Hi Matt, noticed you say you changed how you use your sauna, and used to use it very hot but now not so much. Any advice? Thanks
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“Matt, I noticed you say you changed how you use your sauna.
You used to use it very hot but now not so much.
I’m struggling with what temperature to use and what I can handle.
Any advice?
Thanks.”
Yeah, so I’ve changed a lot of what I do as far as infrared sauna temperatures that I used to strive for are much different than what I do today.
So I think you can find this in some of my videos but I don’t think I’ve ever put out a video specifically about the temperature.
Obviously I’m on a trip right now so you won’t see me in the saunas.
I’m in Maine at my grandmother’s cabin.
But if you wait a couple of weeks when I’m back home in Orlando and I’m in the saunas, I’ll make a special video just for you and show you the difference.
Because what happened was when I first got into saunas, I wasn’t very experienced and my body hadn’t built up a heat tolerance and my heat tolerance hadn’t graduated from…
And so that might be a terminology that you’re not familiar with.
This is not an industry term, it’s just something that I reference.
So for example, if you haven’t worked out for five years, I say this all the time, right?
And you go to the gym for the first time, you’re not going to be competing in a triathlon next month, right?
It’s going to take some time for your body to get back into shape, for your cardio endurance to regulate itself and improve.
Well using a sauna is very much the same.
Most people do not have heat tolerance if they’ve never been exposed to heat therapy before.
I sure as heck didn’t.
So when I first started using the sauna, I was pretty much struggling.
Anything over 140 degrees Fahrenheit for over 20 minutes, that was a struggle.
I’m huffing and puffing, I’m sticking my face out the door to try to get some fresh air, to try to let my heart rate go down a little bit and I’m struggling.
I had this, I don’t know if it was ego or if I just somewhat, maybe it was a functional medicine doctor or something I saw online or whatever, but I took on this belief that I needed to force myself to stay in there as long as I could, as hot as possible and I would get the maximum benefit if I would do this.
I don’t think that’s correct anymore.
I did that for many months, almost a year really, about 6 to 10 months and on and off.
And then I started experimenting and then I came across some anecdotal research that may actually be, they may be on to something that if you switch your nervous system from parasympathetic to sympathetic really fast, which means you’re in a relaxed state, you have this great idea that you’re going to go into a nice warm relaxing sauna and you’ve got relaxation music on or you take a good book in there or you just get lost in whatever or maybe you have an iPad outside the door and you watch Netflix, whatever your thing is or maybe you meditate, whatever.
You have this idea and you’re going to be all relaxed and it has this soothing, you can see it, you can feel it in me right now.
I’m like, “Oh man, that feels so good.
Yes, I can’t wait to get home and get in the sauna.”
And then you get in there and you immediately shock yourself.
You preheat the sauna for an hour so it’s absolutely as hot as it can possibly get.
And then you get in there and then within 10 minutes you’re like, “Dear God, let me out.
Somebody give me some ice.
I want to go in a cold pool.”
All this stuff.
You’re skipping all of that stuff and there’s some preliminary research out there that may turn out to be pretty good that shows if you can stay in parasympathetic longer and stay relaxed that your circulation is better, there’s no stress or contractions in your nervous system or your muscles so your lymphatic system is relaxed, you sweat easier but it just takes longer and it’s more gentle.
It’s also a lot easier and kinder on your adrenals.
There’s all types of things.
And so what I’m getting at is once I started learning about this stuff, I didn’t force myself anymore.
And I even went so far as to for like two months I would not preheat the sauna at all because I wanted to test it for myself and be able to have better information from first hand experience to help people out there because if you’re fighting a chronic disease or you’ve got adrenal fatigue or whatever’s going on, you got Lyme disease, all kinds of things, you got thyroid problems, you can’t just zap the shit out of yourself and then expect yourself not to be fatigued or lightheaded or whatever because it’s just too much on the body.
And so for two months what I would do is get in the sauna, not preheated at all, I would get in it and turn it on.
And now generally people would hate this, myself included, because I don’t want to sit there with nothing happening.
But I learned a very interesting thing.
As long as you’re not in a cheap underpowered sauna like the Costco one or the Amazon one or whatever that takes forever and a day to heat up.
I mean I’ve used saunas before where you preheat the dang thing for an hour, then you get in it, it takes another 45 minutes to start sweating.
Those saunas suck.
I mean that’s not how an infrared sauna should be.
