 1980s and 1990s. So it's relatively new in comparison to traditional steam saunas, and most of the research out there is actually based on steam saunas. However, one thing that I've learned as part of my research and as part of my own testing is that most of the benefits that you can obtain from sauna bathing are based on the fact that your body is exposed to heat stress, and that heat stress is what delivers the benefits. And so many people naturally assume hotter is better, and that's why steam saunas are more effective and provide more health benefits than infrared saunas because in steam saunas, typically the temperature you would find in a steam sauna is somewhere between 150 on the very low end to maybe 215, 220 degrees Fahrenheit. When I jump into our sauna, it's typically somewhere between 195 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. In comparison, our infrared sauna is somewhere between 140 and 150 degrees Fahrenheit. So significantly lower temperature, lower humidity, obviously, because there is no hot air, no hot steam, and no hot moisture. But that doesn't necessarily mean that one is better than the other, and that's important to understand when we talk about those eight health benefits that I'll cover as part of this video. Heat stress is the important factor, and the thing is, infrared radiation, depending on the wavelength, depending on if it's near, mid, or far infrared, can actually penetrate your tissue relatively deeply and carry that energy deep into your tissue, causing your core temperature to rise and causing your heart to beat faster. Hot air has a much weaker capability of delivering energy heat into your tissue, so you need higher air temperatures in traditional steam saunas to obtain some of the same benefits as infrared saunas can deliver with lower temperature. So that's very important to understand. You know, temperature is important, yes, but more important is how much of the temperature, how much of that energy gets delivered into your tissue to cause heat stress. And so one is not necessarily better than the other because of higher temperatures, but we'll cover that here in a little bit.
Now, let's talk about the eight health benefits and how they compare and how they line up between those different saunas. So the first one I want to talk about is cardiovascular health. That's one important benefit, and the reason why many people use saunas to improve their cardiovascular health. The second one is muscle length, joint pain. You know, if you have achy muscles, arthritis, whatever the case might be, if you want to relax or recover after a workout, sauna bathing is an excellent tool to help, you know, reduce the pain and increase your blood flow and support the healing and recovery process. Number three is skin health. That's maybe more associated with infrared saunas, we'll talk about that, but both types of sauna can help improve your skin health. Immune system support, maybe that's the number one even above cardiovascular health. A lot of people sauna bathe, especially during the colder months of the year, to improve their immune system and to reduce the chances of them getting sick. Number five is respiratory health. You know, the moist air can open your airways, and so that's one of the reasons why people with asthma and with other respiratory conditions seek the sauna, do sauna bathing to improve their symptoms. Improved hormone production. That's not something everyone is aware of, but the heat stress can actually upregulate certain hormones that are important for recovery, tissue growth, metabolism, etc. We'll talk about that as well. And the last two are weight loss. If you sweat, if your heart rate goes up, then your ability to burn calories is increased, or the rate at which you burn calories goes up. So some people sauna bathe to help their weight loss efforts. And the last one I want to talk about is stress relief. You know, that's also one of the common use cases for sauna bathing to relieve stress and tension, and we'll talk about that as well.
So let's start with cardiovascular health. Cardiovascular sauna bathing is great for cardiovascular health because you literally give your heart a workout when you are in the sauna. When you're exposed to heat, your heart rate goes up. So your heart has to beat a little bit faster to at the end, after they cool you down and to compensate for the heat stress you're exposed to. Your blood vessels also dilate, and that obviously helps with recovery, with getting oxygenated blood into different areas. But the main reason why your blood vessels dilate is to help you cool down. So it tries to compensate for the heat stress you're exposed to. And so what I've done is I've tested both in my infrared as well as in my steam sauna, how high my heart rate would go above my baseline during a 30-minute sauna session. And interestingly enough, I kind of suspected it just based on how I felt, but when I looked at the numbers, I realized that both sauna types would increase my heart rate to comparable levels. More specifically, my resting heart rate is around 45 or so beats per minute. In the sauna, towards the end of the 30-minute sauna session in either types of saunas, my heart rate went up to about 110 beats per minute. So I saw an increase of 65 beats per minute, which is quite significant because if I go for a brisk walk or I jog slowly, that's roughly the heart rate that I would have. So in other words, being in the sauna for 30 minutes mimics a mild cardiovascular workout, and that's great obviously for my cardiovascular health perspective. And so, for that benefit, I would say that both types of saunas provide equal or very comparable benefits. One is not necessarily better than the other, even though the steam sauna, the heat and the steam sauna was significantly higher than the one in the infrared sauna. But because of the energy that the infrared rays dumped into my tissue, the net effect was pretty much the same benefit.
