5 Rules for Saunas as a Garage Gym Athlete

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: Alright, garage Gym athletes. Let's jump right into the sauna for Garage Gym Athletes. Some of the rules that you might wanna follow if you're considering getting one, or if you already have one. So I, you know, a few weeks ago we covered cold exposure and I ultimately said towards the end of that, Hey, I think heat exposure is better than cold exposure.

If you could only pick one, I would definitely be doing the sauna. I'd be doing, uh, you know, heat exposure, heat therapy over cold any day of the week, just because I think there are more benefits. And then I. Got the question. Okay. What benefits and, and what are the kind of the rules around that? So this is the Garage Gym Athletes Guide to this.

Not as much on the scientific front. I'll go over some of the, the benefits, like right off the bat that I, I pulled some of the research looking at it. Uh, but ultimately I want to kind of give you, like I did with the cold plunge, 3, 4, 5 rules that you can follow when you're doing the sauna. And so right off the bat, let's talk about some of the benefits.

One of the benefits is cardiovascular conditioning. So if you are doing a very hot sauna that has like a certain level of humidity, you can actually get your heart rate into zone two. Uh, you know, that's, it's pretty aggressive. I know I've actually been there, I've been doing the sauna for a very long time, and if I'm doing a long session at a high temperature, your heart rate can get pretty high and it feels weird to be.

At that level when you're just sitting there. It's something I've grown very accustomed to now, but I remember when I first did it, it was, it was very unusual, but your heart doesn't know the difference, right? Conditioning is conditioning your heart, working? Is your heart working? Uh, I would argue that doing physical exercise is better, but there is some level of conditioning, uh, conditioning, uh, modality there.

Second, it has, um, you know, benefits longevity and disease risk. Uh, so ultimately, let's see, this study showed four to seven sauna sessions per week, significantly low. All cause mortality, cardiovascular death, and even Alzheimer's risk. Pretty crazy. A lot of benefits there. Uh, the third benefit, hormetic stress that triggers repair, sore.

So sauna is hormesis, like inaction. It's like you are actually, uh, you know, this is one of the core hormetic stressors, one of the core ways you can do hormesis other than exercise, plant-based toxins, fasting, all those kind of things. And it upregulates heat shock proteins. So what they do is they prevent protein damage and aggregation, and they are also neuroprotective and it will boost immune function, mitochondrial health in cellular resilience.

So a lot of benefit to the hormetic stress from sauna. Now these. You know, kind of other ones that, to be honest, I'm no, I'm no scientist. I'm no medical professional. I don't understand as much about, but the activation are of NR F two and FOX oh three. These transcription factors on genes are responsible for antioxidant defense, DNA repair, inflammation control, and healthy aging.

Aging so sauna turns on the same genes you'd want firing if your goal was to live longer and lift more. So, hey, here's the deal. Those are kind of the benefits and I, those were just something I pulled from like different research resources and honestly, I'll go ahead and give a shout out, like an amazing place to find all this stuff.

Is, uh, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with her. Her website found MyFitness. She has a couple of topics where she has put together a lot of research and sauna is one of them and that's oftentimes where I'm looking if I want to get updated on the latest, like sauna research and like things that she's pulling.

So anyway, shout out to her. She's got a lot of great content and also has. Research the hell out of the sauna. But I wanna get away from the research and just kind of talk about the garage gym athlete utilizing the sauna and kind of my take as someone who's been doing it for a number of years, the first one is do it three to five times per week.

That's right around where the, uh, you know, the research is gonna sit. But at the same time, you don't wanna overdo it. It's not something that you need to be doing seven times a day. I'll talk about that later on. Kind of like the cold plunge, like a stressor is a stressor. You need to be mindful of that, but that's ultimately where you want to get the benefits here.

And the reason I love the repetition here of three to five times a week, what goes back to that benefit that I mentioned kind of at the beginning of it being a mild cardiovascular workout. There's actually some benefit there. And as Garage Gym athletes, if you train how I train, I'm training four to six days per week, depending on the week.

