The Best Sauna for Home Use

Most people lump all saunas together, but there are two totally different ways they heat your body — and that changes everything. In this video I break down the two main “camps” of sauna technology: traditional (wood-burning, electric, or steam) versus infrared.

Infrared heats your body directly, from the inside out, while traditional styles just heat the air. I talk about how that affects your detox, your core temperature, and even things like breathing and comfort level. I’ve tested both setups for years and found infrared to be faster, cleaner, and easier to install at home — especially if you don’t want to mess with steam or ventilation systems.

Some sauna companies use this info the wrong way in their marketing, so I clear up the real differences and what actually matters if you’re building or buying a home sauna.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

I think that the detox is better, there’s a lot of people that say you can’t make heat shock proteins because it’s a lower temperature. I don’t find that to be the case because traditional dry electric, you have wood burning, you have steam, there’s a bunch of different variations, there’s four main types. So I like the infrared, but there’s really, there’s two camps on how the home saunas work.

You can, it’s two mechanisms of heat delivery. So a traditional sauna, whether it’s wood burning, dry electric, steam, you know, finish hot rock, it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s working off the principle, it’s in one camp where it’s working off the principle of heating the air. So all it’s doing is heating the air inside the cabin and that in turn increases your core temperature, it increases your respiratory rate, your breathing, all that kind of stuff.

The other camp is anything that works off of an infrared principle, which is low air temperature, direct heat to the body, exciting the body from within. So you’re heating from the inside out instead of the outside in. So it’s a different mechanism of heat delivery. I gravitate towards the infrared for a bunch of different reasons.

I think that the detox is better. There’s a lot of people that say you can’t make heat shock proteins because it’s a lower temperature. I don’t find that to be the case because if you measure your internal core temperature, you’re still getting the internal core temperature increase no matter which type you use, just the infrared is a little bit, in my experience, it’s quicker on the delivery. And then you can also usually stay in longer because you’re not breathing superheated air.

Is there a benefit to breathing superheated air for the lungs and stuff like that? Maybe. Is it scientifically proven either way, one way or the other? No. The major metric is are you increasing core temperature? How quickly can you do that and how long can that sustain?

And so for what you’re asking about, for home saunas, like in a residential application building or something, for a steam sauna in the southeast, in a house, to not put in a ventilation system, to not have to run 220, to not have to worry about mold, I think infrared or dry electric is the way to go just because ease of installation. And you also don’t have to worry about those other complications.

Now, a lot of infrared companies take this and use that material for their salespeople and their marketing in a wrong way. So they’ll scare people. They’ll say, oh, well, you have to have this wood right here because if that wood gets wet, it’s prone to mold. Well, there’s no moisture in an infrared sauna. So eliminate all that from your vocabulary.

It’s a poor ethical way to try to convince someone on a particular product when the very basis of what they’re using for that is null and void because the only moisture in an infrared sauna is the sweat that’s coming out of your body.