Sauna’s Explained: Health Benefits & Risks

0:00Hello and welcome to Untap the Extra Mile with me, Spencer Matthews. And me, Oli Patrick. Today's topic, sauna, which of course means small little room of heat in Finnish. Ah, right. Glad we got that off our chest. Vital. Not many people knew, but we ourselves did have to fact check that that was the definition of a sauna just before we started. So plenty of rooms, in fact, could be considered saunas in the heat wave. yeah a small heated room a small heated room where where where i believe anywhere without air conditioning but i think it's one of the most joyful things in the world if there's one thing i love it's sauna and you of course love lots of things though if you had to narrow it down to just one thing it'd be the sauna with it i think i've spoken before that i think sleep is obviously the most important part and technologies this is of course outside of our loving wives and children and all the other things that we needn't mention but should.

1:00Yes. Away from flesh, this is. Sauna is the love. My most beloved possession is my sauna. Truly, I think it is the happiest of places. And when I loved sauna from a younger age, and as the data has grown and it's gone more mainstream, I couldn't be happier. It's like finding out the terrible habit you've got for you is the single most effective thing for health and well-being. It's like finding out that chocolate leads to muscle growth. It's exactly that. It's exactly that. It's such a wonderful thing. And seeing it go mainstream, I mean, you know, you and I are both lovers of the sauna. Love sauna.

1:39Yeah. How many a week would you do? Oh, I sauna every single day. If I have one at home. Yeah. Sorry. That wouldn't be unusual in Finland. So there are more saunas. No, but like English people listening to this will just be like, you prick. I needn't lie, right? I have a sauna at home, right? So I use it every evening, pretty much. So I've got one at home, which also... Check us out. Check us out. The extra mile hosts are killing it, aren't they? Just a couple of guys who love the sauna. But it's... Having it at home removes the friction. And there's two parts to sauna. There is just the sheer success of the show that brought saunas into our lives.

2:20But I think it's something that if you've got it at home, you will do it at the frequency which is increasingly shown to be beneficial to health i'm the i'm slightly separate to you that if i don't use my own and mine at the moment is is being rebuilt into a into a separate space you're doubling down making it no just creating a space where i can put i'm going to put a hyperbaric in as well with which is a bigger story for a bigger day um and again people are like why would someone who barely looks athletic have a full athlete's recovery suite at the end of his garden and that's a story for another day But I'm building a space where I can spend more time doing things like saunering, hyper barracks and some other recovery and well-being modalities, particularly for longevity, which is, again, always your fave.

3:03The caveat to all of this is I will actively only book now a hotel that's got a sauna. When I go away, I'll look for experience-based saunas. So I will go, even though I've got one at home, I'll go to one down the road, which has got a lake in front of it. And I'll go and do the ones in London, which have got cold plunges or natural cold bathing next to it. I am in. I honestly think it's the greatest thing in the world. Well, isn't that great? Because we're going to spend the next half hour talking about it. So good. But it's good. It's very good. Okay, well, now that we've established how much you love the sauna, let's talk about its benefits.

3:39Point at something from a health and well-being point of view, and there's probably a benefit from sauna. The big turning point for sauna was the Finnish sauna study, which was more than 2 ,000 males. And Finland, it's cultural, you know, it's quite cultural through parts of the Nordics, but Finland in particular was sort of the original home of the sauna. They ran a study, which is really interesting. It's an observational study, not a randomized control study. And what that means is they didn't have a group of people who didn't sauna to compare against. That's a fallibility. But they ran over 2 ,000 males and observed that the more you saunaed, the better you lived and the longer you lived.

4:14So literally just the longer you can spend in a sauna, the better. It was a dose dependency response, which is pretty fascinating. So people who saunered north of four, I think it was four to seven times a week, and we're talking about 20 minutes per sauna, at a temperature north of 80 degrees. And some of those facts I'd need to triple check, but it's something like that. I have a question for you quickly. Okay, yeah. You know when you're in some saunas that say it's 100 degrees? Yeah. That's bollocks. Probably bollocks. You'd boil. You wouldn't boil because you're not water. Well. There's lots of water in you.

