Near Infrared Sauna Explanations
Video Transcript (AI Generated)
Let’s see if we get that thumbnail going there.
Okay guys, let’s do a video on near-infrared saunas.
A lot of people have been waiting for this.
I know I talk about them a lot.
I tell people my experiences of them, what I like about them, what I don’t like about them.
And as a general rule, people’s consensus of my opinion is that near-infrared saunas are bad.
And that is partially true and partially untrue.
So in this video, I hope to go over everything that I’ve experienced with near-infrared saunas.
Starting with, I don’t believe that there are such a thing as near-infrared saunas.
We’re going to talk about the heat lamp stuff, why I don’t particularly care for them.
I’m also going to show you my contraption.
We’ve got insulation board here that I use to build an enclosure to actually make near-infrared saunas, or what I like to call them is heat lamp saunas, to make them really work.
I made a shower enclosure in there that was completely sealed.
And that’s the key to getting heat lamp saunas to work.
One of the things that I really don’t like about heat lamp saunas, and I think you’ve discovered this if you’ve listened to any of the other videos, is that the companies that make these, I mean they’re charging like $3,000 for these bulbs are like $10-$25 a piece.
I’ll also put some links in the YouTube description to, these are Rubilux bulbs, these are the cheaper Element ones for like $10.
Point being, I built this over a year ago.
This is not a traditional Dr.
Wilson design.
This is, actually it’s so dark.
Oh man, can you guys even see what I’m doing here?
I think the camera was focused on these when I had them on, and then when I shut them off, no bueno.
Let me move it, just one second.
Let’s see if that works a little better.
Okay, now I can have them off or on, we’re facing the other way and things don’t get dark.
So there’s a lot to explain about these guys.
A lot of people see me talk about these and they think that I haven’t given them a chance or they think that I haven’t had a lot of experience with them.
I’ve built a couple different variations of this.
This is a heat lamp sauna, it started out as the Dr.
Wilson design, but you can see I added more bulb positions to the bottom to try to increase the intensity.
Because the issue with these, most of the time, is that you need supplemental heat with something like this.
So a lot of people think that there’s not a lot of EMF that comes out of this.
But this thing has like a 50, 60 mG magnetic field, and you’re going to have to stick it in the enclosure with these things in order to get a full body sweat going, unless you build your own enclosure.
So in this video, I’m going to talk about a lot of the common myths with what people call near-infrared saunas.
So let’s start from the top.
We’re going to cover all that stuff, and we’re going to go line by line and address everyone’s questions and concerns.
There are some folks out there that still want to build these, and I’m going to tell you how to do it the right way to actually make it work.
So the number one issue with these is what I was saying before.
People call these near-infrared saunas, so I’m going to call them near-infrared saunas to not add more confusion to an already really confusing marketplace, right?
Really though, this is not a near-infrared sauna.
This is a heat lamp sauna, because near-infrared when isolated, if I took you into the sauna room and we sat in front of the PBMT lights, which are LED based, like a Juve light or anything like that, you can sit in front of those for two hours and you’re never going to be sweating.
And the reason why is because that’s a true near-infrared therapy or red light therapy device with near-infrared isolated.
So if that was the case with these bulb saunas, you would never sweat sitting in front of these.
Now, the converse is true with these heat lamp bulbs.
These things get screaming hot to where you cannot sit this close to them for any length of time because they will burn you, the surface temperature of the bulb.
And so there’s two things happening here.
One, what people are calling near-infrared saunas, it’s not the near-infrared that’s contributing to your sauna experience.
And this is why I have been out of shape over people saying near-infrared for over a year.
That was my personal experience.
This is what I started with.
And a lot of people don’t realize that because I don’t talk about these because I don’t want to add even more confusion to people’s choices, right?
I started with this because I thought it was freaking crazy to spend thousands of dollars on a stand-up wooden sauna when I was just getting into this because I didn’t understand the benefits of the sauna and I didn’t think it was really worth it.
If I’m being truly honest, I’m like, “Get the fuck out of here.
I’m not going to spend $3,000 on some wooden crate that I can sit in and sweat my ass off.
I’m going to go to the gym and wear a sweatsuit or something.”
You know what I mean?
And at the same time, I was paying all this shit for functional medicine doctor visits and like all this stuff was really expensive.
