How long should you use an infrared sauna? Does this change if you’re sick, in poor health, fighting chronic fatigue, or have adrenal fatigue issues?
Video Transcript (AI Generated)
Ruh roh, camera giving me troubles today.
So a lot of people have been asking how long should you stay in an infrared sauna, what’s the optimal temperature.
I think I’ve done videos on this in the past, but maybe not all in one video.
I think it’s spread out and it’s hard for people to find.
So I’ve kind of changed how I use my sauna over time.
In the beginning I did it the macho way, like I wanted to preheat it so that it was at it’s max temperature before I even got in.
So I wanted it to be as hot as it could possibly get before I stepped foot in it.
And then my goal was to stay in there as long as I possibly could because I thought that would give the most benefit or the most detoxing sweat or all these things that we buy into when we’re doing research online and we’re learning how to do these different protocols and things like that.
That’s very different from what I do now.
And it also depends on, the real answer also depends on what type of sauna that you’re in.
So today I’m in a Radiant Health two person elite model.
And for this particular sauna I don’t really preheat it much at all anymore.
I’ll turn it on to it’s max temp when it’s cold, when it’s at room temperature.
So I’m in Florida and I keep the house around 75.
So it’s usually low 70s in here.
So I’ll turn it on, I’ll wait about 10 minutes.
I really don’t wait, I just go make my water.
I usually take my supplements that I take.
If I’m taking binders that day I’ll do that.
And then I’ll come back about 10 minutes later.
Usually it takes about 25 minutes for the sauna to preheat to say, I don’t know, 120, 130 degrees.
It just depends on how cold it is in your house really.
But generally no more than 25 minutes.
But now what I’ve started to do is right when the sauna is at 100 degrees or 110, whatever, I’ll get in it.
So when you get in it’s not hot.
And it’s just like the old frog jumping out of boiling water analogy.
You put a frog into boiling water and he jumps right out immediately.
You put a frog in lukewarm water and then you slowly heat it up over time, it doesn’t realize it’s being heated.
I don’t know where that comes from.
Maybe that’s not a good analogy for this, but that’s kind of how I’ve morphed into using the sauna.
And so what I do is now I get in when it’s not hot and it’s not hard to breathe and it doesn’t make you sweat right away.
And I slowly, the reason that I do this is I’ve found that I actually get better sweats at lower temperatures because it’s almost like the sauna itself as it’s heating up will keep the body in the optimum range to get enough sweat, but not too much to where it’s not overbearing.
So you can actually stay in longer.
It’s more gentle and you sweat greater quantity.
Like right now, I mean it’s hard for you to see.
The lights in this sauna are a little bit different than some of the other saunas.
So half the time in the videos, it looks like I’m not really sweating that much, but I guarantee you I am sweating profusely.
And so the whole time I’m making this video, sweat is just rolling down my back and my chest that you can’t see.
Occasionally I wipe my face pretty frequently.
But again, using the sauna this way I think is a better option for, especially for beginners because when I was dealing with chronic fatigue and I had some adrenal issues and the brain fog and all that stuff, it was hard enough just to do day to day life things.
And so I don’t think forcing myself to get in a sauna when it was super hot and use it as hot as I possibly could for as long as I could was necessarily the best choice.
Back then I was just doing the best that I knew how.
I was trying to help myself and I’m actually going to take a little breather here for a second.
I was just doing the best thing that I thought would help me the most because I had done the amalgam filling removals and the functional medicine lady was telling me that I needed to detox the mercury.
Actually the aluminum was higher than the mercury and I was doing the hair mineral analysis testing and all this jazz and all the supplementation and everything goes along with it.
So I didn’t want to do all that work and then I felt like I wasn’t going to use the sauna to the maximum and get the most benefit out of everything because I wanted to get my health back, right?
Well in hindsight, hindsight is always 20/20.
Experience is the best teacher.
And so now I would never recommend somebody do what I did when I first started the way that I used to use the sauna unless you’re a triathlete or you’re in tip top physical shape and you have zero health issues whatsoever and you are looking to use saunas to improve yourself as an endurance athlete.
I would not use saunas in the way that I used to use them.
I may have even said or recommended for people to do that in past videos but as the years go on you learn better ways.
And so my recommendation is this, if you want some hard numbers.
So if you’re in a sauna like this, which is this is the sauna that I would recommend, you can see it’s on the certified sauna list.
If you go to cleverleverage.com you can see all my infrared sauna reviews.
Make sure you look at the reviews for saunas that I recommend not to buy.
You want to avoid those at all costs.
The good saunas don’t cost any more than the bad saunas.
It’s just you getting educated and staying away from the bullshit sauna salesman and all that high pressure tactics and no buy now before the price goes up or we’re having a sale.