4:42Lots of water in us. Yeah, yeah. And actually, I think you might boil. Come on. You would die eventually. Well. The thing can't be 100 degrees. 100 degrees is mental. Yeah, some of them getting to, I was in a 95. But is it really though? Because it depends on where you put the thermometer. It depends, but also you are designed to fight that. So homeostasis is that my internal environment obviously is like 37, you know, 37.2 degrees. And I'm fighting to stop that temperature rising. And actually one of the key benefits of sauna is my core temperature, so actually the tissues within me are going up towards 39, 40 degrees.

5:16and that's the point where some of the benefits exclusively happen, which is quite relevant. But just coming back to my point of the water, like you sweat so much, right, in a sauna, that surely the sweat that is on your body would boil at that temperature and it would cause great harm to any person that sat in a 100-degree room. It's a great question. Like I struggle with it. It's like, oh, I was in a sauna the other day, it was 110 degrees. It's like, of course you weren't, you twat, you'd be dead. Like that's my response. I think saunas are like 60, 70 degrees. No, no, you are 100. It will be 85, 90 degrees as standard if it's a good quality sauna.

5:5280 degrees sort of north is where it is. And at 100 degrees, you can survive that because of the extraordinary cooling mechanisms. And your water will evaporate, you know, before it fundamentally, you know, before it boiled. It's a good question. I actually would need to look at some of the advanced thermodynamics of what a 100 degree temperature looks like. but principally what you are creating is a survival stress that that is the principle of the sauna you are in an environment where if you didn't adapt to it you would die and it's the adaptation to it that generates the health benefit so if it wasn't such a toxic environment it wouldn't be any good and that that's really the point that that heat is the challenge well you know you know when you're in a sauna and you start to feel that sort of sickly feeling that that is something called dynorphins which your brain produces when you are reaching sort of a really critically high temperature and interestingly the release of those then makes your body more sensitive to endorphins that's why people often get a really wonderful feeling post sauna it's like you've sensitized your brain to all these wonderful sensations that the world is providing so there's a real desire to go into the pain cave to come out into the sort of the rainbow cafe as one might describe it how's lovely well you know there's probably a book in there somewhere principally the heat is the vital piece and in the finished sauna study 2000 men if they did it 47 times a week for 20 minutes they had a 40 reduced cause of all reasons of dying all reasons not getting hit by a bus mortality again great caveat and lots of studies fail to include or exclude people being hit by a bus but it's not as common as you might think so you've got 40 reduced cause all causes of death and sort of 60 reduction in in particularly cardiovascular disease, think heart attacks, strokes.

7:3960 % reduction. Yeah. And what you've got here is people who did less had a lesser impact. So the dose dependency was if you did sort of two, you had a 25 % reduction. And this is all compared against someone who did one. Fallibilities of the study is people who sawned that much probably had other healthy habits. So hard to separate that from other things. But the study actually isolated things like smoking. Were they overweight? Did they have big family history? And so it's a really good study to say there is something magical in the water of sauna that makes you less likely to die and particularly less likely to die from cardiovascular disease.

8:13Think heart attack.

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10:21Could it be as simple as just doing difficult things? Great question. Because, you know, we talk a lot about pushing yourself into extreme discomfort and what that does from a psychological perspective and a physiological perspective. Is it the heat or is it your body reacting to the difficulty of having to withstand the heat? I think that would be a better case for cold because cold is under threat in terms of lots of the proposed benefits of not manifested. So cold plunge and some of the things around what we thought it was going to do haven't played out yet. Your jury's still out. But I think one of the big arguments for cold is that is definitely a hard thing.