The idea of buying, you know, I’ll just tell you right now.
The lady, the functional medicine doctor that I went to, she recommended that I buy a sauna space unit, which is basically four of these in a little tent enclosure and that’s it, with a little wooden frame.
They’re $3,000.
I thought that was freaking nuts.
I still think that is effing nuts.
You’d have to be crazy.
I built this contraption here with nice stones and, you know, all this stuff.
It stands up by itself.
You can put it in the shower.
You can do all kinds of things with it, right?
For like $200.
So I think it’s high way, you know, one of my aversions to talking to people about near infrared saunas is that I think people are getting ripped off when they’re in a vulnerable state, when they’re having a hard time in life.
You don’t just go to a Home Depot one day and be like, “Oh, I think I’m going to build some contraption so I can sit in front of it and get me a little red light swag going on.”
You know, people don’t just do that for no reason.
Most of us have either had health troubles or we’re interested in improving our longevity or we’re interested in improving athletic performance or this, that, and the other.
And so, you know, this is what I started with.
This is what was recommended to me.
I thought it was nuts.
I still think it’s nuts.
If you want to do something like this, don’t spend $3,000 to get four $10 bulbs, a little wooden frame, and a tent.
Because for one reason, the tent enclosure is what makes this not work.
So when I first turned on, I don’t know if I can do it from this angle now because we had to move the camera, but basically I’ll just try to show you a little bit.
I guess I won’t be able to show you the actual insulated door and things like that.
The key to getting near-infrared, I’ll just call them the Dr.
Wilson’s heat lamp style saws to work.
The key to getting them to work is to actually have an insulated enclosure with a radiant reflective heat barrier.
And so what that’s going to allow this to do is bounce the heat around inside.
Because the main issue with heat lamp saunas not working has nothing to do with whether or not it’s near-infrared or far-infrared or full spectrum, because you’re getting a little bit of everything out of the heat lamp bulbs.
And I’m jumping around here, but stay with me.
It’ll all make sense in just a second.
The key to making these work is having a small, so the cubic footage matters, the actual air space matters.
The smaller you can get it, the faster it’s going to heat up and the quicker it’ll work.
You’ve got to have a reflective, radiant heat barrier inside, which means you have to use a material like Reflectix or you have to use an insulated polystyrene foam board with a foil backer on one side.
You’ve got to get the heat bouncing around in there because you’ve got a single directional source on one side of your body.
Yes, you can rotate all the time.
You won’t have a choice because these things are so flipping hot, you cannot sit on one side for more than five minutes without them burning you.
Or you’d have to move back, it’s too far of a distance, the sauna would be too big.
And so what makes these not work is tent enclosures or non-insulated enclosures.
Because what happens is, let me just turn this on, I’ll show you right now.
What happens is, you’re sitting in front of this thing, right?
And you’ve got this strange array of bulbs.
And this is extremely directional, like you’re getting a very concentrated directional beam of infrared, right?
Let’s not even get into the near versus far and all that bullshit just yet.
Let’s just, let me tell you the issue with using one of these because I’ve used these a lot.
The issue is, why do I feel like the bulb’s going to break?
Hear it cracking.
Usually they break when that happens.
Let me turn this off.
That’s not normal.
I don’t want that to break on camera because then people are going to think, “Oh my God, these are dangerous.”
Keep in mind, my stuff gets really, really abused.
I test things, people come over and use stuff of mine.
This stuff gets banged around.
There’s nothing harmful about these bulbs.
They’re not going to like crack and break and kill you or anything like that.
I don’t want that to happen on camera.
I don’t want to give these things a bad name just because of that.
What I was trying to tell you is that you’re getting a narrow focus beam of infrared on one side of an enclosure, no matter if it’s an insulated enclosure, a cloth enclosure, or whatever.
You literally have to turn around like a rotisserie in order to get adequate coverage on other parts of your body.
Here’s the issue that I have with these.
What stops me from using one of these, because there are benefits to this and I’ll get to that in a second.
What stops me from using one of these over a far infrared sauna is the first time you use a really good far infrared sauna, you’re going to sweat from your knuckles, the backs of your elbows, and the backs of your knees, and your ankles, and your toes.
You’re going to have a full body sweat.
The amount of infrared coverage that you’re going to get in there is far superior to the directional nature of this.