Number two, joint and muscle pain or recovery more generally speaking. Doesn't always have to be an injury or an inflammation or inflammatory condition. It could just be that you're working out and you want to recover, and so you want to get oxygenated blood flow into your tissue. And so in that case, I think the infrared sauna has slightly, provides slightly more benefits because of the deep tissue penetration. And of course, it depends on the exact type of infrared sauna you have. We have a full spectrum infrared sauna that provides both near, mid, and far infrared radiation. But generally speaking, with infrared, you get a couple of centimeters up to five, six, seven, eight centimeters of tissue penetration with infrared radiation. And so that means that even larger muscle groups, like your glutes, your thighs, your pecs, whatever the case might be, they get oxygenated blood flow much more so in an infrared sauna than in a steam sauna where the heat is higher, but the penetration depth is not quite there. So you get a lot of blood flow in your skin, obviously, and in tissue adjacent to the skin, but it doesn't necessarily deeply penetrate your muscle tissue. And so I think from a joint pain recovery perspective, infrared has a leg up. Also, because there have been a lot of studies that show that infrared radiation can help with reduced pain by blocking pain signals, by increasing blood flow deep in the tissue, etc., etc. So there, I would say the point goes to infrared. But obviously, steam saunas are great for recovery as well, just not to the same extent.
Number three is skin health. And skin health is traditionally the domain of infrared and red light therapy. There's a lot of articles on my blog that talk specifically about the benefits of red light and infrared light for skin health, for improving collagen production, etc. And so here also, I think that infrared saunas have a leg up. They've been proven to increase collagen production in the skin, to reduce fine lines and wrinkles from a cosmetic perspective, or if you have scar tissue, if you have eczema, if you have certain skin conditions, infrared light has been shown to be highly beneficial in reducing inflammation and correcting some of those issues and helping your skin tissue to heal optimally. But that doesn't mean there are no benefits as far as skin health are concerned in steam saunas. In fact, steam saunas, the hot steam moisturizes the skin. Also, the sweating helps moisturize the skin. So, and the increased blood flow in the skin and the underlying tissue because of the high heat also improves skin health, just a little to a smaller degree as infrared saunas can.
Number four, immunity and helping your immune system. And most of the immune benefits from sauna bathing stem from heat stress. So if your body is at a heat stress agent, it's a what's called a hormetic stressor, a good stressor, stress nonetheless, but a good one. Your body starts releasing heat shock proteins, and heat shock proteins are part of the normal immune response that get released when you're under heat stress, hence the name heat shock proteins. The body also releases white blood cells and some other immune factors due to that heat stress. And so the question is, what type of sauna provides the greater heat stress? And just based on my findings and based on my tests using, you know, looking at my heart rate, I would argue that both types of saunas can provide comparable heat stress depending on the temperature of course that you set your sauna to. If you do infrared at 90 degrees Fahrenheit, you likely never going to experience heat stress. So you have to get close to the 140, 150 where you start feeling uncomfortable. And the same goes with the steam sauna. If I remember correctly, you have to be close to 180 degrees Fahrenheit or higher to experience that heat stress to cause your body to release those heat shock proteins. But when you do, you get equal comparable benefits from both types of saunas as far as your immune system is concerned.
Number five, respiratory health. And here I think the steam sauna is the clear winner because the moist air can open up your airways and can help you breathe more easily if you have any type of respiratory infection or asthma or something else that might prevent you from oxygenating properly, from breathing well and deeply. And so the steam sauna here has a clear advantage. We've used hot steam when our little one many, many years ago had, I think it's called croup. It's I think a bacterial infection or a viral infection, and it made her cough a lot, made breathing difficult for her. You know, at that time we didn't have a sauna yet, but we turned on the hot shower and let her inhale the steam, and that significantly improved the symptoms. So hot steam in a steam sauna is great for respiratory health. The infrared sauna is not entirely useless because by upregulating your immune system, you can certainly also support your respiratory system, but to a lesser extent as you can in a traditional steam sauna.
