Near infrared saunas vs far infrared saunas, one is way better than the other. Let’s compare!
Video Transcript (AI Generated)
Alright, let’s give that a go.
Near infrared is better than far infrared.
I know some of you are freaking out right now because of that title.
This is, I get a lot of emails about which is better, near infrared, far infrared, blah blah blah.
And people send me specific articles and videos and reviews, and a lot of it’s not even the article that talks about it.
It’s just, if you didn’t build websites for a living you wouldn’t know this, but it’s just the title tag that appears on Google when you search for stuff of a particular webpage and it’ll say something provocative to get a higher CTR rate or something like that.
If you’ve never built a website before, this will be Greek to you, but I always kind of chuckle when people send this stuff to me because they’re asking me questions about what’s in the title tag and then when you actually review the information on the page there’s never any reference to what the title tag says to make you click on the article.
So if you’re not in the web services business, this is called clickbait.
You see it all over YouTube where there’s things that make you click on them, it’s very prominent on Facebook.
And so, near infrared is better than far infrared.
Do I believe that’s true?
No.
However, there are skin healing benefits, there’s mitochondrial and energy benefits that I have been studying and researching from near infrared and I do believe that near infrared is a beneficial treatment.
However, I’m not a person that believes you need a full spectrum sauna or a near infrared sauna or a sauna that has all three wavelengths in it.
The main reason why is because I’ve built near infrared saunas and I’ve also used PBMT lights which is photovoltaic modulation which is red light therapy and near infrared therapy usually in the 600, middle of the 600 nanometer wavelength and the middle of the 800.
One’s visible, one’s not.
The point is, if you isolate near infrared in that fashion, right, you can sit in front of it for hours and you’re never going to sweat like I’m sweating right now.
I’m using a cell phone for this video so I don’t know if you can see me sweating.
Usually I bring the big camera in here and the quality’s a lot better but I mean, you know, I’m pretty glistened up.
I’ve been in here for about 13 minutes.
Current temperature, people always want to know what I do, what the best temperature is to run the sauna on and all this other stuff.
To be honest with you, what I do in the sauna now has changed a lot from when I started.
I’m even going to open the door right now just to ventilate things.
I like fresh air and I also like staying in at a lower temperature so that the body stays more relaxed.
And in the beginning, I know this is unrelated but I know a lot of people would appreciate updates in the middle of the videos as time goes on and I learn more things and better ways to use the saunas.
It kind of turns out that there’s some research that supports that not using the sauna at such a higher temperature may in fact allow the body to stay in a relaxed state instead of switching from parasympathetic to sympathetic from the heat stress response.
If you can sweat quite a bit before you trigger that response or stretch it out a little and make it a little easier on your body, and this is my opinion, I’m not a doctor, I don’t offer any type of, I don’t claim to be any kind of sauna expert or anything like that.
This is just from my own testing.
I’ve been using saunas for over a year now.
It feels like if you can, I don’t know how to explain that.
If you’re suffering from any type of fatigue or adrenal issues or anything like that, there also may be a side benefit to doing it this way and using the sauna at a lower temperature because if you think about it, it’s really just a kinder way.
It’s a kinder to your body.
And you can tell like there’s no lack of sweat.
And that kind of brings me full circle to when I first was using the saunas, I wanted a sauna that would get really hot as fast as possible and go up to a higher temperature than the cheap ones that I use that only went up to like 139, 140.
And it was a struggle to get those saunas up that high.
And so it was almost like a he-man response or like an egotistical response.
I thought I was doing good by using the sauna at 160 degrees for an hour, even though I felt like I was going to pass out sometimes in the beginning when I wasn’t heat adapted and my heat tolerance just wasn’t there.
And now after a lot of experience, I think that was the wrong approach.
I think it’s good for your body to do that occasionally so that you, you know, there’s positive if you’re healthy and you feel great and your adrenals are in tip top shape and you don’t have fatigue and stuff anymore and you’re not doing any chelation therapy, you’re trying to detox metals or dealing with any of that stuff or using a sauna for Lyme disease or anything where there’s a complication that could cripple you if you overdid it.