Where people lose me, and a lot of people misquote me from here on out, is they think that I’m saying near infrared therapy is bad.
That is not the case.
Near infrared therapy is amazing, just not for a particular sauna application that’s trying to basically just emerge in the market with something that’s new, or flashy, or gives you a better detox, or penetrates to the bone, or near infrared works better than far infrared, all this other bullshit.
The tried and true portion that’s really heating up the water in your cells and giving you radiant heat to give you the sweat experience is the far infrared portion of the wavelength.
The real issue here is that I don’t want to sit in front of something like this, whether I get the benefit of having photobiomodulation added to it, or red light therapy added to it, or some near infrared exposure, I don’t care.
I can do that separately and in less than 10 minutes.
I don’t want to sit in front of something like this for 45 freaking minutes and only get a core sweat, because that’s what happens for me.
I only get a core sweat.
In less than an hour, even if I turn like a rotisserie, it’s just the core of my body that’s really sweating because this is so directional and confined in nature.
I’m not going to sit up here and put my feet in front of the bulbs, you know what I mean?
Because that’s basically what happens.
You can see there’s some bouncing on my face and stuff like that, but my legs are never going to get hit, all this other stuff.
I would literally have to bring my feet up and do things like that.
Now as the core temperature rises in the near infrared sauna people’s defense, you will start to accumulate sweat in other places, but it’s primarily a core sweat.
The thing that’s going to intensify this or make it work faster is an insulated enclosure, a cloth enclosure, a breathable enclosure.
They don’t work.
They didn’t work for me.
I mean, maybe somebody out there lives in the Bahamas or something where it’s 900 degrees already and you can sit in a little cloth thing and a few added degrees of temperature would give you what you’re looking for, but in normal room temperature it’s not enough.
That brings me to, everyone says, “Well, just add supplemental heat.”
I got this bad big boy or big bad boy, I guess you could say, but these things have giant amounts of EMF.
I found some other ones that have lower EMF, but what happens is you would have to have a dedicated setup just for this.
I had a shower enclosure.
It was insulated.
We did the door thing.
Pardon me.
This thing must have dust in it or something because I haven’t used it in so long.
It’s such a pain in the ass to set up.
I’m not going to use it all the time.
I’m just being honest.
I’m not going to drag this thing in there.
I’m not going to put an extension cord separate and put this thing in there.
I’m not going to put an insulated …
All this stuff.
The way to make this stuff work is to build an actual sauna yourself and stick this in it.
You want to build not only a wooden enclosure, you want to have a sturdy wooden framed enclosure as small as possible, so preferably sitting height no more than say four or five feet tall because any additional cubic footage, it’s going to take even longer for this to heat up.
I can tell you, you can get this to work very well if you build a two by four frame, you skin it in polystyrene foam so it’s super tight.
You got to foil tape the seams like it’s an AC duct so it’s airtight.
Please don’t ask me about …
Some people are like, “What about VOCs?
Is that going to be safe?”
And blah, blah, blah.
Then I’m going to seal myself up in there.
I’m going to breathe the gases.
Then I’m going to sweat out because it’s too tight.
If you want to build something like this, don’t ask me those kind of questions.
If you’re building something from scratch using a polystyrene foam and you expect that to be VOC free or you want it to be as clean as a Radiant Health sauna that is the sauna of the year and with a complete VOC report showing nothing, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
We got to stay in our lane for some of this stuff.
If you build that enclosure, you skin it in polystyrene, you tape the seams so it’s real tight and then you add Reflectix to the inside, this will work and it will work extremely well because now what you’ve got is a Radiant Reflective Heat Barrier inside.
It will be low EMF and now I’m going to start talking about the benefits of something like this.
It is low EMF because by nature these are lower EMF than a Farm Fred sauna because they don’t have to work as hard, number one.
A traditional Farm Fred sauna has heaters all over the place, has wires all over the place, has a power supply all over the place on at least three or four sides of your body.
By its inherent nature, it’s going to have more EMF than something like this because in this, you’ve only got a power cable on one side, you’ve only got an electric and heat source on one side.
Just by the very nature of it, it’s going to have less EMF.
Now is that trade-off worth it not working very well and you having to spin around like a rotisserie chicken on a stick?
In my opinion, no because it sucks.
