Do Infrared Saunas Actually Work? Benefits, Risks & How Long to Feel Results

After testing over 40 sauna brands and being a total skeptic in the beginning, I’ve seen both the good and the bad. In this video, I walk through what it really means when an infrared sauna “works,” how long it should take to start sweating, what kind of results you can realistically expect, and which common mistakes are leaving people with zero benefit. If you’ve ever sat in a sauna and wondered why nothing’s happening, this one’s for you.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

Do infrared saunas work? Well, usually, except for this one. I say that to be funny, but I’m kind of not joking. If you’re in an infrared sauna that only has heaters on the back wall, there’s nothing in the floor, nothing in the sidewalls, nothing anywhere else, you would probably walk away with the impression that infrared saunas don’t work.

So let’s talk about it. So after testing over 40 sauna brands in the last six years, we recognize that we need to define a few things before we just say do infrared saunas work or not. So first off, number one, what does it mean when a sauna really works?

Number two, what should you really feel when using the sauna? Number three is how long until you actually feel a difference? Number four, what you should not expect? Now before we get into this, I just want to be really clear.

I was the biggest skeptic of infrared sauna or sauna in general for many, many years. Why? Back in 2015, when I started to have health issues, I started seeing a functional medicine doctor after I had amalgam fillings removed and it didn’t go well. Six months later, my health started to crash and burn, altered the course of my life forever, which has now been a huge blessing, but I didn’t know that at the time.

She was pushing me to do, you know, this detox protocol and that based on my labs, but I was looking at it as why am I gonna go spend $6,500 on an infrared sauna or any sauna for that matter, in order to do what she said I needed to do.

I’d already lived in a high-rise building that had a traditional sauna. I had been using it. It felt nice, but I never really noticed that much benefit from it. I had already built a DIY lamp sauna that I could use in my shower.

Again, I started to sweat better in that than I did in, you know, some of the other stuff and I went to rent sessions in a Sunlight and Impulse or something like that at a float tank place and while I felt immediate relief from some of the symptoms that I was having, I wasn’t convinced that that was really the way to go and kind of my intuition was right and my

Intuition was wrong. And over the course of the last six years, you can tell from 700 videos on YouTube, I’m obviously passionate about this and it’s made a huge difference in my life. So number one, what does it mean when a sauna really works? Well, I classify this in a couple of different ways.

The most important being the number one thing that matters is are you getting vasodilation after 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 minutes? Are you producing a river sweat at some point? If you’re not health challenged, why do I add that caveat? Because some people struggle to sweat.

Some people have to build up to their body being able to sweat. Well, they haven’t exercised for years. They’re overweight. They have some type of health complication that prevents them from, you know, they have mineral imbalances.

They have electrolyte imbalances. They have some type of health condition that alters that. So we have a unique perspective, especially having the Facebook group with 35,000 group members in there, we get to have a 30,000 foot overview and watch everyone and see what works for the majority of people and what I’ve found.

And this is why I talk a lot about heater layout is when you saturate the body with far infrared, whether you’re health challenged or not low and slow approach, given enough time, your body will learn to sweat well, as long as you’re in a piece of equipment that has enough far infrared coverage in order to give you that experience.

So for me, one thing and one thing only determines, you know, what does a sauna work or not? And that is, do you get a detoxificating sweat? Are you covered in sweat in a reasonable amount of time? And are you actually getting a sauna session or are you ending the session and wondering where your sauna should have been?

So point number two, how should someone feel if you know your, you know, sauna is good or working correctly. So it’s a little different for everyone because like I said, there’s varying fitness levels. There’s people that can go out and run a 5k this morning and not struggle.

And there’s some of us that would have to walk part of it, right? Due to joint pain and injuries and neuropathy for, in my case, post leukemia treatment complication, right? Or, you know, whatever, being overweight, basically not being a hundred percent healthy.

And so I think the reports of how a sauna should feel vary greatly in the same fashion. But here’s a baseline to give you to go on. When you’re in your sauna, if it’s a good one, about five to eight minutes in you should start feeling hot. And it doesn’t have to be preheated to its max temperature, it should just be mid-range or greater.

Within 10 minutes you should start a surface sweat on your skin on your low back, as long as the sauna has good heater coverage. Some of the saunas that you see in the reviews that I gripe about on the channel, my feet and legs, knees and thighs are dry after about a half an hour.

That is not how it should feel. That is not a good sauna session. It’s not the people’s fault. It’s not your health condition’s fault.

It’s the actual sauna design that is the ultimate fault of that. Because it’s not equipped with the right layout in order to hit the body in the key areas in order to generate a sweat in those areas. I keep telling people over and over that it’s not about the air temperature and infrared sauna.

It’s also about the radiant heat. So if you don’t have radiant heat, go watch the FLIR videos that we put out. If you don’t have radiant heat in the key areas, how can that portion of the body sweat? It’s not conducting heat just based on air temperature.

It’s not the only thing. So how should it feel? Here’s my baseline. Most people, unless you have some type of health condition that’s preventing it, you should be sweating in 12 minutes.

You should be sweating in 15 minutes. You should be building a sweat, you know, strong in under 20 minutes. And then your session begins. You should struggle to make it to 45 minutes because to me that’s a 20 minute session.

Your 20 minutes starts after you begin sweating. So how should it feel? It should feel gentle at first. It should feel comfortable unless it’s super preheated, really really hot, which you don’t actually need.

You need time for your body to start to warm up. You don’t need to oversaturate the air with heat because then your breathing will accelerate. You’re in the wrong heart rate zone unless you train your breath or do heart rate or cardio training or you’re an athlete of some type.

And you should…

should be basically river sweating in under 25 minutes, really preferably under 20 minutes. So that’s how it should feel. Number three is how long does it take to notice a difference? This is hard for me to answer because I don’t know exactly what you mean.

