Is Red Light Therapy Inside Sauna Worthless?

Does red light therapy belong in a sauna, or is it worthless combined with heat? Are they better together in a full spectrum sauna? The red light saunas are getting…

Read the transcript below

---

---

Transcript

Oh Man, I see your question on red light and sauna Now, I don’t know if I want to cover this. This one is a tough for me. It’s it’s a difficult one because everyone wants to sell Red light with sauna, right? So when I’m here in the group and I see your questions like do I think you should put your red light in a sauna or do I think you should buy a sauna with red light in it Do I think that chromotherapy is the same thing as red light There’s there’s so many like little points that make all the difference in the world for this set of questions that it’s like I Hate to say that it’s largely individualistic But it really comes down to exactly what you’re saying, right?

So if you’re talking about chromotherapy if you’re talking about some special sauna, that is full spectrum and it has Red lights mounted in the ceiling that shine down on you, right? If you have a Built-in red light therapy device along with your sauna heaters like behind the grill or integrated into the wall Or the newest thing that I’ve seen like on some of the Wayfair saunas some of the cheaper stuff It’s really interesting.

You’ll kind of like I have red light therapy panels behind me hanging. This is a vertical Like red light therapy bed So to say instead of buying a $30,000 bed, you just hang four panels and stand in front of it naked in the middle Anybody can do it. It’s not that expensive.

It’s not that difficult to set up It’s just kind of like a hack that I’ve been testing in order to try stuff That said it’s very interesting when you guys post these messages that come from sauna salespeople because just like

The traditional Finnish sauna crowd that says that you can’t make heat shock proteins in anything but a Finnish sauna is immediately debunked as soon as you see a piece of PubMed research that shows how the body makes heat shock proteins in a jacuzzi or a hot tub right and so it’s no longer that the air temperature that being 200 degrees or something like that is actually creating the heat shock proteins it is is there enough stimulus to the body to have a strong enough hyperthermic response in order for the body to trigger that reaction and so the question is you can do it in anything the real answer is you can do it in anything you just need enough heat stimulus in order to achieve it so the idea that one type of sauna that’s like saying well if I go in a different type of bath disregard the PubMed research altogether you know you can’t make heat shock proteins but if you use this other special bath it’s like well is their heat transfer they have a special water right like is the medium that you’re using to conduct heat somehow magically different what does this thing make its own water that’s somehow from Mars or something and has some unique ability to transfer more heat a lot of this same jargon is ending up in the red light therapy space when it’s combined with sauna so there’s a couple of things shout out to Andrew from Gemba Red I’ve always loved his stuff and he also helped me get a custom calibrated spectrometer that really made a difference when I was trying to test some of the saunas because it was when they get into the near infrared wavelength it’s over a thousand nanometers right most every single full spectrum sauna on the planet falls off a cliff for a thousand nanometers and down it just doesn’t have it well what is all the PubMed what is all the research from low-level laser therapy all the PubMed research showing that red light therapy or photobiomodulation has merit what wavelengths are

They all using the 600 nanometer wavelength, the 800 nanometer wavelength and everything in between some 10 50, you know, maybe they get up to 1100. What are all the saunas that are full spectrum lacking that, right? So it doesn’t compute, but you wouldn’t know that because you don’t actually know which wavelength does what, right?

And just like, you know, we can put videos on the screen here of you seeing me showing somebody the difference between red light therapy or unboxing a sauna and putting something together and seeing, you know, some type of heater for the first time, the normal person is not going to have the equipment or the wherewithal to decipher what it is that they’re actually getting.

But what will happen to them is 10 or 15 years from now, when research that supports what does work, they’re going to realize very quickly that they haven’t been getting those benefits because they don’t actually have the equipment that emits those wavelengths. So a lot of this, you know, should I get a full spectrum sauna?

Is red light therapy worth it is, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. It’s so contextual that chromotherapy isn’t going to cut it. A full spectrum sauna that has, you know, red light therapy device, like the wayfair one where it’s mounted behind you on a 45 degree angle, guys, that’s never going to do anything for you.

I shouldn’t say it won’t do anything. You may get some red light therapy on the side of your body or something, but you’re never going to get it on your face. You’re never going to get it on your torso. You’re never going to get it on your chest.

Your ability to get full body coverage is basically cut in two thirds, right? It’s kind of like gimmicky. And they’re usually the cheaper panels. You never know like what lenses they have in them.

You never know what percentage is, you know, red light and what’s actually infrared or, you know, it’s, there’s a lot of little nuanced stuff that comes into play, but just know right up front chromotherapy.

is not red light therapy. There’s no way in hell that a little tiny colored light in a ceiling is going to give you what something hanging behind me that has its own fan power supply and everything else. There’s a reason that it has that. It’s because it has to produce enough power in order to give your body 28 milliwatts per centimeter squared, which is the average from all the pub med studies that I’ve looked at.