No one wants to sit on an uncomfortable stool and rotate every five minutes and do all this shit and you’re still not going to get your legs sweating and have a full body sweat, at least for me.
What happened was I built this and then I was like, “Well, I don’t know if that’s really how it’s supposed to be.”
I went to a float tank place and paid to use a Farm Fred sauna.
I came out of there and I was like, “Holy shit.”
I was just dripping sweat everywhere.
It was like right then I realized, it’s like, “Why was the functional medicine doctor recommending this compared to a Farm Fred sauna?
How did I get so far off track from what just gave me a way better experience in half the time?”
I can only come to two conclusions.
One, functional medicine doctors go to weekend retreats and continuing education stuff and all these events and there’s companies there with booths and they pitch products and they convince them of this and they convince them of that and they believe in it.
Then they come back and then they pass that along to their patients.
The patients go in in a vulnerable state and what the hell do we know?
We don’t know any better.
If she says this thing is the best thing since sliced bread, this thing is the best thing since sliced bread.
We’re trying to get help.
We get brain fog.
Things aren’t going well, fatigue, all this stuff.
You buy into it.
It’s not until you truly experience the difference for yourself that you’re like, “Okay, there’s no way in hell I’m going to pay $3,000 for something like this when I can pay $3,000 and get a glass door with a fancy cabinet that actually is relaxing and I don’t have to crouch down and be uncomfortable to use the damn thing.”
There’s all these pros and cons.
I guess my intention for this video, I want to talk to you a little bit more about the EMF.
The inherent nature of the design of these, the Dr.
Wilson Protocol, they’re already low EMF by their nature because you’ve only got power cord, you’ve only got magnetic fields basically behind the fixture.
You can’t sit close enough to these …
I’ve been trying to clean up the language a little bit so that families and stuff can watch this, but I have to be honest, it’s not going very well.
You can’t sit close enough to these things for it to even matter because they’re so flippin’ hot.
They do have some electric fields.
The way that you can get around that if you want to build something like this is to build a grounded Faraday cage shield in front of them.
You can take quarter inch aluminum screening, put it in the front, clip a ground to it, boom, no electric fields, body voltage drops real low, under 100 volts per meter.
I’m sorry, under 100 millivolts and you’re good to go.
All the other issues still apply.
You’ve got to have, you’ve got to build a custom enclosure to make these things work the way that they’re supposed to.
Let’s talk about …
That’s one of the things, one of the reasons that the EMF stuff is so crazy with the far infrared saunas is because by the design of having wiring and heaters and everything, all the stuff all over the place that gives you the better sauna experience, by design they have to work a lot harder right out of the box to give you a low EMF environment because you’ve got stuff everywhere.
It’s not just on one side.
The benefit is you already know.
You don’t have to spin around like a little turkey rotisserie on a little stool like I’m sitting on now because my butt’s already starting to hurt.
I mean, I’ve done this stuff.
It’s not really fun.
It’ll get you by in a pinch.
I want people to learn from their own experiences or from real world experience.
I’m not saying that no one should ever use this.
I’m saying don’t spend $3,000 on it and if you’re going to build one, build it right.
I will put out a tutorial and a guide for people to build these the right way.
It’s not like I’m going to leave you hanging.
If this is what you’re hell bent on doing because there are people out there that must have this, that’s fine.
No problem.
I will help you later on when I have time.
We’re going to do a custom little one and you’ll be able to see it.
If you can’t afford a sauna, this will be a great solution to get you by or make it work.
Now there’s going to be stipulations to that.
We’re going to be using wood and materials and stuff from Home Depot.
It’s not going to be hypoallergenic.
There’s no going to be any VOC testing.
Don’t hound me about is this material safe and is that.
You want to build something and it’s going to be cheap and there’s not going to be any official testing to go along with it.
Don’t bother me with all this stuff.
There’s a pro and a con to everything.
Everyone wants speed, price and performance.
Pick two.
It’s the same old thing.
What else was I going to say?
There’s also something else that I’ve had in my back pocket for a long time.
People have been waiting for this and waiting for this and waiting for this.
One of the things, because here’s where there’s a split in the road and no one understands that I’m actually all for near infrared therapy.
Let’s get into why these are not really near infrared saunas.
Number one, there’s two things, first of all, that are contributing to the sauna experience from these near infrared saunas.
