Sauna + Red Light Therapy: Worth It or Total Waste?

I’ve spent years testing every kind of sauna and red light setup you can think of — and I’ve made the same mistakes you might be making right now. When I was recovering from neuropathy after leukemia treatment, I was overdoing both therapies and oversaturating myself.

Today, I’m breaking down whether adding red light therapy to your sauna is worth it, how to do it for the most benefit, and why so many setups miss the mark. I’ll walk you through different versions, show you what actually works, and explain how to get the most out of your investment.

This isn’t brand-specific hype — it’s real-world experience backed by hands-on testing with custom spectrometers, feedback from the Certified Saunas community, and years of trial and error.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

I incorporated red light therapy and I myself healing my feet from neuropathy, leukemia induced or drug induced neuropathy. Not only was I doing sauna and red light therapy separate, but there was a ton of overlap. I was oversaturating myself. I don’t do that today, but I also had an acute need for it.

I think on a day to day basis, this is your best bet. Is it just hype or is it something more? Is there something that you should really pay extra money for? Are you getting the benefits when you put red light therapy in the sauna?

Let’s talk about it. And I’m going to go from each version so that you can see exactly what works best. Before we jump into just the sauna stuff, I don’t show it very often. I don’t know if you’ve seen how I actually have done my red light therapy for the last two years.

I don’t like to stand in front of a door. I also like to do it as a separate therapy, which I’ll talk about in the red light series, but I like horizontal stands. I know they get a lot of flack, very, very comfortable. You can do other stuff like watch, you know, something or read a book or yada, yada.

Just thought I would show this really quick. Doesn’t really pertain to sauna, but I’ve tried a lot of this stuff, and this would be my preferred preference for just red light therapy by itself. So unfortunately the AC is out. Um, tech is working in the mechanical room, so we’ll have to redo this section when it’s not 900 degrees up here, but got a lot of panels.

Um, got a lot of portable stuff that’s all kind of discombobulated because unfortunately AC is out. Let’s go back to the sauna room and I’ll do a followup on these panels right here, because I think you guys will be really interested in these and to know the difference between something like, you know, the hygge and then the five wavelength panels versus the two.

So I think a lot of people get into trouble because you kind of, you see these posts on social media, you see the girl in the bikini, you see, you see the ripped guy’s abs, you know, all this fitness stuff.

Bind with sauna, cold plunge, red light therapy. Oh, this is the best. Oh, you gotta do this. Oh, you should have this full-spectrum thing or oh, dah, dah, dah, dah.

I think one of the biggest issues is that you’re not gonna have access to that panel, that panel, that panel, a full-spectrum sauna. Oh, and by the way, though I love and recommend these saunas, these full-spectrum saunas, you are not getting red light therapy from these types of heaters.

Any company, I’m not saying it’s this one, I’m saying there’s a bunch of ads on Facebook that are kind of pulling people in the wrong direction. You think that these heaters are gonna give you red light therapy and they simply do not. Watch my other videos where we check these with a spectrometer.

Not unique to this brand, has nothing to do with any particular brand, but you need a red light therapy device in order to get red light therapy. Don’t be fooled by the full-spectrum nonsense. A foreign-friend sauna. And be able to try all these things so that you can actually tell, is it just hype or is it something more?

Is there something that you should really pay extra money for? Are you getting the benefits when you put red light therapy in the sauna? Let’s talk about it. And I’m gonna go from each version so that you can see exactly what works best.

So I’m in a foreign-friend sauna right now. And some of these companies, this isn’t about any particular brand, will say, oh, you have red lights in the ceiling and that’s good enough. You have chromotherapy and that’ll give you some photobiomodulation. No, it won’t.

Number one, there’s a reason why body panels that emit red light therapy to give you photobiomodulation have a cooling fan and a heat sink on the back. They’re putting out such output that you wouldn’t be able to duplicate that without dissipating the heat and having a power supply large enough with enough LEDs that would produce enough oomph to really give you photobiomodulation at a distance.

Why are we talking about distance? Because you asked about doing this in a sauna, okay? This is not a body wrap. This is not a helmet.

This is not a red light therapy device, a mask that goes on your face. Showed you that in the other.

video. Those are skin contact, point of body contact. And if you look at the PubMed research, it shows on average, those are between 25 and 30 milliwatts per centimeter squared. That is the output range that shows clinical merit.

And that’s not usually touching the skin either. So I’m being generous by tossing these numbers around. Why? Because if you just watch the influencers, everyone will say, oh yeah, you need a hundred milliwatts a centimeter square.

You need this massive panel, you know, that’s bigger than the human. You got to do this. You got to do that. Yeah.

Maybe if you’re sitting across the room, but that does not correlate to the outcomes of the positive PubMed research that I’ve just looked at and discussed with Andrew. If you don’t know, I’ve always been a fan of Andrew’s products. That’s why I gravitate towards them. But why is it because I love the products?

No, because he’s super diligent, helped me get a custom altered spectrometer in order to test these. And we literally check the lights and see if the output range is within the marketing, right? A lot of times it’s not, a lot of times it’s overkill. You don’t need that much.

