I was 8 years old when I saw the inside of a traditional Finnish sauna for the first time. My parents introduced me to this Scandinavian tradition during a 3 week camping trip through Norway and Finland. The “bath house”, as the sign on the sauna entrance said, was a log home style one room building with a giant wood fired stove and wooden benches located on one of the boat docks of the campground. At first the heat (200 deg F) and the humidity made it almost impossible for me to breath, but my dad told me to sit on the low level bench near the entrance door to acclimate. The little room was packed with profusely sweating people and I couldn’t understand why these folks, who clearly weren’t forced by their parents to be in this strangest of all places, would voluntarily do this to themselves. People would leave, new people would take their spots on the benches and each time shortly after a person left there was loud, liberating happy scream followed by a big splash. After 10 minutes in the sauna – my skin lobster red and sweaty – we finally left and my dad told me to follow him, run to the end of the dock and jump into the lake to cool off. While running, the encouraging scream in anticipation of the cold lake water was an unforced, natural reaction and the rush of hitting the ice-cold water was truly amazing. I had to go back and do it again!
Back then I didn’t know anything about the health and wellness benefits of sauna bathing. I only knew that the combination of sweating and lake jumping felt like a huge accomplishment, was very “grown-up” and that I was always very tired after a couple of sauna-lake intervals.
Over the years sauna bathing became my to-go-to solution to relax after intense workouts, cold days on the ski slopes, long workdays or to just get tired enough to beat the jet lag while traveling internationally. Doing a couple of hot-cold intervals between sauna and shower or pool always felt good, relaxing and gave me my “happy face” back.
The four basic heat therapy modules are the traditional dry sauna, the steam bath, the hot stone steam bath and the infrared light therapy. During my international travels I had the privilege of experiencing various types of saunas, heat therapies and sauna bathing strategies. The spectrum of sauna module material, size and heat source variations is huge. Depending on who you ask and where you are in the world, people will recommend different temperatures, humidity levels and the optimal times of day (from early in the morning to wake you up and start your day refreshed to right before bedtime for a better night’s sleep) for the best sauna bathing result.
The really great news is that there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to the best choice of heat therapy – it is all about personal preference and what works best for you. Heat therapy is an individual experience and preference. And, for some people, the preference is to not use heat therapy at all, as they just turn red, can’t stand sweat and/or simply hate heat. Others fall asleep after 5 minutes and wake up at the end of their session in a 200 degrees F dry heat sauna totally soaked. In summary, heat therapy is not for everybody and sauna lovers have there own individual preferences for their perfect sauna experience.
When our doctor recommended sauna/heat therapy to support our detoxing process Dani and I tested our options. We started with the dry sauna and the steam bath in our gym and then booked an one hour infrared heat therapy session at a local day spa. Comparing the options and coming up with a solution was fairly easy. All three choices produced the same level of sweating and similar feel good factors for us, but we really enjoyed the fact that we could do the infrared heat therapy together in a more private setting. We checked online, compared models, module sizes and did an “day spa fee vs. buy” analysis. Two weeks later a 2 person, 4 ft. x 4 ft. x 6.5 ft., low EMF FAR infrared sauna was delivered curbside and we enjoyed our first sauna session that same evening (after a 2 hour successful assembly of the thing!).
A 40 minute sauna session became a fixture of our daily routine and we enjoy the sweating, relaxation and good sleep we get as a result. For us the plan was for the combination of diet change, workout change, charcoal treatment, lots of water and infrared heat therapy to successfully reduced the mycotoxin levels in our bodies and bring us back to normal health.
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