Because you don’t want to be recovering for four or five days just from one sauna session.
And some people’s health, you know, we’re all on a different stage of our path or journey.
And so what’s right for me right now or what was right for me then or what’s going to be right for me a year from now may not be right exactly right now for you.
So you have to really, my advice in current day would be to be more gentle than you’re with your body than you think you need to be.
And really, as long as you’re sweating, as long as you’re full body sweating, as long as you’re, you know, the backs of your hands and your elbows and your, you know, your head and your legs and your knees and everything is dripping sweat, you’re doing good.
So the low, in my opinion, the lowest temperature that will give you that effect is what you should try because I’ve been trying it.
I’ve been trying it for months now and I keep going back to it.
You know, I’ll heat stress myself and run the sauna as hot as possible.
I’ll preheat it for an hour just to make it piping hot and I’ll get in and it’s something, there is something intuitive about the low temperature way, something about it.
And I’ve found some research that may suggest what I’m talking about, but there’s really nothing, there’s not like been a long standing study or anything to substantiate that stuff.
So I don’t really want to make any claims.
This is just my opinion based on experience.
And so this ties in with the topic though, that near infrared is better than far infrared.
We’ve got all these marketers and we’ve got all these companies, you know, trying to steer people toward near infrared saunas, full spectrum saunas, red light therapy devices, PBMT therapy devices.
But for the last two decades, the people that have been helped the most and that typically heal from heavy metal poisoning or different types of pesticide detox or chemical sensitivities and things like that, those are primarily done with heat therapy that makes you sweat.
And so my point is, near infrared when isolated does not induce a sweating response.
It just doesn’t.
You can go watch my other videos.
I sit in front of near infrared lights for two hours or something like that.
I mean, I’m moving around and I alternate and I do things because that’s a little bit too much near infrared.
I wouldn’t do that all the time.
If you happen to buy a device, this is by no means a recommendation for the people to do that.
I was a little naive at the time, but I wanted to prove to myself that, hey, this near infrared stuff is never going to make me sweat.
And even the heat sinks that were on these devices and the fans and everything, I mean, those would get hot, but no, and I put them in an enclosed environment in a sauna enclosure, but I shut the sauna itself off.
And so I’m running these things and you never sweat.
And so I know that people cite these studies and some of it seems legitimate and they pull information from NASA, which talks about LED and then a lot of the near infrared sauna companies are using incandescent.
And I don’t think that information just swaps over.
You can’t just take a bunch of research from an LED based study or example and apply it to an incandescent bulb, because it’s my opinion that a near infrared sauna doesn’t really exist.
And I’ve been saying that since I think October of 2018, maybe even sooner because I’ve built multiple near infrared saunas.
I built a shower enclosure like you’ve seen in the past videos.
I built a freestanding unit.
I built a modified unit that you can put in any far infrared sauna so I can bring the bulbs in here and compare what it’s like to sweat with the far infrared versus the near infrared or use them at the same time.
And I’ve got videos like if you’re hell bent on having near infrared and I really honestly don’t want to call them near infrared saunas.
The only reason that I do it is because the sauna marketplace and the sauna industry is so confusing as it is.
If I start labeling that as something different, it’s just going to make it more confusing for everybody else.
And so, but to be truthful with you and to be blatantly frank, there is no such thing as a near infrared sauna, because if you strip out the heat lamps or if you strip out the heat, if we’re talking about a heat lamp sauna, by the way, that’s what I would probably call it.
It does have a near infrared component to it.
And don’t take me the wrong way.
There are benefits that I believe are good from a heat lamp bulb from a near infrared bulb.
I just don’t, I didn’t get the same sweating experience from those that I do from this.
You can get a core or a torso sweat going, but you’re not going to be sweating from your elbows and dripping sweat.
I mean, it’s only 136 degrees in here and we were just 10 minutes left on the counter.
So I’ve been in here for 20, 19 minutes.
I would have to sit in a near infrared sauna that I built.
And this is a lot different than the cloth enclosures.
I think the cloth, I’ve never purchased a cloth enclosure because I think $3,000 for four, you know, $10 bulbs, a stick frame and some cloth is highway robbery.