Number six, hormone production. Now, what most people don't know is that if you are exposed to heat stress for a certain amount of time, your body starts releasing growth hormone. That's the same growth hormone that some athletes use to dope, to improve their, you know, tissue creation, muscle growth, metabolic health, metabolic capacity, etc. Saunas can do the same thing. In fact, I've seen studies with certain sauna protocols where you go into sauna for two times 30 minutes with a 10-minute break at relatively high temperatures. The study was done using steam saunas, but the same applies to infrared, and that triggered a 16-fold increase in growth hormone production. That is incredible. So you can leverage sauna bathing before, maybe in a competition, maybe an important workout that you need to perform very well. So I would necessarily jump in the sauna an hour before an important workout or before an important competition, but if you leverage this, you know, during the days leading up to the competition, you can significantly increase your growth hormone levels and leverage them during the competition and also for recovery. Again, it goes back to heat stress, and since both types of saunas produce or can lead to similar heat stress depending on the temperature used in both saunas, I would argue that you can get the same growth hormone releasing benefits from a steam sauna as well as from an infrared sauna.
Number seven is weight loss. You know, if your heart rate increases, if your heart beats faster, you burn more calories. And so a lot of people use sauna bathing and the sweating aspect of it to lose weight. Now, energy balance, meaning how much calories you consume versus how many you burn, is certainly a factor in losing weight, no question about it. But I would argue it's not the most important one. How you eat, what you eat, when you eat, how well you sleep, how well you manage your stress, those are all important factors. And specifically, what you eat is significantly more important than how many calories you eat if you want to lose weight. But everything else being equal, yes, you can use sauna bathing to support your weight loss effort because you'll burn some extra calories as your heart beats faster and as you sweat. Just, you know, understand that using sauna bathing with a poor diet, poor sleep, and poor stress management is not going to lead to results, at least not in a sustainable manner. So you sauna bathe wisely in combination with making the right lifestyle choices. And if you do, I believe that both types of saunas can provide similar benefits, again, based on the fact that both types of saunas can increase your heart rate to very comparable levels. And so you'll get the same or similar benefits from both.
Last but not least, stress relief. Here again, I think it's a tie. Both types of saunas can be very relaxing, can help you a lot to relieve tension, to settle down, to sweat a little bit. Not too much if you're already stressed, you don't have to go all in and expose your body to extreme heat stresses. Just sit in there, you know, chill out, and know it'll turn out. You have to be warm obviously to a degree, but you know what I mean. And in that regard, I think both types of saunas provide very comparable benefits. You can relieve your stress in an infrared sauna, you can relieve your stress in a steam sauna. Ultimately, I think it depends on what you enjoy more, the wet heat, the moist heat, the high humidity, or the infrared radiation that radiates more from the inside without being stuck in a cabin that has a very high humidity level. So it's personal preference at the end of the day.
But before we wrap it up, I want to offer a couple of more considerations that might determine what type of sauna is better for you. Number one is ventilation. Especially if you want to use the sauna indoors, a steam sauna, as you can imagine, produces a lot of humidity that you have to remove from the room or from the sauna to reduce the chance of mold and mildew growing. You know, and so ventilation is very important. You have less of an issue with, even though you sweat as well, with an infrared sauna. If you use it outdoors, with both of our saunas outdoors, so ventilation is typically not an issue regardless. But indoors, make sure you take this into consideration.