If you were talking about a good infrared sauna like any of the saunas on the certified sauna list, certifiedsaunas.com is not done right now, but if you go to Clever Leverage and just search for the list of certified saunas, you’ll see the three brands.
It’s the Radiant Health, the Clearlight Premier, and the Hi-Tech Health TR2.
Those three are adequately powered, they work really well.
If those are preheated or just turned on for about 20 minutes, I mean you will start sweating within a half an hour.
So what I did was for two months, no preheating the sauna, I would get in, turn the sauna on and then I would just sit there and I would wait and I would monitor things and I would see how things would go.
And I would try a little bit of niacin or I would go for a walk or I would do a little bit of rebounding and I would experiment with all these things.
And what I found was best for me and I actually felt like I had a better, almost it goes in line with some of this preliminary research that I was reading.
Now there’s no scientific studies that back this up and I’m not a doctor so take all this stuff with a grain of salt.
This is just testing and experimenting and reaching out to people who do studies at universities and this, that and the other.
What I think I feel from seat of the pants is that I think I get a better sweat at a lower temperature without taxing my adrenals and without tanking my energy and I think you get, I think you might actually get a better detox.
Because if you can prolong switching the stress response on, right?
Think about it.
Your lymphatic system is more relaxed, your circulation is better, your breathing is more complete, there’s more oxygen circulating through and you’re relaxed.
I don’t know about you but if you ever try to do anything when you’re really stressed and then you try to do the exact same thing when you’re relaxed, usually things go much better when you’re relaxed.
So in my experience, what I do now, I’ve kind of perfected it for myself and it’s not an exact science.
Sometimes it’s a little more, sometimes it’s a little less.
What I do now is I preheat the sauna to about 135 degrees, about 140, I’ll set the thermostat.
So I don’t try to get it to 150 anymore.
I don’t use the sauna at 150 anymore.
What I do is I’ll preheat it for about 10 minutes, maybe 15 if I’m making my water, if I’m getting some electrolytes or if I’m doing some mineral stuff or if I’m rebounding.
I don’t try to be so hardcore with, “Oh my God, it’s going to be like 7 minutes and 30 seconds and then I have to get in.”
Relax, give yourself the treat of having a healing sanctuary in your home.
That’s one of the greatest benefits of this.
So I preheat for about somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes.
Could go as much as 20, could be as short as 8, whatever.
Generally the sauna depends on which model you’re in, but if you’re in like a Radiant Health which is the one that I usually use because I have a choice, right?
I’ve got a bunch of saunas in there I can pick and choose.
That’s the one that I’ve been using lately.
Obviously not here at Grandma’s Cabin in Maine, but back at my house in Orlando, Florida.
I’ll be back there in about a week.
So you should see sauna videos with me back in the sauna then.
Working on getting an outdoor sauna for up here because I think it would be super cool.
I don’t know if you guys can see, but got tons of snow out there and I think it would be really neat to put an outdoor sauna in the woods there and have a cool little experience.
But anyway, so preheat the sauna for 10, 12, 15 minutes, whatever.
Hop in, not much is going to happen, right?
The sauna will be, it takes about 30 minutes to get to 130 something degrees, 132, 133.
And so what I want is I want my body to be relaxed, to not be overheated, to have plenty of hydration.
I’ve got a lot of water in there and to have some type of soothing environment going on whether it’s reading a book, watching a YouTube video, filming a video for you guys.
That doesn’t really count because I’m actively doing stuff, but I do it because it just works better for people because a lot of times I can just grab the camera and show you stuff.
But what I want is for the body to be in there when it’s around 115 degrees or less.
And so I want the temperature, the ambient temperature to be low and I want the air temperature to be low so that my breathing is relaxed, we’re not superheating the lungs or anything like that.
There’s no need to be opening the door and having excess ventilation except if you want to leave it cracked and have the roof vent open, whatever, whatever you like, right?
And so as the sauna’s temperature slowly climbs, I want my body temperature to slowly climb with it.
And you stay relaxed, you don’t increase the heart rate too much and you just start sweating a little bit and then all of a sudden, bang, you just start sweating profusely within about 15 to 20 minutes.
But the thing is you’re not superheated.
So your body, your core temperature is a little lower and I’ve found that you can actually stay in the sauna in a relaxed state longer when you do this because it’s almost like the frog in the boiling water thing.
You guys heard all that?
You know, you stick a frog in boiling water and he jumps out.