10:57If I get myself into eight degrees of water, that's going to build the muscle of grit. It's going to prove that I'm capable. It proves that I can withstand. So I think grit, which is the ability to persevere to a long-term goal of passion, is a bit of a muscle that can be worked through doing hard things. And people with higher grit scores are more likely to succeed in life. So it follows the work of a lady called Angela Duckworth, who wrote a brilliant book called Grit. And I'd advocate anyone in any sphere of sports performance or life to have a little browse at that. That all linked in. I think the sauna is looking at a different mechanism.

11:32And the main one cited, which will be of great joy to all of our athletes listening to this, is that it's what's called an exercise mimetic. So do you track your heart rate when you're in the sauna? I don't aggressively track it, but yes, you could say that I do. And what do you notice? It elevates. It does, because all of the things that keep you alive require energy. And in cold, it goes down. It does. And actually, cold is a physiological calming device. The first time you fall into cold, you get the cold shock response, which is a stress. And then actually it becomes almost like a blanket over physiological stress.

12:06Any whoopers out there should do this if you haven't already. It's actually, it's extraordinary. If you program into your whoop that you're getting into an ice bath. So you don't just let it do its thing. So go into start, workout, or whatever it is. Find ice bath. Click on ice bath and click start. And get into freezing cold water. My ice bath was always set to 0.5 or whatever, or 1 degree. And you submerge yourself in the water and just prop your phone up somewhere where you can see. It'll show you your heart rate as you're in the water as well as the time that you're in there for. I used to just use the whoop so that I could see how long I was in there.

12:48Your heart rate literally goes from like, as you say, it stresses up to say 120 or like 125. And then it literally nosedives like a black ski slope. Like it just goes down, down, down, down, down, down, down. And it just drops and drops and drops and drops and drops until you're at like, you know, sub 50. It's remarkable. It's beautiful. It just dives. It's like a plane falling out of the sky. And it's kind of interesting to watch. and you look at it going like, I wonder how long I could survive in here before it flatlines. Yeah, well, again, your body doesn't know you're in an ice bath. It thinks you've fallen out of a boat on an Arctic cruise.

13:23So it's got to preserve your biological functioning for as long as it can before you die. So in that scenario, its protective mechanism is to slow down, to drive what's called parasympathetic nervous activity. And that moves you into a state of physiological calm, which is a state lots of people can't get to because they're too stressed or wired or busy. And that's why we see lots of value in people with sort of propensities for anxiety or psychological challenges to use cold as a way of modulating mood. Cold's a different beast altogether. Heat is the opposite of that. You're right. So exercise mimetic, a mime, someone who pretends to be something they're not, it pretends to do cardiovascular exercise, right?

14:02So if you are in an 85 degree, 90 degree sauna, you might find in a 20 minute period, it looked like a zone two workout. And so what's really difficult with sauna is to separate is all the benefit that we're seeing just because it basically did what exercise did but you were sitting on your ass or lying on a towel and that's quite hard to separate lots of the mechanistic benefits of sauna from this centralized idea that it's just another way of exercising without exercising and and that is one of the great challenges we know that is definitely a benefit the question is is that the benefit and that raises into a great debate when you look at things like finished sauna, which is a dry sauna versus infrared sauna, which is this new modality that's come out, which doesn't create the same heart rate elevation.

14:48So there's a really interesting point. Is the benefit of sauna my body fighting the heat? Or is it the fact that in that fight, it basically gave me the benefits of exercising without putting my trainers on? It'd be hard to imagine that it was the latter because 20 minutes at zone two isn't really a workout is it boom and i think that's a really great caveat say well on an exercise volume it doesn't quite meet what you'd expect for that dose response and so the science of sauna is going well if it is that and nothing is one thing right exercise isn't good for me because it's it's just i get a slightly stronger ability to pump blood from my heart it's also more blood it's also more mitochondria it's also better tendons so the idea that we reduce sauna to one mechanism of benefit is something we have to challenge the exciting stuff about sauna is when i go into that what's called a hormetic stress.