You’ve heard it all.
What I’d recommend if you’re in a sauna like this, like the Radiant Health, is preheat the sauna, let it sit for 10 minutes while you go make your water, get your towels ready, do all that stuff.
Come back, get in, it’s not going to be super hot, it’s not going to be hard to breathe, you should be very relaxed, and just set the thermostat to its max temp, use the max time, and then just relax.
I have some relaxing tunes on today.
I usually don’t do that when I’m making videos, but I kind of wanted to illustrate a point.
I don’t know if the microphone will pick them up or if you can even hear them, but when I’m not making videos or answering questions for people, this is how I use the sauna.
It should be a de-stressing and a relaxing experience for you to get the most out of it.
This is also why I changed the temperature, the time limit, the way that I’m using the sauna, so that the whole thing is…
If I had to sum it up into one word, most people just need to be kinder.
Is kinder even a word?
More kind to themselves, to their bodies, to their whatever healing journey that they’re going through or difficulties.
I had tons of health issues.
There are still a few nagging ones for me, but my life is definitely better now than it was last year.
A lot of that has to do with saunas and the protocols and everything.
A couple supplements.
I’ve tried so many supplements that I think half of them aren’t even worth their weight in Amazon shipping.
They should just be thrown out, taken off the market.
Very few supplements really do a hell of a whole lot, I’ve come to find out, after spending thousands of dollars.
That’s another thing I need to do videos on, is I need to take the camera gear, set it up in my kitchen, open the cabinet and let you guys see.
Last time I counted, I think there was almost 300 supplements in there.
I think I could put together some useful videos on what supplements are worthless.
They’re just basically burning a hole in your pocket.
We as people that are struggling with certain health conditions, buy into buying the next supplement that’s going to help us.
Or we go to a functional medicine doctor and next thing you know, your medicine cabinet is filled with 30 different supplements that you have to wake up and take.
There’s an AM one, and there’s before bed, and there’s before meals, and there’s lunchtime.
I really think in hindsight, after going through all that, there’s a better way to do things.
Complicating your life and stressing yourself out and trying to combine all that with sauna and do everything right and do chelation therapy or take binders and do it the natural way or do juice fast and all these other things to remove heavy metals and timing it with your sauna sessions like everyone says.
I think there’s a lot of benefit to just taking it a little bit easier.
Without rambling on anymore, I would recommend preheat your sauna.
If you’re in a good sauna, if you’re in one of those saunas that everyone complains about where it takes an hour to preheat and then you got to sit in it for another hour in order to get a good sweat, this isn’t going to work.
If you’re getting a sauna off the certified sauna list or you’re in a Radiant Health or a Clearlight Premier or a Hitech Health, any of the ones that I promote have tested and they work really well.
They’re super low EMF verified by me on my video.
You can find those on YouTube.
If you’re in a decent sauna like that, it should only take between 10 to 25 minutes to preheat the sauna to enough temperature that you would start sweating.
So a good temperature for most people, especially just starting out, is the lower 130s.
So 131, 132, 133.
If you can kind of hover right there, and what I would recommend for a beginner is to not set the thermostat in the 130s.
What I would recommend is set the thermostat all the way up at its max temperature.
Go ahead and set the timer for 60 minutes, its max amount of time, and let the sauna preheat for between 10 to 25 minutes.
The earlier you get in, the better.
Put towels down on the bench and stuff.
Have an extra towel that you just used to wipe your face.
Get your waters ready and all that stuff.
Come in the sauna and just relax in here.
Put on relaxing music, read a book, whatever it is that you like to do.
Preferably no screen time, no Facebook, no “I used to watch videos and stuff” or do learning or reading and stuff in here.
Try not to do that anymore.
This is a time for you.
This is a time for you to relax and rejuvenate.
Allow the sauna to do what it can to help you.
Because if you do that, you’ll get better results.
If you’re stressed and you’re thinking about stuff and you’re talking on the phone or you’re basically just available or you’re getting dopamine hits from social media, Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff.
Even taking pictures of yourself.
Like a lot of times I won’t make videos in the sauna and I do them at my desk now because this is my time.
This is my little healing sanctuary.
This is my slice of the day before bed where I can relax.
Some days I’ll make an exception like today and make videos for you guys.
But not all the time because this is for me.
So there is no phone in here.
I don’t want a sauna that is connected to the internet.
I don’t want my phone hooked up to Bluetooth so that when I’m playing relaxing music, even though it’s on silent and a call comes in, it somehow miraculously rings through the speakers.
It breaks the state.
It breaks that relaxation.