But if you stick this frog in cold water and you slowly heat it up, it stays in there because it’s the same idea, right?
And so I’ve found that that works a lot better for me.
I’m not super fatigued.
Every now and then I’ll do like a super hot session just to see where my heat tolerance is at.
But for most people, if I knew what I knew now, when you first get your sauna, this is the best way to get started.
I made a mistake in the past.
Like I say, I don’t know if it’s ego driven, I don’t know if it’s, you know, some belief that I took on or, you know, this was the method that people told me that I thought I had to do, you know, just make it as hot as possible and try to tolerate it.
I think that’s wrong especially for people starting out.
I think the best thing that you can do is use the sauna at the lowest temperature possible for you to still get a profuse sweat.
Because what you’re going to be able to do is you’ll be able to take more sauna sessions per week without taxing your adrenals, without expelling too many electrolytes, without getting dizzy and lightheaded and having all that stress.
Because that’s kind of a mental stress too, right?
Like I can go in a really hot sauna now and I can get lightheaded and you mentally, you’re like, “Oh my God, am I going to pass out?”
You’re not really going to most of the time.
But there’s a mental battle and some emotional stuff can come up when you do that.
And for most people, if you’re not experienced, you don’t know what your limits are, you’re not sure how to work through that, you don’t know if you’re doing harm to yourself or if that’s good for you and blah, blah, blah.
So the right way to do it is to do it in reverse.
You know, what I do now is what I should have done at the beginning.
And I should have done that for months so that my body could slowly adjust to the heat tolerance and I could slowly build, you know, build up to that.
And I think that’s the best way forward for most people.
That’s what I would recommend to you.
That’s what I do myself now.
And so for me, the optimal sauna temperature for the infrared sauna right now is somewhere between 130 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now if you’re buying a sauna from the certified sauna list, that is applicable across the board, doesn’t matter which three brands it is.
If you’re in a different infrared sauna, that temperature could be different because these three sauna brands on the list, those are all adequately powered.
Every single one of them has some type of frontal infrared so you’re getting full body infrared.
Some of them have bigger heaters in the front than others but there’s adequate heater placement to really make sure that you’re sweating a lot.
So for me, my perfect temperature is about 133, 132.
That’s where I like it.
That will keep me sweating without exasperating the breath and the heart rate and everything else.
And I think it’s just enough to get a deep penetrating detox sweat and it keeps your back and everything sweating the whole time.
Your back of your hands will sweat.
Now obviously these are all far infrared saunas and so if you’re doing the near infrared thing, that’s a whole different animal.
The core sweat is a lot different than a full body sweat in my opinion.
I only use far infrared myself.
I like near infrared things but generally I’ll do it supplemental or I’ll do it separate from the sauna.
I’ve got some other videos that show you how to put heat lamp bulbs in the sauna if that’s your jam.
Otherwise than that I would recommend some type of PBMT lights outside of the sauna, some red light therapy and things like that.
But yeah to answer your question in a roundabout way, I think we kind of covered everything regarding the temperature.
Some people are hell bent on having the sauna at 160 degrees or they want to supercharge the sauna, this and that.
That’s fine if you build up to that but I don’t think you really need it.
I think you can get all the benefits you need.
I think you can get a complete detox at a much lower temperature.
My motto now, right now for this quarter or this six months is just being kind to the body.
So base your choices on what would be kind to yourself.
Before that’s why I think it was ego driven.
I was like, “Hotter, more, longer.
You know, I’m going to sweat this stuff out.”
But that mentality, I mean just look at the physiology that I take on whenever I describe it right.
What you want to do is you want to be as relaxed as possible.
You want to be kind to yourself.
You want to show patience.
You want to try to enjoy the process.
You want to have a positive attitude.
Be thinking about what great things you’re doing for yourself by number one, carving out time of your day for yourself.
Your sauna session is doing that for you.
Carving out a time of the day to where you can detox yourself.
You are eliminating toxins with this sauna session.
And you can think about purification however you like.
Some people it becomes a spiritual thing or an emotional thing or a mental thing.
For other people it’s just a physical thing.
Regardless, use the time to your benefit.
Try and stay in that parasympathetic state so that you stay relaxed.
Give your nervous system a break.
And I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.
You can do a complete niacin detox.
You don’t have to do this crazy high heat that a lot of the people say.
I get plenty of sweat detox at lower temperatures.
So I hope that helps you and have a great day.