The first thing is that this is a heat lamp bulb.
Whether it’s an infrared bulb or not doesn’t matter.
This is 250 watts times four.
The little heat lamps that they use to keep food warm in cafeterias and things like that, that is what this is.
This is an incandescent heat bulb.
Get rid of the red part, get rid of the infrared part.
It’s a 250 watt heat lamp bulb.
Now, I don’t know about you, have you ever used one of those shop lights in a garage that’s a halogen, it’s really powerful?
They use them as work lights, like if you have a tractor that’s broken or something and you want to light up an area, blah, blah, blah, blah.
If you’ve ever stood in front of one of those, they get really hot.
That’s what’s happening partially here.
You’ve got heat from the heat lamp bulb that is heating the air up or heating the area up.
It just so happens that these are infrared, but they’re not just near infrared.
If they were just near infrared and they didn’t have the heat lamp portion, nothing would be heating you up.
You wouldn’t.
Go look on Amazon, go look at the LED near infrared bulbs that are the same size as these that are 150 watts or whatever.
You can stick those on you and you might feel a little bit of warmth or tingle after 30 minutes on a select area.
Your body is never going to sweat.
What I don’t like about all this stuff and the reason that I get so irritated is because there’s so much overlap and different things going on there.
People easily buy into this idea that, “Oh, near infrared gives you a better detox,” but it’s not the near infrared from the damn bulbs that are making you sweat.
Now, the spectrum that is emitted from these bulbs in particular, and it doesn’t matter which one it is, this is a triangle or a elemental or this is a ruby lux, I have all the bulbs.
They all work.
Some of them I like better than others.
I kind of like the ruby lux, but they’re like 25 bucks a piece instead of $10 a piece.
I know, you’re up to 100 bucks.
Where’s the other 2,900 when you buy a $3,000 near infrared sauna?
I don’t know.
The emissions from a bulb like this have far infrared in them.
If you look at the graph, if you look at the curve and you analyze the different wavelengths that are projected from a bulb like this or this bulb, all of them really, it’s a pretty decent curve.
You’re going to have a whole portion of a little bit of the entire spectrum from these bulbs.
You can start calling these far infrared bulbs and you wouldn’t be lying.
This is why I get so irritated about, “Oh, near infrared sauna.”
It’s not really a near infrared sauna.
It could be …
Then that brings us into this full spectrum stuff and all this other nonsense, which I think is just a deviation, a marketing distraction to try to get people to buy into a concept that obviously costs more money.
What I don’t like about it, the reason that I get all mad and I start cursing and all this stuff in videos for the last year, is that I know what it’s like to be in this situation because this is what got me started in saunas.
Being in that functional medicine doctor’s office, her telling me I had to go buy this $3,000 freaking thing and all this stuff, I know what it’s like to be in that position.
The thing that sucks, the thing that I think is bad, is that people get bogged down into this full spectrum and then they start believing.
They’re like, “Oh, well I have to have a full spectrum sauna.
Otherwise it’s not going to be that good.
I can’t just get a far infrared sauna even though that’s all I can afford because that’s not going to provide me any benefit.”
Because that’s kind of the road that I was headed down.
Then I said, “No, let’s put the brakes on this.
Hold on here.
Let me research this because something doesn’t seem quite right.
You’re telling me that for the last 20 years there’s steam saunas and far infrared saunas and all this stuff.
What about all the people that healed themselves in far infrared then?
Why all of a sudden now if we don’t have full spectrum or we don’t have near infrared, we’re not going to get any benefit?”
That was one of my major gripes.
Here’s where I said the road splits.
I’m trying to shove everything I know about these things into this one video because so many people have so many questions about all this stuff.
The trouble is, and the thing that really grinds my gears, is that people get so bogged down and so confused and then everybody is a shark.
Every sauna company you call says, “Our sauna is the best.
You’ve got to have this and you’ve got to have this.”
Then you call the next sauna company and they say the complete opposite.
It’s like at the end of the day you’re exhausted, you’re already not feeling well, and it’s like, “You know what?
To hell with all of you.
I’m not buying anything.”
You put it off and you put it off.
You know how long it took me to buy a sauna?
It took five months.
I built this instead.
Or actually this was the second one.
I built a different version of this which was basically just like a pogo stick with some lights screwed to it.