15:35So hormetic stress is me deliberately creating a challenge to my body that it rebounds from and builds itself back stronger. So exercise is a hormetic stress, cold, hot. The fight creates some adaptations which benefit me. We hear about heat shock proteins. Is that chatter that's going on in your running world? People talking about heat shock proteins? Not in my park laps group. It's more a case of kind of, you know, what's the session and what time are we meeting? Good. And then there's kind of a bit of banter. Good. But nothing about heat shock proteins yet anyway. But the door's wide open. Well, I think you should steer that conversation.

16:12Maybe I will. Heat shock proteins are something manufactured when the body's fighting heat. And they are effectively little molecules that go and preserve the structure of a cell. So a cell is a three-dimensional object that can get deteriorated. And we know that one of the challenges of aging is the cell itself. Think of it, people often look at a cell as flat. It's like a little stress ball. And its integrity is damaged through life. And a heat shock protein sort of turns it back into a 3D, like inflates the stress ball again. And that might be a mechanism that reduces inflammation, and we see reduced inflammation with sauna.

16:43That might mean reduced accelerated aging. It might mean all of the things that we're seeing down the line. It's one of the benefits. We also know that today you and I will encounter lots of toxins, lots of polluted water, lots of polluted air, lots of, again, things... Well, because we live in London? Because we live in London, yeah. Or it might be anything from a microplastic in a water bottle. It might be that the air pollution in central London great. We might have put a cream or a perfume on that has forever chemicals. We both have sprayed a little perfume on ourselves today. A story for another day.

17:16And all that in mind is, right, how do I get rid of all that stuff? So, you know, someone will try and sell you activated charcoal, but the body detoxifies through poo, wee, and sweat. And sweating is an underutilized resource, right? So I've got to be hydrated. I've got to have loads of fiber and quality motions, but I also need to sweat and ideally sweat regularly. And in sweat, you see quite a lot of excreted toxicity that might reduce risk of cell mutation that might reduce the risk of inflammation. So I'm exercising without exercising. I'm creating heat shock proteins. I'm detoxifying. If I heat your brain, you produce something called brain derived nootropic factor, BDNF, which literally preserves the neurons of your brain and is increasingly linked with things like Alzheimer's.

17:59So you're like, this is ridiculous. And it's the same way as when vitamin C got first popularized. If you owned the patent to this, you'd be a billionaire. And sauna is just catching up with the data is there. The application and understanding is lagging. Hence why we're championing it today.

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20:25So there's really no downside to the sauna. Well, if you have a dodgy ticker, if you have cardiovascular disease, I wouldn't want you sitting in a boiling environment where blood pressure is going to rise, heart rate is going to rise. So one of the great challenges with sauna is stress is good for someone who's got the capacity to manage stress. So if you had a horrible day today and you'd had a horrible day yesterday, You had a horrible day yesterday, didn't sleep well, didn't recover. And that had gone on the week before, and you've got that day again today. Is jumping into an 85-degree box what you need?

20:55Or is that the same as training on the back of, you know, too much training? And so, like any hormetic stress, the dose determines the poison. So you can't say it's a panacea for the person who's completely full of childcare responsibilities and juggling two jobs and trying to, you know, beat their, you know, set a marathon personal best. Dumping into a boiling hot room might be the thing that tips you over the edge, and it might be the thing that tips your heart over the edge. So there is a caveat to it for sure. If you consume alcohol, so say you go out and enjoy a few pints with your mates, will a sauna dispense of toxins in your body faster than if you did not sauna?

21:39That's a good question. I don't know. I would suspect it would exacerbate the problem through the fact many of the sort of deleterious effects of alcohol are cellular dehydration. You know, I've put a diuretic in, which has meant your body has excreted water and lost water volume. And that's one of the reasons people feel hanging after too much booze. And then a down with the kids. I mean, really, your liver is going to be doing the heavy detoxification work versus it being stored in other tissues. So whether there was a slight potential detoxification benefit, I would say it would be offset by further dehydration.