Why do I say all this? Because if you’re doing it in a sauna, you probably need that much. But I also want to point out that you are most likely suffering from a disillusioned point of view of getting red light therapy in your sauna. It’s not the best because when your body is superheated, the conversion or the ability to absorb red light and the photobiomodulation effect within the body, in my opinion, based on what we’ve looked at and digested is down-regulated.

So you do not want to apply red light therapy when the body is super, super heated, like in a sauna, or your core temperature is higher, or your skin is covered in a thick layer of sweat. Or have you seen those cheaper red light therapy, you know, saunas that are full spectrum now, they have a big panel like we use, but it’s mounted in the back of the sauna in a corner on a 45 degree angle, and you don’t take it off.

How does that make any sense whatsoever? It doesn’t.

I would never use something like that. I wanna get red light therapy on my face, on my chest, on my front side, where I think it matters most. Yes, you could say that there’s a systemic improvement by having it anywhere on the body. I don’t agree with having red light therapy shining down from the ceiling at three or four feet away from the majority of your body in a place where you’re never gonna get it on your torso or on your back or like a large area of surface where the skin could really absorb a lot of light.

You know, all this talk about bouncing it around a cabin, especially the portable saunas, I really don’t think these provide clinical merit. The output of these when you check them is not in line with the PubMed research. And if you look at the TBI studies or if you look at any of the improvements that come from red light therapy that are actually documented, they were not implemented in this way.

So it’s my belief first and foremost that you do your red light therapy in your sauna second or you choose something like the Heavenly Heat Red Light Therapy Sauna where you can see the B-roll of it in my other videos. We have it, I don’t have it here in this office, we have it in Maine.

Basically this entire window, right, is completely, oh, stop making that noise, is a complete red light therapy panel. And if you wanna use it separately, it pops out. If you wanna use it together, you can. My advice would be to get a red light therapy sauna that has something like this so that if you decide that that’s not right for you, you can put the window back in and you still have the standalone panel to use separately.

Now a lot of people would say, well, hey Matt, why are you still recommending that? Guys, every single week you guys are saying, hey Matt, I don’t have time to do both therapies, what should I get? So I also am compassionate and I recognize that you’re not gonna make time to do both therapies.

So if that’s you, here’s exactly what you do. You get the red light therapy sauna from Heavenly Heat, right, or something similar, whatever it is that you like, it doesn’t matter. That’s something that I like, that I think works well because the sauna portion.

is awesome. The red light therapy portion is awesome. So you get, you know, something that’s very versatile and you can change how you use it. If you change your mind over time, I’m, I’m a person that gravitates towards that because sometimes when you implement a therapy six months to a year from now, you want to do something a little different.

So I like those number one. Um, some of the guys that participated in a group by in the Facebook group, absolutely love theirs. My point is this, when the red light therapy panel is on, you want to be preheating the sauna. So the procedure would look like this.

You come in, you’re not clothed. You turn on your red light therapy. You turn on your sauna. You set the timer for 10 minutes or whatever it is you’re going to do for that day’s session.

You sit here before the sauna starts to heat up. You’re already doing your red light therapy session. So you can combine the two therapies. Just take an extra five or 10 minutes to do the red light therapy before the sauna gets super hot and makes you really sweaty.

Why? Because of everything that I mentioned before. And why am I harping on this so much? Because I think people that do full sauna sessions for 20 to 45 minutes and then do red light therapy without washing off their skin, without letting themselves cool down, I think they’re violating the improvements that are found and studied.

And we’ve digested from, you know, perusing the PubMed research. And these are clinical studies where these folks have documented great improvements for various conditions. Now I’m not a doctor. I’m not suggesting that you should use this to treat any disease.

We’re not allowed to say stuff like that. But as you can imagine with a Facebook group of over 30,000 people and I myself healing my feet from neuropathy leukemia induced or drug induced neuropathy I incorporated red light therapy immensely in my protocol, right? Not only was I doing sauna and red light therapy separate, but there was a ton of overlap.

I was oversaturating myself. I don’t do that today, but I also had an acute need for it. I think on a day-to-day basis, this is your best bet. If you want an infrared sauna that combines red light therapy, do something in this fashion to where you can use the red light therapy, get the maximum benefit.

from a panel that actually has the capability to produce the therapeutic wavelengths that are required in order to get set result. You mess around with these little LEDs, you mess around with chromotherapy, you mess around with saunas that have red light therapy panels mounted to the side wall where you’re never going to see it, right?

It’s not going to bounce off the wood and do your eyes any good, right? If you’ve noticed the vision improvements or the people that talk about those on social media from red light therapy, they’re not having the lights behind them, right? It’s not shining all the way through your brain into your eye and then giving you said benefit.

That’s not how it works. It’s never going to work like that. So let’s not set ourselves up for failure or to not receive maximum benefit for the dollars that we’re putting out to buy these things. That’s my take.

That’s what I would recommend. If you have other questions about this, let me know in the comments and I’ll see you in the next video.