Doctor Reveals the Best Way to Sauna

After testing more than 40 saunas over the past seven years and combining that experience with the Japanese medical practice of Waon Therapy, I’ve developed a sauna protocol that works for almost anyone. It’s simple, effective, and based on real clinical results. This is the foundation I recommend if you want to get the most out of heat therapy without overcomplicating it.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

If you want to start with a foundation that you can execute on and adjust to suit your liking no matter what anybody tells you, here’s the best protocol to try. I’ve tested over 40 different saunas in the last 7 years, and when you combine that real world experience with the clinical studies out of Japan on something called Weian Therapy, you end up with the most effective sauna session for getting the best results that you can possibly get.

Today, I’m going to show you exactly how to do it. We have other videos if you want the details, but in Japan, Weian Therapy is actually an official medical treatment. The protocol is pretty simple. It’s 15 minutes in a Farnford sauna, about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, followed by 20-30 minute wrapped in blankets to hold in the heat.

This causes you to retain core temperature for a longer period of time without subjecting the patient to any additional heat stress specifically. Studies show pretty powerful results, lowered blood pressure, improved heart function, vascular repair, and even better long-term survival even for the heart patients themselves. The key takeaway is that structure matters.

It’s not just about sitting randomly and sweating. It’s following a proven routine and doing it regularly. So Weian Therapy shows us the power of structure, but over the years, I’ve found ways to refine it and expand on it. Through testing dozens of saunas myself and working with thousands of people in the sauna community, I’ve developed a protocol that is just kind of like one-size-fits-all low and slow that builds on those principles, but makes them more practical for everyday life.

Hydration starts before you even step into the sauna, usually days beforehand. My protocol is first and foremost, a lot of times people aren’t paying attention to labs when they’re doing these therapies or replicating studies. And the biggest thing is electrolytes, mineral balance. So hydration starts the day before, if not several days before.

It’s not enough just to drink some water right before your sauna session. You want fluids and electrolytes in your system ahead of time, way ahead of time. So for me personally, I always bring a hydration drink into the sauna and sip it throughout the session. I have a list of mine in preferential order.

You can probably find it in the Facebook group, you can probably find it on my Amazon profile, or you can find it on my website.

find it on my blog or in one of the reviews. I like the clean ones with low sugar. You can’t go wrong with Redmond. Liquid IV’s okay, but I like the other ones better.

LMNT’s fine, but I think you get a better deal with some of the others. But check the list out, see what you like. So I preheat the sauna. I just turn it on max time, max temp.

And then I walk away from it. I go make my hydration drink. I’ll go for a 20 minute walk. You could do a rebounder, you could do a workout, you could do anything.

But I would recommend preheating your body before, if you wanna follow my protocol, I would recommend preheating your body before you get in the sauna. Gets your blood flowing, your metabolism’s primed, gets some lymph fluids moving, and you get better sessions overall, and more even sweating. I would recommend most people start with 15 or 20 minute sessions.

The way that some people gauge that is different. My methodology is the sauna session officially starts once you begin sweating. So from that point in, I stay in for about 20 minutes. The reason why I do it this way is because some people are not heat adapted.

Some people don’t sweat well. Some people sweat really, really well. So to say that every single person should be in there for 45 minutes is a little bit crazy. Just like saying that somebody’s 100 pounds doesn’t need 300 ounces of water a day.

This situational awareness, body type, nuances, do you have health conditions? So on average, what I recommend is it’s gonna take most people between eight to 14 minutes to start sweating usually, if the sauna’s preheated. And this obviously changes if you’re doing super hot sauna sessions. But this is a basic protocol and this is something that anybody can do.

So we’re not talking about a training protocol for a triathlon. We’re not talking about doing contrast therapy in a 220 degree sauna. For most people that have never experienced heat therapy before, that’s gonna zap them. It’s too much for their system right away.