And so if you want to get all the healing benefits, you should treat this as a healing sanctuary so that you are not only getting a good detox sweat, you’re going to detox heavy metals if you’re using the right binders like I talk about in other videos.
And you could actually get some meditative benefits if you put on a meditation track like I do a lot of the time.
And you’re going to be lowering cortisol by just having a creating space for yourself to have an optimal healing environment.
That’s what it really is all about.
Combine that with the far infrared and you have a winner.
And so the reason that I’m explaining all that is because the other mentality and what a lot of people teach online, I don’t know if I want to call it wrong because nothing’s really wrong, right?
You need to experiment with yourself because if I saw a lot, like if I saw it every day or if I go on a kick where I was signing twice a day for 20 minutes or something like that, just to experiment, just to find out what works, what doesn’t work, this, that, and the other, you know, you’ll, I don’t know if I want to say that it’s wrong the way other people teach infrared sauna use.
But definitely the macho mentality is not the right attitude when it comes to creating an environment for self healing or allowing the sauna to work for you instead of you working your ass off in the sauna, raising your heart rate too much, huffing and puffing and breathing.
Yes, everyone wants heat shock proteins and everyone wants, you know, a reduced all cause mortality like Dr.
Rhonda Patrick says and all this stuff.
But if you’re suffering from brain fog like I was, or adrenal fatigue or chronic fatigue or any of the fatigues, right, whatever label you want to give it, basically it’s impossible to get through the day.
I wake up at, you know, I was waking up at 637 and by 10 o’clock I felt like I needed a nap.
I couldn’t get off the couch.
You know, my nights were researching, trying to figure out what was wrong with me.
I was tired all the time, blah, blah, blah.
If that’s anything like you, then that particular strategy that’s taught by a lot of people to use saunas is probably not going to serve you best when you’re first starting out.
You need to build up to that.
And what I was talking about when I sauna all the time is my tolerance goes way up.
You have to build a, it’s kind of like if you’ve never been in the sun before, you haven’t been in the sun in five years and you’re fair skin, all of a sudden you go in the sun at the beach for eight hours, no sunscreen, no shade, no protection, no nothing, you’re going to get fried, right?
It’s the same concept.
If you haven’t been to the gym in five years and you think that you’re going to go do a CrossFit workout and complete the whole thing for the AMRAP, there’s no way in hell that you’re going to finish that.
It’s the same thing.
You have to give your body the grace and the be kind to it and allow it to become heat adapted for a lot of people.
Heat therapy is one of the best things that they can do.
It will improve their health all around.
It will help people with all types of conditions.
People get great results that have, you know, mold poisoning and are dealing with Lyme, spirochetes and all these other, you know, bacterial things where the body helps itself if you can get into a hyperthermic state, which means you’re increasing your core temperature enough.
You’re also doing other things that stimulate the immune system so that you get a little boost there.
And just, you know, detoxing certain chemicals.
A lot of people think that heavy metals are the number one thing that’s excreted with saunas, but I don’t really think that’s the case.
There’s all kinds of pesticides and other chemicals that can come out through the skin.
There’s a lot of other side benefits to sweating in an infrared sauna, not just heavy metals.
It was just popularized as a way to start detoxing that stuff without doing harsh synthetic chelation because so many people’s organs and things were already taxed like mine were.
Synthetic chelation is not advisable if you’re in that condition because one wrong move and you can send a ton of stuff that the body can’t process to already stressed organs and then you have a catastrophic failure.
That’s how people end up in the hospital or they end up in trouble.
You know, you can see reviews online that document all this stuff.
There’s people that go to natural health clinics and they do, you know, a mercury challenge test or a DMSA or they’ll do injection challenge tests with different types of synthetic chelators.
But if those people haven’t been checked out prior or their organs haven’t been measured or their general health assessment has not been accurate, they can find themselves in a world of trouble before they even get in a sauna, before you even get that far.
But that’s what’s driven a lot of people to believe in doing alternative ways.
You know, you do sauna therapy and you combine that with cilantro and chlorella.
That works really well.
But again, somebody who’s never done any type of detoxing before and has a lifelong buildup of heavy metals, you don’t want to start out with a ton of cilantro and chlorella.
In fact, I would tell you not to use cilantro oil in a concentrated form at all for the first little while.
If I had my whole situation to do over again, I would have started renting sauna sessions at a local spa if I couldn’t afford to buy one.
And I would have gone there for several months before I did anything, before I took any of the vitamins that are supposed to detox metals, before I were going to do any of the, you know, chelators or anything like that.
Definitely alpha lipoic acid.
I would not do that right away.
Give your body a chance to handle some of the stuff on its own naturally.
And so what I would recommend is that I know this is really long and I don’t know why I just injected all of that additional information into this.
All I know is it was hard to find.