22:13So the general rule of thumb of using a sauna is not to do it post-booze or in the presence of alcohol because you're adding another dehydrating, you know, behavior to an already dehydrating behavior. And hydration is life. You'd look quite ripped, though, if you were saunaring pissed because you would just like... Again, I can't advocate, but you would look ripped. Yeah. And if you're a boxer, you know, the boxers, when they're cutting, have you ever cut for anything? Yeah. Yeah, so you were the sweatsuits. So it's like a plastic bag, effectively. I had to, no, I cut through calorie deficit. Okay, not like a weight cut.

22:52I've never had to cut aggressively like that. Like a boxer or a UFC fighter. I've had a couple of fights, and I had to make weight for one of them. But I just made weight in the kind of six weeks prior. Amazing. Didn't have to, like, sauna with a bin bag or anything. And they do. You see that. If you are five pounds over and UFC fighters got a huge penalty, if you don't make it, you will see them exercising in these sort of bin bag suits, saunering, and just trying to get every ounce of weight. And on the scales, they look like body fat. They look emaciated. But then they can go and gain a stone the following day.

23:31So then you've got to rehydrate. And that is one of the things that's really challenging about being a jockey, being a fighter, any way where you have to cut weight is an extraordinarily unhealthy thing for human physiology. And that's another great example that being a performance athlete isn't the same as being a healthy individual because it's, of course, completely unhealthy to do that to your body in sort of rapid stages and then get punched in the face. That may be an amazing performance thing, but it won't ever be a health thing, sadly. I have to separate those, you know, one from the other.

24:02And I love all those sports. I think the cutting, I think in the next 10 years, will be under massive scrutiny because it's too big a sort of distress to physiology. There's an Orlando Bloom boxing film out called The Cut. Interesting. And it's all about him cutting weight. Is it? For a fight, yeah. And it's... Where did I watch that? On a plane or something? You've seen it, yeah. Yeah, I know, I watched it. And the moral of the story was... Well, it was very unhealthy. Yeah. Was that the outcome? That was the... I can't really remember I just it just popped into my head I like a bit of Bloomy you know like I've always him naked on that paddleboard was strange incredible I have to say but also just like you're Orlando Bloom like you're an A-list celebrity like what are you doing out in the open naked yeah it was an oddity but Great Seas rebuilt his career with the cut which no one's heard of and you can't remember a single scene from well I remember sounds like an Oscar nominee I remember him violently trying to lose weight.

25:05Okay, yeah, well. Well, for an hour and a half. Yeah, pretty much. No, no, it's all about the... It's amazing. Yeah, no, I'm pretty sure it is, in fact, like all around. It's called The Cut. And he had to make weight for this fight, and it's all about him trying to make weight. Anyway. Oh, watch. And did he... So, Sorna would be a way of doing that. Yeah, he did. But I think, you know, they nearly had to pull the fight and stuff because he was, like, passing out. And, you know, it was tough. Tough work, it looked. Yeah, God. Yeah. These things, nothing is universally healthy. It certainly didn't look healthy, and therefore we don't condone it.

25:39We don't. We don't. We can't tell you what to do. Nor would we dare. No, nor would we dare. But we can suggest that cutting weight dramatically in that fashion is in fact unhealthy. I agree. And that's rare to say because sauna, coming back to our beloved, is a great thing. I'm going to have a sauna as soon as we finish here. So what's your biggest reason? So you're, of course, you're not doing it specifically for brain-derived nootropic factor or for these structural integrity of a heat shock protein. Could be. Well, those are the benefits you're getting, but that's not your reason for entering daily.