And it’s really taking advantage of people that are in a bad spot.
That’s why I built my own instead of buying one, like the functional medicine doctor wanted me to do.
But I do have a lot of experience with them.
And I even made variations where the, instead of just using four bulbs per Dr.
Wilson’s original design, we modified it to do six and seven bulbs to try to up the heat.
Because what was happening is I made an insulated door for a sauna shower enclosure.
And so I would seal off the shower and I’d put my stool in there so you can rotate like a rotisserie.
That’s a pain in the ass too, by the way.
But still it wouldn’t get hot enough.
I mean, I’d be in there for 45 minutes and I’d get a torso sweat, but I wouldn’t get, you know, a full body sweat.
And so it would take forever.
It was very slow and I had to add supplemental heat.
So I was adding a space heater in there, which was inducing other types of EMF that I wasn’t a huge fan of.
And to me, if you’re going to spend $3,000 on any kind of sauna, make sure it’s comfortable and at least has a glass door so that you can, you know, relax and you actually like having it in your house.
Because when I was, when I injured my leg in late 2018, there’s no way in hell that I could use a tent sauna or anything that you’re going to crouch down and sit on a stool or, you know, that has a limited head height.
There’s no way.
And that’s just not relaxing.
That’s not something that I would like to use every day.
And the whole point of a sauna is to use it regularly.
So keep that in mind.
You know, obviously I’m not really trying to sway anyone toward any particular product or anything like that in this video.
Obviously I’m in a far infrared sauna right now from certified saunas.com.
If you want to see the list of the lowest, I tested 12 infrared sauna brands over the last year and a half.
And there’s three that tested the lowest out of all of them.
And if you want to see that list, just go to cleverleverage.com and search for list of certified saunas.
Or later when I get the website done, like if it’s six months from now and you see this video, you can just go to certified saunas.com and all the reviews will be there.
But I’m still testing saunas.
I’m still using them myself.
And so it’s my opinion that near infrared is not better than far infrared.
And it’s also my opinion that people aren’t being honest with you when they say that a near infrared sauna penetrates deeper than far infrared.
Because if you analyze an incandescent heat lamp bulb that they call a near infrared bulb, there is near infrared coming out of the full wavelength or the full spectrum of that.
But there’s also two other things that’s really giving you the sweating response.
The far infrared portion that’s emitted, and they don’t talk about that, and the heat from the heat lamp itself.
If you put four 250 watt heat lamp bulbs in a tiny little enclosure, that’s a thousand watts of heat.
It’s going to heat you up, but it’s not the near infrared doing it.
And so I just think that people are being misled.
I think that you can build near infrared saunas really cheap.
I mean, I built mine for less than $200, a bunch of them.
And I think if you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on something, number one, buy a couple of heat lamp bulbs first and test it out before you do that.
Because I don’t want to tell you what to do, or I don’t want to pawn off my experience onto you and tell you it’ll be exactly the same.
But if I had to guess, you’re never going to get this full body sweat from a near infrared sauna like you will in a far infrared sauna.
And I have some videos coming out because there are some people that are hell bent.
I shouldn’t say hell bent.
There are some people that are convinced of the near infrared healing benefits of a heat lamp bulb, which I agree with.
I think it’s a good thing.
What I don’t normally show is that starting middle of last year, I started modifying saunas.
I’d cut holes in the roof.
I’d put exhaust fans in.
I would try different ventilation methods.
I would try different shielding methods to make bad saunas good.
I would try all types of stuff.
One of the things that I came up with was there’s a really easy way to mount two near infrared or however many you want really, near infrared heat lamp bulbs in any far infrared sauna from the ceiling just by drilling two little holes and putting two screws in.
And there are special little fixtures that I found online and I’ll show you where to get them.
And you can add near infrared to any far infrared sauna for about $100.
And if you wanted to get really fancy, I’ve got these little clickable outlet remotes that gives you a remote control to turn them on and off individually when you’re in the sauna.
So if it gets too hot or it’s too much on one side, you can control them for an extra 30 bucks.