And I'm typically only gonna be training for about 45 to 60 minutes per day. And I have very specific goals that I'm hitting. I mean, in all honesty, I'm just following the Garage Gym athlete programming on the hard to kill track, you know, that we provide. But if I want to get a little bit of extra cardiovascular stuff, conditioning in.

I'm either gonna have to find that time to do it, which is difficult as an entrepreneur, father of three. And so I do like to get into sauna, you know, at the get into as sauna at the end of the night for not only all the other benefits, but also there's a little extra conditioning benefit. So that three to five times a week markers, not just with the science.

I think if I were to be adding additional just zone two conditioning or conditioning, I wouldn't wanna do it more than three to five times a week anyway. So I think that's right where the kind of the sweet spot is. Next, use real heat. Um, you can go back and forth on this, but I just try to look at the research.

Now, I know a lot of people have infrared saunas. They have these red light therapy saunas. They have all these different versions. I'm not here to tell you that your sauna is ineffective, okay? That's not what I, that's not what I'm trying to do. But when I look at the research, especially what like Dr.

Rhonda Patrick has given me is. Or what she has pointed to in some of these bigger studies where, you know, the, the time matters and the temperature matters and the humidity matters, and all these things, and where all these kind of studies pull from. Most of the studies are looking at traditional finish, uh, finish saunas, and the research says that the temperature needs to be anywhere to between 170 degrees and 195 degrees.

So that is kind of the, the checkbox there that can your sauna get to 170 to 195 degrees. Now I'm sure there, there's additional research on infrared saunas. It can feel good, you know, like it makes you sweat. I'm sure there are a lot of other benefits and who knows, maybe more research will come out saying, Hey, these are just as effective as a traditional finished sauna.

But there's just not as much research. 'cause if you go to Finland, it's like 95% of Finnish people just have a sauna. It's very easy to, for them to do research studies on this kind of stuff. When they land in that temperature range of 170 to 195 degrees, that's where you want to be getting. And ultimately that's hard to do in these infrared saunas, in in, in honesty, I think it's impossible in some of them.

I don't have a lot of experience with 'em, but I know in my sauna I have a low temperature gauge in there. I'm hopping in when it gets to about 180, and that's what I'm going for. So that's the second thing, is making sure that your heat temperature is correct, just based off of the scientific research.

And then the next one is. Time, time domain. And I found this very interesting because in the research it was like 11 to 18 minutes was one category and then it was like greater than 18 to 20 minutes was another category. And then 20 minutes plus of like how much time you, uh, you know, spend in the sauna in 19 minutes was like the sweet spot for.

The greatest amount of cardiovascular benefits, Alzheimer reduction, all of that kind of stuff. It was right at 19 minutes. I don't know why it landed in 19 minutes some, sometimes that's how the data works out and you might have to work up to being able to do 19 minutes, but I. If you're, if you're like only doing it for five or 10 minutes, you just have to know there's not as much time, so you have to be putting in the time.

Let's just round it up. You need to be putting in about 20 minutes, and if you wanna be very on, on point with the scientific research, 20 minute or 19 minutes at 170 to 195 degrees. Now the, the fourth thing is. Kind of, I like how I started. You gotta respect the stress. Just like what we talked about with a cold plunge, it's going to stress the body, and you have to realize that that is an additional stressor.

So if you had an incredibly hard workout and an incredibly stressful day. Maybe that's not the time for Asana. Even though Asana can have this like relaxing benefit after the fact, sometimes it is an additional stressor and so you have to be taking that into account. Like it's, it's equivalent of a very light workout, but it's additional physical load nonetheless.

And so I wouldn't say avoid it on days that you have a hard training session. I would just say let's not do it seven days per week. And let's not do it on the really hard, hard days. And I'm talking about where the training session was incredibly hard and like maybe your workday was incredibly hard and you had a incredibly like maybe stressful like family life situation, something like that.

That might not be the time to add an additional stressor. And I'm just trying to make all garage gym athletes mindful of this stress load that you encounter each and every single day so you can start to recover better. 'cause recovery. Is a hundred percent necessary if you wanna get better at anything or if you wanna progress as a human being.