Number two is the type of heater you want to use. Infrared saunas, obviously, you know, you plug them in, they are they run by electricity or with electricity. With steam saunas, you often have a choice between a traditional wood stove or a wood-fired oven and an electrical oven. And while the wood oven sounds obviously very romantic and very traditional, it's likely going to be a pain in the butt if you, you know, need to get the oven going long before you can jump into the sauna, then you have to clean up, there is more maintenance involved. So think carefully if you want to go with a steam sauna, if a wood oven is romantic and as great as it sounds, is really the way to go, because chances are you end up not using it very often, and that kind of defeats the benefits of having a sauna. We chose to go with an electric heater for our steam sauna, and the downside of an electric one is that it consumes a lot of energy, potentially. So we have a nine kilowatt heater in our steam sauna, and it consumes nine kilowatts, as the name implies. Our infrared sauna, in comparison, consumes approximately two kilowatts. And so there is a significant difference in power consumption between those two types of saunas. Now, from a monetary perspective, that might not be a huge deal. If you can afford spending thousands of dollars on a new sauna, then paying 30, 40, 50 a month extra for your steam sauna might not be a big deal. We have solar panels on our roof, and they produce 7.7 kilowatts. So if I turn on our nine kilowatt heater, then we have to either buy energy from the grid or tap into our battery backup. And so I've become a little bit more conscious of when we use the sauna. So I wouldn't necessarily use the steam sauna in the evening when our panels are not producing anything. I'd rather use it during the day when there is sunlight and we can produce most of the energy. But again, if you don't have solar, if you just pay for electricity, it might not be a big deal, but something at least you want to take into consideration.
The other thing that you want to consider is the electrical requirements for both sauna types. Just to give you an example, for our infrared sauna, we had to put in a dedicated 20 amp, 120 volt circuit specifically for the sauna. So we had to pay an electrician to come out and put it in. We are actually in the process of upgrading our infrared sauna, and the new one requires a 240 volt, 20 amp circuit. So we have to get another circuit in. Keep that in mind, it would also increase the power consumption by the way and maybe equalize it out a little bit. On the flip side, our heater for our steam sauna required a dedicated 50 amp, 120 volt circuit and a breaker box on the outside. So that investment, getting that set up and that circuit put in and the breaker box on the outside, cost more money than putting in the 20 amp circuit for our infrared sauna. So there is, you know, again, a cost difference that goes way beyond the purchase price of the sauna that you should take into consideration.
The other thing that's important is for us at least is electromagnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation. Most cheap infrared saunas on the market emit a lot of EMFs. And so I'm not a fan of man-made EMFs because there is no scientific evidence that would suggest that any amount of man-made EMFs is good for our health. So we do everything we can to reduce our EMF exposure from man-made sources. And that's one of the reasons why we picked the Sunlighten Sauna, which is very low in EMFs, and the company actually tested using a third-party lab to make sure that their EMF exposure is within acceptable levels. The steam sauna, on the other hand, doesn't produce any EMFs, maybe with the exception of the electric heater, you know, electrical radiation. If you go with a wood oven, you're not going to have that issue at all. So that's also something to consider.
And the last thing is off-gassing. Again, especially cheap saunas off-gas because of the glues, the stains, the woods they use. That's again one of the reasons we went with Sunlighten for infrared and with Redwood Outdoors for our steam sauna because they don't emit a lot of EMFs, they don't off-gas, they use only natural materials, high-quality materials. You can say the same for, like a cheap sauna you might get from Costco. The other thing specifically with infrared saunas to take into consideration is their emissivity. So how much infrared radiation they actually emit. And again, based on the tests of various products I've looked at, most of the realistic or most of the cheaper products, again, I'm using Costco as an example because I looked specifically at a model from Costco, they are amazing emissivity is relatively low. So you don't get a whole lot of infrared radiation into your tissue. Whereas Sunlighten has a very high emissivity of like 95 to 99 or so. So again, that's a difference that you want to take into consideration before you make a purchase decision.
Now, with that, we're gonna wrap it up. The bottom line here really is that for most of the eight health benefits I've mentioned, they are pretty much the same between the two types, between those two types of saunas. Respiratory health, obviously, the wet sauna has an advantage. Skin health, the infrared sauna has an advantage. Joint and muscle pain reduction and recovery, the infrared sauna has a slight advantage. But besides that, they are relatively comparable. And at the end of the day, it matters more that you make sauna bathing a regular part of a routine versus freaking out over which model to get. At the end of the day, pick the one that you feel most comfortable with. If you like the wet, humid, moist air, go with the steam sauna. If you like dry air and some of the cosmetic benefits of infrared radiation, go with an infrared sauna. Either way, you're gonna improve your health and well-being. And with that, we're gonna wrap it up. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't like it, let me know in the comments what I could have done better. Until next time.
[Music] Thank you.