26:16What's the reason you get in it every day? Oh, I don't know, really. I like the feeling of it. Like it makes me feel nice. I think, broadly speaking, it's nice to do things that make you feel good. Yeah. You know, like when I was jumping in an ice bath all the time, I also have an ice bath. It's currently in storage because, you know, we're currently living in a rental and we had to choose between the sauna and the ice bath because the outside area of the house is limited, shall we say. We went with the sauna. I think the data supports that decision. Good. I'm glad to hear it, actually, because the decision was made a while ago without the data.

26:53So, yeah, so when I was jumping in an ice bath daily, again, wasn't really doing it for kind of stress responses and all the reasons that you'd read about. I just really liked how I felt when I got out of it. You know, I got in. There was a little bit of kind of fighting the pain of it and doing the difficult thing first thing in the morning so that when you get to your first meeting, you already feel like you've done something. You know, it's that like cold shower thing, which I also love doing. I cold shower in the morning. you know and i i love the you can call it a stress response i suppose that kind of that shock of oh god i'm i'm really awake now you know like i i love all that the endorphins if you will but you know i mostly did it because i really liked the feeling of being freezing cold and then you know succeeding in that difficult task early that was nice yeah sauna is a little different it's kind of more comfortable um why do i do it i don't like i feel like it's good for me i feel like it I feel, and this is probably not backed by any kind of science, but I feel that just the mental thing that goes on in my head is that any toxins that are in me are being excreted in my sweat, is how I feel about it.

28:09They're probably not. As you say, the liver's doing the work on alcohol. No, they are excreted, actually, and we see quite a lot of heavy metals, so leads or cadmiums or things that might be in polluted water. so we see quite a lot of heavy metal extraction we see an increasing volume of some forever chemicals and so the idea that we would excrete toxins through sweating is absolutely valid and you may be feeling that and that's fair. I feel kind of cleansed when I come out of it like a confession booth of sorts you go in there and I don't necessarily spew my misdeeds into myself but you know it kind of feels that way I come out feel like I've been kind of blessed say you know like I feel clean even though I'm filthy actually physically not morally of course no morally I'm always clean you're cleansed been a while actually since I've been morally dirty then the what else I stretch in there so I stand and I put my palms on the floor and I really, I stretch a lot.

29:22So I'll do a lot of like bending my head and I'll really pull like my knees and my foot like up into my shoulder. I'll really like dig into a good old stretch, which I'm sure I could do without the sauna. It's just where I do my stretching. Well, you'll be more flexible. So in the same way as, you know, hot yoga spawned. Bikram yoga. Bikram yoga, you know, and various, you've now got hot Pilates. When you have heat, you've got more blood supply to those sort of frisky tendons and ligaments and musculature. So you are more pliable under warmer temperatures. So you will stretch better in a sauna, theoretically, than you would if you were in...

30:01I'll really dig into my carbs and like, oh, I might take the massage gun in there later. You could, so you've got better supplies. That all being said, there's an improvement in potentially circulation. So it's quite a good, again, for running and athletic community. It could be a really good part of their cool down in a bizarre way, part of your post-exercise stretching. And we're seeing lots of people using saunas at the end of sessions to extend the duration of the session, but also to help that return to play feeling. True athletic recovery is, can I go back and be pain-free and pliable and capable tomorrow versus am I, you know, chill and zen?

30:36And it does tend to help with that, assuming it's not too hot and it's not too late. Do you see any improvement on your WHOOP data with sleep when you sauna versus not? Yeah, I think I probably do. more likely to get a green recovery if I sauna, you know, an hour before bed. That's really, really interesting. I think so. But like, I don't know, I'm not, I love whoop. As you know, I'm a big whooper. But, you know, just this morning, I did everything right yesterday. Did a lovely training session. I ate really well. I was alone without Vogue or children. Beautiful air-conditioned room, 18 degrees, fan on high.