How long does it take to notice a difference in overall health? How long does it take to notice a difference in sleep? How long does it take to notice a difference in mental clarity? Cause you know, I could go on and on and on down the list of the things that I’ve felt the difference in, but a lot of it really is just like training in the gym.

It’s consistency. It’s supporting your body’s natural abilities to do those things. Everyone thinks that a sauna is like, you know, doing this thing or creating this thing. Not really.

It’s really supporting the body’s natural processes in ways that you usually can’t. Meaning if you can get a good sweat and you can be in zone two heart rate zone two, right? Without moving in a stress-free environment where you can relax and control your breath and create a little healing sanctuary time at the end of the day for you to get away from your stress and just decompress.

You have no idea what that’ll do for your body. That’s why I sleep better. That’s why I have more mental clarity. That’s why my body starts to work better.

That’s why, you know, my detoxification labs, you know, look better after six months of sauna. Why do I say six months? It doesn’t mean that it takes six months. It just means without doing chelation, without doing some complicated detox protocol, without taking 9 million supplements, which after doing it myself, I don’t advise it at all.

Most of them don’t do anything. A lot of them can pull you out of balance and it’s thousands and thousands of dollars of guesswork. People aren’t buying supplements based on labs, which is exactly what you should be doing, right? I didn’t know any better.

I was just willing to do anything to help myself. Right? So in my opinion, how long does it take? Well, that depends on the status of your own health.

That depends on the status of your own body. For me, when I had the worst brain fog, chronic,

fatigue and I was really, really struggling. I was kind of like, some people call it derealization, disassociation, or basically you’re just in a fog. For that, I noticed mental clarity relief, not instantly, but within a week, right? It’s going to be different for everybody.

I had some compounds that wouldn’t clear from the body or brain, however you want to look at it. And so sauna greatly assisted me in doing that. I would say I noticed sleep benefits within two or three weeks, but the real benefits didn’t come for a period of months.

I would say three to six months consistently saunaing three or four times a week. Why do I think that is? Because the body needs time to do its thing. It needs time to be supported and allowed to self-correct on a lot of health challenges and things like that.

I don’t think of it as a cure. I don’t think of it as, you know, Oh if you’re not overnight feeling better in three days, then the damn thing is worthless. No, that’s the wrong mentality. That’s not how you should think about it.

It’s a tool in your toolbox. It’s a healing modality that supports all systems of life. And when people go through times of degradation, health challenge, right? Sometimes you don’t even know what’s actually causing it.

So if you can do something that provides systemic benefit like sauna, red light therapy, walking, stress management, the breath techniques, you know, there is, there’s a reason why I keep saying healing sanctuary. Part of it is to get you into a habitualized ritual of giving yourself time and space to decompress, allowing your nervous system to reset, stopping things from spinning from a busy world and busy life.

Hectic family, hectic career, hectic, this hectic that creates pressure. So if you can do something that can allow you to decompress, which sauna is awesome for that, uh, you’d be amazed at what it can do for you and you’re going to know you’re going to feel it. And that brings me right into step four or point number four and I’m kind of already touching on it.

What you should not expect. You should not expect this to cure your cancer or do something crazy like some of these idiots.

Let’s tell you, I’m a person who has been through leukemia treatment five days a week for almost a year. Those sauna helped me greatly, especially with post leukemia drug detox. I had neuropathy in my feet. I couldn’t walk.

It felt like half my foot was numb. Hands, you know, were numb and tingly. The other half of my foot, the heel felt like I was walking on shards of glass. I couldn’t make it to the end of the driveway, let alone walk around the block.

I hate to even bring up cancer and sauna because I think a lot of it does people disservice. I say that because after going through that myself, I still believe sauna has incredible merit in the multifaceted approach, but I wouldn’t expect it to be some overnight cure where some guy talks you into buying some really expensive sauna and then all your problems go away the next week, right?

So never, ever fall for that. There’s companies out there that have been caught telling people that saunas will cure your cancer and do this and do that. And while we use sauna specifically in some of those targeted approaches for, like, I don’t even want to say it. We don’t treat diseases with this equipment, but we support the body and we still continue to do that and it has great success, but your expectation of it being like some overnight thing, it’s not, it is not reality.

That’s just not how it works. So that’s the main thing. I just, I just want to drive home the, the sincerity, the honesty, the genuineness saunas are not an overnight cure for anything, but they can be a wonderful systemic support for all types of health conditions even though they’re really not supposed to be, you know, endorsed that way by the medical society.

We see thousands of people getting great benefit on all types of fronts. Just look at the reports. And last but not least, I myself am a living testament to it. So all this to say in summary, do infrared saunas really work?

Well, in my experience, they absolutely do. I wouldn’t be as passionate or have the endurance to do this for so many years and put up with all the stuff that we go through if it wouldn’t have made massive changes in my life.

If I wouldn’t have seen thousands of people continue to get improvement year after year after year if the research that was coming out supporting heat therapy Increasing longevity the the stats are incredible So it’s very difficult to ignore a lot of people want to argue, you know Do saunas detoxify you or is it a lie?

We have a whiteboard video on that where I talk about it and I go in-depth on Exactly what I think is happening when you use the sauna But in my humble opinion Sauna is absolutely work and it’s one tool that you shouldn’t ignore and you should absolutely Incorporate into your toolbox for the future if you’re struggling getting started or you’re just beginning your journey All the links you might need are in the description I’d encourage you to check out certified saunas calm just to see a bunch of videos that I’ve done over a period of multiple Years and go to the Facebook group the certified sauna community There’s 30,000 people in there just like you that offer really really really good advice.

I learn from them every day I’m also contributing and answering questions in there every day. See you in the next video