Oops, what’s going on with the camera?
I think it’s getting too hot.
All I know is that it was really hard to find a lot of that info that syncs up with each other when I was going through that.
So I’m thinking back to all these times that I had those questions and how many people have asked me the exact same questions.
Even though it’s been a year and a half, two years since I’ve gone through that, one of the things, or you know what, I’ll just save it for another video.
Create the sauna 10 to 25 minutes if you’re in a good sauna, get in, set the timer for, you know, whatever’s appropriate to you.
Actually just set it at 60 minutes when you get started.
If you run out after 60 and you need more, you can always add it.
Set the temperature to max when it gets to around the 130s, not over 135 unless you know, that’s not hot enough for you or you’re not sweating.
Just crack the door a little bit like I’m doing right now and let keep the thermostat of the sauna all the way up so that the heater stay on constantly and then just crack the door to give yourself a breather to maintain the lower 130s temperature that you desire that’s comfortable for you.
This will do two things.
It’ll make your beginning sauna sessions easier so that you’re more tolerable and you’ll actually do them and complete them, which is better than, you know, huffing and puffing and using the sauna at a really high temperature and then having to get out after 5, 10 or 15 minutes.
You want to be able to at least stay in for 20 minutes if you can.
And even that is too much for some people when they first start.
So the most important thing is to listen to your body.
Don’t listen to anyone else, not me, not a functional medicine doctor, you know, not some person on the internet that’s telling you how to do a sauna detox protocol, none of that stuff.
You’ve got to listen to your body.
If you feel lightheaded or if it’s too much for you, get out, you know, pick it back up tomorrow and give yourself some grace.
You will become heat adapted.
Your heat tolerance will increase over time.
So just take it slow.
Let the sauna help you.
It’s here as a healing tool to help you.
Let it do its job.
But don’t, you know, abuse it or overuse it.
That’s when people get into trouble.
And so what you’re going to do is you’re going to start sweating when the sauna gets to probably around 120, 125, you’re going to start sweating.
And then you’ll continue to start sweating more profusely and you’ll get into the 132, 135.
It’s different for some people.
It depends on how big you are, how hydrated you are, how well your body sweats.
If you’ve done any exercise beforehand, that will make it easier for you to sweat.
If you’re dehydrated and you don’t drink water and stuff like that, then that’s a whole different animal.
You’re going to have trouble sweating.
So I don’t think I have to tell anybody that.
It’s kind of a given.
What you want to do is just like right now, I’m propping the door open.
Just prop the door open and that’ll allow you to have some fresh air.
That’ll A, give you a break.
B, let some of this stagnant air out.
It’s a good idea to do that every now and then.
And then naturally control the temperature without even touching the controls.
So it’s a win, win, win across the board.
I hope that answers, you know, the basis of the question, how hot should you use the infrared sauna?
You know, how long should you stay in?
You should really listen to your body and no one else.
But if you can at least stay in 20 minutes.
I would say when you’re starting out, don’t stay in more than 40 minutes.
That’s plenty for a newbie.
And then when you work up to it, you can stay in for an hour or you could get out, take a break and then get back in.
If you want to do like an hour and a half session, a lot of the NIAC and detoxes or the protocols have that type of timeline in them.
And as always, if you have any questions, comment down below in the video and let me know what you’d like to see in tomorrow’s video.
And there was one other thing I was going to tell you.
If you’re just starting out and you’re not used to saunas and you’re having, you know, difficulties or if you feel worse after you’ve done your infrared sauna session, the first thing to know is that if you’re in a high EMF sauna, that could have something to do with it.
If you’re not, and you’re in a sauna that’s from the certified sauna list that I’ve tested, we know it’s low EMF.
The number one thing that I would recommend is that you go watch my other videos or just post a comment in the YouTube video and ask me if I need to, I can make a follow up video explaining it exactly for you.
But if you feel bad, a lot of the time it’s because you have leaky gut and you, your body is trying to eliminate things, but they’re recirculating into the bloodstream.
And so you need to take a binder.
So there’s all different types of binders.
I’ve done a bunch of videos on them.
If you want to know more about that, just ask me in the comments below or go on YouTube and search for my sauna detox binders videos.
I also have some blog posts on the blog, cleverleverage.com, but a lot of people that I’ve worked with and myself included, it makes a huge difference whether or not you sauna with a binder or without.
So for a lot of people, when you first start, it’s very important to get a binder that works good for you.
I like Interos gel, but again, you can see my other reviews.
Interos gel is silica based, so it has a high affinity for aluminum.
There’s other binders that work well for other things, but again, this video is getting really long.
Hope it was helpful for somebody.
Have a great night guys. see you in tomorrow’s video.