So for less than $150 or so, you can have near infrared in any sauna you want.
And so that is probably the biggest reason why I would get so upset in past videos because for a long time I was basing my initial research or my initial quest to find the right sauna for me based on the recommendations from the functional medicine doctor that I was seeing.
And a lot of them were centered around the heat lamp saunas or the near infrared saunas.
And I just struggled.
I knew something wasn’t right about that.
And I knew that I wasn’t getting a deep detox because I’d go to the local spa and I would use the far infrared sauna for like 25 minutes and I would just have sweat pouring out of me like right now.
I mean, I’ve been sweating this entire time and I don’t, you guys can’t see it, but every time I go like that, I’m opening the door just to give myself some fresh air and to keep the temperature.
I want the heaters in the sauna on all the time.
But to keep the temperature under, it’s about 135 right now.
And I’ve been in here for 27 minutes and this is a pretty good session.
And the nice thing is I’m comfortable, I’m not huffing and puffing.
The body is not overheated yet the core temperature is elevated and the volume of sweat that’s allowed to come out when you stay in this relaxed state like this and you’re not overdoing it and you’ve got plenty of far infrared coverage because that’s what makes the huge difference in my experience.
I’ve been in a lot of saunas, I’ve been in more saunas than most people that work for the sauna companies that are trying to sell you the saunas.
And so my perspective may be a lot different than you’re used to hearing, but there’s no such thing as a near infrared sauna in my book.
There’s no such thing as a mid infrared sauna.
If you really want near infrared or mid infrared, you know, my other videos will show you how to add it for a hundred bucks, a couple hundred bucks.
It’s very inexpensive.
And I truly believe based on my own testing that myself and other people get faster, better results in a far infrared sauna.
Now there is one caveat, generally a cheap far infrared sauna, like from Costco, like the ones that I originally started out to have really high EMS, generally a near infrared sauna or a heat lamp sauna, bulb sauna is going to have lower EMS than one of those cheap saunas, just given the nature of the way that it’s set up, because it only has, you know, power run to one side and you’re rotating on the little stool.
So it’s not like you’re surrounded in, you know, heaters like this and wiring and things like that.
So there’s a pro and a con to that.
The pro is if you can’t afford a true low EMF sauna, like I feature on certified saunas.com because they are expensive.
And, you know, I’m well aware that there’s been times where it’s been, I looked at it and I was like, Oh my God, $4,000.
Like I’m gonna have to put this on a credit card.
And, you know, I would second guess it.
That’s why I recommend everybody.
I tell everybody, oops, I’m not done with the video.
So let’s add some time.
I tell everybody, make sure infrared saunas are right for you before you buy one.
You know, there’s, you call a lot of sauna companies and all they want to do is like push, push, push and tell you their sauna is the best.
And, you know, they’re having a stupid sale and get in before the price goes up and, you know, Oh, it’s only $5,500.
You want to pay with Visa or MasterCard?
Come on, let’s do it.
Let’s do it.
Let’s roll.
I’m like, man, it’s so used car salesman ish.
But you know, I’m well aware that the point is near infrared saunas or the heat lamp saunas.
A lot of people get confused with the marketing because people say that they have lower EMF.
They do if you compare them to a cheap ass sauna that isn’t very good.
But if you get into a quality far infrared sauna and you could AB them, you know, you could use one and then hop in the other and test it, I guarantee you that your experience would be much similar to mine and that you would fall in love with far infrared.
And if it turns out you need the near infrared for other things like acne or different types of skin treatment or thyroid treatment, I can show you how to add that to any of these saunas.
So I hope that helps.
And I hope that sheds some light on why near infrared is way better than far infrared.
And I hope you know that I’m being facetious.
So have a great day and we’ll see you in the next sauna video.
I haven’t done any of these style videos this year.
So if you guys could please help me out, leave a comment on the YouTube video below or on the blog post and tell me what topic you want to talk me to talk about in tomorrow’s sauna session.
So every day I’m going to shoot a video when I’m doing my sauna session and that should help you guys out and I’ll get caught up on all the questions for 2019.
Have a great day.