One of the things that I should have tossed in there is that me saying all this and developing different protocols for different groups of people, it comes from me doing the wrong things too. Like the reason that I know this stuff is because I try.

it. And I have the same mentality. I call it the He-Man mentality. You want to jump in and just do as much as you can because you think that it leads to more benefit.

So you’re just like overbearing, you know, schedule, overbearing temperature, overbearing heat stress, but sometimes less is more. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. You know, I don’t wrap myself in blankets and retain core temp for an extra half hour because, you know, I have other things to do and I’m not going to a clinic to have these sessions administered to me either.

I’m doing the courtesy of my own home. So I can just do another session tomorrow, you know, or the next day also. If I’m sunning in the evening, I usually just jump right in the shower. I mean, I want to, I sauna like two hours, two and a half, three hours before I go to bed.

It gives me time to cool down. So I just start my normal evening routine after that. So I want to get clean and dry. I don’t want to be sitting in sweat or doing anything else.

People take this as gospel. Like, I never do anything different, which is funny sometimes. We’ll do Q and A’s and stuff. And they’re like, well, Matt, you said you shower right after the sauna.

Now you’re saying you went and did house chores and took the trash out. You did this and you do that. Wouldn’t it take longer for your body to cool down? It’s like, well, yeah, you can’t be so dogmatic that you can’t deviate, you know, for 10 minutes.

It’s not even if you take the portions that are applicable to any heat therapy. A lot of people will argue about this, but if you take the finish sauna studies, which there’s the most data on the benefit from heat therapy, which you could even get from hot tubs or jacuzzis and infrared saunas or whatever, even though the studies aren’t done on them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We hear all this stuff. Most of the benefits and the stimulation that occurs within the body is going to be just like exercise. What kind of cardiovascular benefit do you get if you only exercise once per week? That’s why we talk about schedule and repetition.

So three times per week, every other day, that’s the minimum. Without talking to somebody, you can’t take into account their unique situation, health challenge.

which is, are they overweight, what kind of, you know, nutritional imbalances might they be encountering, you know, all that stuff comes into play because if you tell one person to do something, you know, they don’t have as much gas in the tank as the next person. So while one person might struggle with something that seems like a minute difference to you, another person is going to thrive on it.

And then you have, you know, social media where you see people, you know, giving reviews and saying, oh, I love this thing, or I did this protocol, and then you see the exact opposite and it’s like, oh, I did this same protocol and I crashed and burned. So I think broad, broad spectrum, there are some similarities and differences, both way on therapy and any method that are structured and consistent are going to have better results just like exercise.

Both methods of heat therapy, increased circulation, going to activate heat shock proteins as long as you’re stimulating core temperature, doesn’t matter what the cabin temperature is necessarily. And then all forms of heat therapy give you a breath and nervous system reset. They’re going to change your like default from throughout the day.

Differences are way on therapy is very medical and rest based. It’s kind of like, you know, easygoing. Let’s just get the minimum stimuli to get the cardiovascular benefit. My approach is more lifestyle friendly.

You know, I focus on hydration, movement, active cool downs, or aggressive cool downs. We’re not wrapping ourselves in blankets and sitting on the couch for, you know, 45 minutes post sauna session. Way on ends with blanket rest. You know, I end with progressive shower or contrast shower or something like that.

Just to recap, if you want to start with a foundation that you can execute on and adjust to suit your liking, no matter what anybody tells you, here’s the best protocol to try. Hydrate ahead of time. Do a 20 minute walk while your sauna is preheating. Enter the sauna around 140 degrees, 135 degrees, whatever it is at the time.

Start your sauna session timing and stay in about 15, you know, 20 minutes once you start sweating well. And then shower off or relax, you know, after your sauna session. Do this for two weeks.

adjust accordingly. And when you’re starting out, if you’ve never done heat therapy before, you don’t sauna any two days in a row. So it’s every other day. It doesn’t matter if you miss a session or not.