It was the best I could do because I was like, “I’m not going to spend four or five freaking thousand dollars and not be sure about this.”
I’m glad that I waited because it turns out things are drastically different.
What I was saying earlier is, “Let’s finish this up before I show you this.
Let’s finish this up.”
I’m not saying that near infrared therapy or red light therapy is bad.
Quite the opposite.
I love near infrared therapy.
I love the idea of red light therapy.
I think there are great benefits to it, just not as a sauna.
It’s not contributing to your sauna experience.
It’s not making you sweat.
I don’t like that people are borrowing the NASA research.
They’re borrowing the near infrared research that was done on light emitting diodes and applying it to incandescent bulbs.
Whether there’s some overlap or not is a different story.
There is some.
Because for one thing, you cannot stay close to these.
My skin is getting hot already.
My natural instinct right now is to pull away because it will burn you.
How does that affect your exposure distance?
It’s going to affect everything.
My real issue, actually I think you know all the issues.
I’m beating a dead horse here.
Point number one is I’m going to show you guys how to use equipment like this to add these near infrared bulbs to any far infrared sauna that you want.
Very easily for $100.
This is something that anyone can customize.
I’ve got a video coming out on it.
I did this almost a year ago.
I’ve been testing it and testing it and testing it myself before I talk about it because I don’t like to mention things that I’m not very confident about.
This is really inexpensive stuff.
I’m going to show you where to buy it.
This is probably $20.
You get a fixture.
Very easy to do.
You do have to be very careful because these are extremely hot.
You can add bulbs like this on a swivel mount, on a multi-directional mount to any sauna for around $100 or so.
I’m going to show you how to do it the fancy way with a remote control like this so that when you mount these in your sauna and they get too hot or something happens and it’s too much, you can turn them off from inside the sauna with a click of the button.
Everything will be safe, all this kind of stuff, and it won’t cost $3,000.
My intention behind doing this is not to make people think that near infrared saunas are better than far infrared saunas or that far infrared saunas are better than near infrared saunas.
We already know that those don’t really exist.
My intention is, hey, there’s benefits to near infrared therapy.
There’s benefits to PBMT, photobiomodulation, to red light therapy.
Don’t waste your money.
Don’t forego the benefits of having a good far infrared sauna just to get photobiomodulation.
I’m going to show you how to get whatever sauna you want.
Get a good far infrared sauna.
Whether it’s one that I promote or not, who cares?
Just get something that’s really going to help you.
I’m looking at the camera because a lot of times it shuts off right around this mark and people are like, “Oh, you were talking about something but then you didn’t finish.”
I’m like, “Well, I’m sorry.
I didn’t know the camera shut off.”
Get something that is right for you, whatever that is.
I don’t care if it’s a brand that I say is great or whatever.
Do you.
Do what’s right for you.
All I’m saying is pay attention out there.
Don’t spend $3,000 on some tent frame with some cloth and some Home Depot bulbs that are $10 each, Ruby Luxe $25 each.
Wake up a little bit.
If you can’t afford any of that stuff, learn how to build an insulated enclosure.
Put these together in an environment where it’s actually going to work well.
If you really want to get cheap red light therapy, do this.
Watch one of my other videos.
The tutorial is coming out.
There are great benefits to near infrared therapy, just not as a sauna.
They’re not really a sauna on their own.
If this was nothing but near infrared and I had my little insulated enclosure and everything was perfect, I still wouldn’t sweat.
It’s the heat from the heat lamps.
It’s the far infrared portion of the spectrum.
It’s all that stuff in an insulated enclosure that’s giving you the sweat.
Unless the insulated enclosure is really tight, you’re not going to get more than a core sweat.
You’re just going to get a core sweat.
You won’t get full body.
If you build something that’s really good, then you’ll be able to do that.
I highly recommend you check out some of my other videos.
Go to cleverleverage.com.
You’ll find all my infrared sauna videos.
You’ll find the Costco saunas, the Amazon saunas, all the ones that were terrible.
You can also go to the list of certified saunas to see the sauna of the year for 2019 and beyond.
I think that covers it.
If you have questions that I missed, let me know in the comments and I’ll see you in tomorrow’s video.
Ha ha, that’s not the camera.
That definitely is not the camera remote.
What are we doing?
I’d say we have too many remotes.