Best Type of Sauna: Infrared vs. Traditional

One of the biggest debates in the sauna world is infrared versus traditional: which one gives the best results for health, detox, and overall performance? In this video, I cut through the marketing and share my real experience. I talk about how I first started with sweat lodges and Finnish saunas, and why infrared ended up making the biggest difference for me — especially when I was dealing with brain fog and chronic fatigue.

Both types of sauna have their place, but the way you implement them matters. Whether it’s the ease of installing an infrared sauna at home or the intensity of a traditional build-out, I’ll explain the pros, cons, and where each really shines so you can decide what’s right for you.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

One of the most common debates online is infrared versus traditional saunas. Which one is really the best, which one’s the best for health detox, which one gives the best results, heat shock, proteins, et cetera. Let’s cut through the marketing and get to the truth. What is the best type of sauna?

Is it infrared? Is it traditional? So I want you to kind of dive into this and talk about how in the past you have done traditional sauna, but in your eyes, what is the best type of sauna? Yeah, most people don’t even know how I got started.

The first saunas that I ever used were not infrared. Uh, the first sauna that I ever used was actually a native Indian sweat lodge, uh, at a men’s retreat weekend. And then from there I would use the traditional Finnish sauna that was in my apartment building. I lived in a high rise and I had a traditional, uh, Finnish sauna downstairs, throw water on the rocks, this, that, and the other.

And while it felt nice, I never really got the health benefits as far as clearing brain fog and some other things that I was looking to do out of those. It wasn’t until I tried an infrared sauna for the first time that I really noticed the difference, you know, brain fog can be caused by various issues.

At the time I was dealing with, um, some dental stuff, uh, some amalgam filling removal that wasn’t done correctly. I think it kind of went wrong, had some health troubles after that. And what I was looking to do was reduce, you know, particular levels of certain compounds in my labs and doing traditional sauna.

I don’t necessarily know if I would have gotten the effectiveness that I got in the same amount of time as I did with the, the infrared, but I could literally feel a lift in mental clarity, uh, after suffering from brain fog using the infrared and that’s kind of, it wasn’t listening to all this bull online or this, you know, nonsense claims.

It was me going and renting sessions at the float tank place and driving home, sitting in the car in traffic and being like, you know, I’m here sweaty, sitting on towels in traffic. This is not really fun, but all of a sudden my brain feels a little bit sharper, a little bit.

Us brain fog, I’m a little bit more clear and you could attribute that to many things, but I wasn’t necessarily getting that same outcome, uh, from the other styles of sauna and that kind of just pulled me in deeper. I wanted to know more. I wanted to try more.

I would go on to try other infrared saunas. Some of them, I didn’t get the same results from and other ones. I got even better results. So then I was kind of hooked.

So you mentioned something, uh, just a second ago. You don’t think that you would have gotten the same benefit in the same time using traditional versus infrared. Do you think that has to do with the consistency in which you can use infrared? Well, for my particular case, this would change obviously, depending on someone’s health status.

But in my particular case, during that time of my life, I was dealing with chronic fatigue. So if you were to stick me in an overstimulated environment or something that I suffered with, like I couldn’t go and do really hard workouts at the time. So if you were to stick me in a 220 degree sauna and I could only tolerate it for five minutes or something, 10 minutes at the time, it would take months and months to achieve the same benefits of a gentle, you know, detoxicating sweat that I could get with infrared at 135 degrees for 20, 25 minutes a day without overtaxing my body.

So for my intended application for my, you know, unique health status at that time, that was a much better application and yielded a lot better results. Let’s just say price has nothing to do with it. What are some scenarios where you think traditional saunas would be appropriate for a person in their day to day life?

Well, I immediately go to the install. So the install is going to be a lot more complicated to do a built in indoor traditional sauna. Cause if you truly want to have lolly and water on the rocks and high humidity and stuff like that, you build a custom sauna room off a master suite edition or in a basement or something, you’re going to want a ventilation system additional to take care of that moisture.

Uh, that’s not something that you would want to let go untreated. It would lead to issues. You don’t want to have any mold troubles or anything like that.

So my mind immediately goes to, you know, what is the, not the dollar amount, but what is the frustration amount of investment that’s required to get, you know, the minimum health improvement or, you know, health benefit? So I think that’s why myself and others, you know, tend to gravitate toward infrared, because it’s just a lot easier to install without the hassle.

I don’t know if that’s exactly what you’re asking, but that’s where my mind goes when people ask that. And another thing for me is something that you said earlier, which was the intensity of it. It dissuades people from continuing like consistent use of the sauna. And so I think that people who are specifically, specifically struggling with health issues right now, I agree with you.

I think it’s, I think it’s extremely taxing. Not that it’s hurting them, but if they don’t feel great afterwards and their intent was to feel better mental clarity or physical or whatever, I don’t know if that’s the most effective tool to do that. Especially if right now we have the other options on the market.

They both work. If you go back and look at the results of detox protocols, like the Hubbard protocol and stuff like that, or even Dan’s father’s Aniasin protocol or things like that, you can cut down the time it takes to run a detox protocol using an infrared versus a traditional.

But really I think the core benefit of using infrared is the way that the far infrared penetrates the body. A lot of people are just talking about, heating you up to a specific core temperature, making heat shock proteins, doing heat and cold therapy stimulation for athletes, getting specific types of endurance benefits out of it post-workout.

But I think a lot of people are missing the fact that the compounds in the body are stored in the adipose tissue, the fat cells. When you have far.

They don’t talk about whether those are water based or oil based. When you have far infrared that can penetrate your tissues and assist with vasodilation at the same time without taking synthetic drugs, what you have is a recipe to support the body’s natural detoxification pathways in a little different fashion than a traditional sauna where you have super high heat lolly.

Yes, are you still getting the heat stimulus? Of course. But you’re not stimulating the tissues in exactly the same way. You’re wrapping the body in heat instead of penetrating the tissue.

I mean, you could argue that both work. But to what degree in a short period of time? I think that’s why people get better results that are health challenged with infrared. You have to think of implementation in all this.

That’s why I talk about installation. The average person is not going to have a spare room in their basement to do a built in sauna and spend $15,000 making a cedar enclosure with a ventilation system and run 240 volt electrical to it and do all this stuff. So should they just not get any benefits of heat therapy for the next two decades of their life?

Or should they do something that you can actually install next week and implement three times a week pretty easily? A lot of it is that. It doesn’t mean that both types are great. I don’t try to talk anybody into either one.

I think the best thing that you can do is just go run sessions. Try them both. Whatever your heart feels is in alignment with what you like the most, do that.