Now the next one is just rehydrate. I have had a lot of friends, uh, come over, utilize, uh, my sauna, you know, when people visit those kind of things. And I. Kind of pre-frame it at the beginning of the day if I know we're gonna be getting in that night that they need to be hydrating. 'cause I've had some experiences where people get in and they end up with migraines after the fact they weren't hydrated before they got in.

Maybe it was a travel day and we did it. And so now I'm very on top of that when people are coming over, I. Making sure that you're drinking enough electrolytes, not just the water. So having sodium, magnesium, potassium, um, a lot of electrolyte supplements out there these days, but making sure that you are truly rehydrated.

I know in the summer here in Texas, I, if I'm doing a sauna several times a week, I'm exercising and training outside, just going to soccer games and football games. I'm sweating a ton, so I'm taking in a ton of sodium, magnesium, and potassium, having a lot of electrolytes. I kind of. Taper it down in the wintertime when I'm only doing sauna, not sweating as much, especially during the training sessions, but you have to be very on top of this, or I think that you'll ultimately start feeling worse over time as you deplete more and more of your electrolytes.

Um, so other than that, that's basically the, the main points for, for your sauna use. And so to recap. Doing it three to five times a week, treating it like a, a miniature workout, like a light workout. Try to use real heat. 170 to 195 degrees, minimum time domains gonna be 19 minutes. Anywhere from, you know, 19 to 20 minutes would be be fine.

Respect the stress of the heat source itself and just overall stressors in your work and life and pay attention to that and make sure that you're rehydrating with a ton of electrolytes. Now this is one that I actually do recommend for most people. Now I'm gonna go in one more tactical level here because.

I've seen a lot of people go, uh, I've seen a lot of sauna companies pop up over the years. I've had one for a number of years, and, um, what's cool I is my, my grandpa actually built his own and that's what got me interested in sauna. He built his own in his basement, uh, when I was a kid, and I thought it was awesome that he had one and I always wanted one.

I finally got one several years ago, but what I've noticed is. With these like heat source saunas, these finished style saunas, they're getting outrageously expensive for no real reason at all. You could honestly build one of these out of some cedar wood that you go buy at Home Depot as, and then you have to buy the heater, but, and the heater can be a few thousand dollars depending on how, how powerful you want it, and whether or not it has wifi control and all that kind of stuff.

But this is not a place where you have to spend 10, 15, $20,000 for Asana. So. To get tactical, give you an actual recommendation. The one I have is almost heaven saunas, and you can get these, last I checked, I got mine at Home Depot. You can order it online, ship it to your house. I think you can also get it at Costco and Lowe's.

So it is something you can order online and they will ship to you. You can also order from their website, but I think it's actually cheaper if you go through these other sources for some reason, and I'm sure prices have crept up. I'm not saying it's like. Inexpensive, but I also have seen some of the newer, bigger brands out there, um, with these outrageous prices.

And all you need is to get hot. Like you just need a, uh, a box that has a heat source. And I've seen other ones that are like. Square and they're like, oh, circle saunas don't make sense because all the heat rises and you can't get up there. It's so stupid. All of that's so stupid. If, if the inside of the sauna is the temperature that you want it and you're in there for 20 minutes is not very complex.

Do you think the finished people who. You know who are major users, heavy users of Sauna, we're like trying to take all these things into consideration. It's not that big of a deal. You just need the time and the temperature. So I've given you a specific brand recommendation for the one I have. I've had no problems with it.

I did change out the heater, not because my previous one was broken, but because I actually wanted the wifi control so I could turn it on while I was coming home from. Like kids soccer practices and stuff, and it'd be ready, uh, right before I'd be, you know, getting ready for bed and all those kind of things.

But other than that, that's my rule. My rules for sauna usage, how I've been using it over the years, I think it's been a huge benefit for me and something that could really help you. So, like I said, if, if you had to pick one. Cold or hot. Go with Hot, get the sauna and get all the health benefits that go along with it.

That's it for this one. If you're one of our athletes who wants to train with us, go to garage gym athlete.com. Sign up for free trial. We would love to have you, and for all of our athletes who are sticking out the training right now, it's awesome seeing your comments in the app and that you're getting after it and being consistent.

So stick with it. Remember, if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.