Everyone that’s trying to go for 200 milliwatts a centimeter squared, I’m being facetious when I say that, 100, 150, you know, whatever. They’re just trying to, they’re making it a pissing contest, you know, oh, mine’s stronger than yours, buy ours. Well, that’s great, but you’re oversaturating, right? And so if you use that for a while, meaning like a half an hour a day, you’re oversaturating.

If you mount that in your sauna, right? Yes, it’s a distance away from you, but your body is also superheated at that point. You’re downregulating the ability to get benefit from photobiomodulation in that circumstance. Is it not worthwhile at all and have zero merit?

No, of course not. But if you’re looking to get the best out of the best, right? You really want to have separate therapies. You really want to have an actual body panel that can produce therapeutic output in the correct ranges, right?

That means no patio heaters in the sauna. I don’t care if it has a red tinted glass on the front that makes you think you’re getting red light therapy. You’re not. They peak at like 1600 nanometers, which is way too high.

When you check them on a spectrometer, they fall off a cliff underneath like 1050, 1100, 1200, right? So what does that mean? That means when you chart this on a graph and you look at the actual output from these things, it’s missing what you would be looking for when you say red light therapy, but so easily confused when somebody says, Oh, get a full spectrum sauna because

It has near, mid, and far. It has all the wavelengths. It’s very easy to make you think that it has what you’re looking for, but it actually does not. The only way that it possibly can is if it was a gigantic panel like these hanging right beside me, and they’re there for a reason.

They’re not in, you know, you don’t see me screwing them into every single sauna that I own. I use them separately. Why? So that my body’s not superheated.

It only takes five or 10 minutes. I don’t really need to combine the therapies. I want my core temperature to be low. I want the maximum photobiomodulation positive effect that I can possibly get.

And the only way that you’re gonna do that is outside of heat therapy. You’re gonna down-regulate the conversion when you apply heat to the body. If that’s all you can do, then that’s okay. But just don’t think you’re getting one of these full-spectrum saunas with a patio heater in it, and you’re actually gonna get the same output as one of these.

It’s not possible. If you’re looking for a sauna that can do it all, or actually has red light therapy in it, you wanna look at something like the Heavenly Heat red light therapy model. There’s a couple other sauna companies that have red light therapy add-ons. I don’t point them out as typically, because a lot of times those start out as full-spectrum saunas anyway, and they have, you know, what you would consider a patio or quartz halogen emitter in them.

And a lot of times people are told that these full-spectrums already have near, mid, and far. And then the question becomes, well, if it has all the wavelengths, why would I need a red light therapy add-on? You do because it doesn’t have all the wavelengths, right? It’s kind of like a sales gimmick thing.

Or if it has all the wavelengths, they’re behind a grill on three sides of the sauna that are always behind you. So you’re never going to get, you know, true red light therapy on your torso like I think you should get. And it’s never going to be at 28 milliliters.

lots of centimeters squared in the right places for the right time, length of time. So that’s my take on it. Uh, we’ve got tons of videos of me testing this stuff. Uh, we have tons of resources in the Facebook group.

There’s playlists on YouTube. There’s also 700 videos for you to peruse through. I think at this point, um, there’s too many. So we might have to go back and make some of the information a little bit more succinct, but see how, you know, try this out.

Let me know in the comments what you think. Does this add clarity to what you’re looking for? Do you understand now that you can’t just have one little beam of red light in a sauna and think that your full spectrum sauna is going to give you a photo biomodulation benefits consistent with the PubMed studies, right?

It’s a bait and switch you guys. And so I don’t want you to wake up 20 years from now realizing that you haven’t been getting that you think that you have because you have this little red, you know, diode or something that you call chromotherapy in the ceiling of your sauna or you like color lights or you, you know, this somebody told you that it does this or does that.

But the past two decades you actually haven’t been getting those benefits because you can’t because the equipment won’t produce the wavelengths correlated with the beneficial research. So that’s the main mission here is just to go back, educate you, you know, try and simplify, make this more understanding. I know you probably, it’s hard to do it in one video.

We’re going to try to throw some videos on the screen as I answer these questions and talk so that you can see a wide array of stuff, you know, that we’ve been looking at for the past few years and you’ll see it come up. A lot of these products have these you know, style emitters or heaters.

They’re not really heaters if they’re supposed to produce red light. That’s the telltale giveaway. You guys, something that actually, here’s, here it is in a nutshell. In one sentence, a piece of equipment that actually produced.

red light therapy in the beneficial wavelengths that you need will not cause you to sweat by itself. That’s all you really need to know. If you stand in front of a real red light therapy device like these, they’re not going to make me sweat. I’m not going to have like an intense sweat.

Will they cause heat on the skin? Sure, there’s four of them wrapped around the body. There’s nowhere for me to go, right? Is it going to make me sweat profusely and something that I could execute a sauna detox protocol with?

Absolutely not. That is red light therapy.