31:14Like being in a chilled fridge. wonderful one episode of breaking bad just really beautiful stuff yeah lovely shower like clean my teeth had my magnesium everything of course no alcohol yeah i'm not on holiday anymore yeah you know and um i've had five green recoveries in a row and i thought you know this is an easy home run slam dunk for the sith you know yeah somebody make it hard you know i'm only i'm the green king over here yeah the pub landlord and uh and and i uh yeah and the bastards you know gave me a 55 amber recovery i couldn't believe it i had eight hours and 11 minutes sleep really high rem deep sleep i paid down my my debt and all kinds of stuff and i and i woke up and i thought that that is that is not just.

32:09Can I put my clinician's hat on and suggest two things that might have contributed to that that you've shared with me in confidence? Oh yes, the lasagna. I think eating what might be now closer to 4 ,000 calories of lasagna may have contributed to that. I want to see what my resting heart rate is. Your resting heart rate while eating the lasagna was probably 110. My resting heart rate ordinarily when I sleep could be like 48. Well, if your HIV is lower, then we would expect your resting heart rate to be higher. Heart rate variability, 59 today. Yeah, so you've had a dip. What? I would also add, so while you're looking at your data, the 7 ,500 calories of lasagna that you managed to consume is point number one.

32:55Point number two is you shared with me that the thing that you watched was the single most exciting episode of maybe the best box set of all time. And here we end up with a situation that is an adrenalizing activity. And there is no way you can turn your brain off from that level of pure adrenalized entertainment. Beautiful excitement. That's beautiful. And of course, excitement is the same as fear and stress when it comes to physiology. They both inhibit quality restorative sleep. So I would suggest your core temperature was up because of the lasagna and the digestive requirement. And I'll suggest that watching the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad threw you under the bus.

33:33and there's no charge for that. Ozymandias is called the episode. It's just such a banger. Where's my resting heart rate? Resting heart rate, 55! Yeah, see, the night before, 48 beats per minute. The night before that, 47. What Woof is revealing there is you ate too much lasagna and watched too adrenalising activity and those things have overridden some of the other patterns of behaviour that you put in place. VO2 max though, we're up to 64. Outlandish. Thanks a lot. Here we go on the crest for 65. That will be played in. Sauna will help with sleep. When we've spoken about sleep before, of course, sleep is about dropping core temperature, not rising it.

34:09So there's a time point here that I don't want to do my sauna too close to bed. But if I sauna, of course, I'll go even pinker than I am now. Beautiful. All my blood is magnificent. Like a kind of Alaskan crab. You know those beautiful pink crabs? That's gorgeous. They're pink and white, actually. They've got a duality to their tone. that's a really good i'll be updating my my linkedin later to the alaskan crab but that pink is because all the blood's come to my surface where it will then lose heat more easily so if i come out of a sauna both the natural cooling mechanism and my blood being close to my surface means i can drop my temperature down lower as long as it wasn't too close to bedtime so what we also see is when you're in the sauna your heart rate variability will go down and your heart will go up because it's like exercise.

34:56But the recovery from that is then you would get an upsurge of parasympathetic calming physiology in the aftermath. So it's a short-term stress to drive a latent recovery. So we often find an improvement in sleep onset, sleep latency, sleep quality or architecture, and in just that general sense of feeling restored. Assuming I rehydrate, which is absolutely a critical part, you know, the fact that I want to detoxify and shed that fluid, but I also want that fluid back in my cells. So should I rehydrate with effective electrolytes? Probably. And of course, Aftermath, Dr. Dre's record label. Which is not what we're talking about.

35:37What's Aftermath? You said Aftermath. Oh, the Aftermath. That was his... That's a massive hip hop blind spot for me. Yeah, yeah. So his record label is called Aftermath, I believe, unless he's changed it. I feel so middle-aged at this moment. Dr. Dre. Dr. Dre is himself middle aged probably also worth noting that Dr. Dre is not a real doctor just in case anyone he's I'd be amazed if he hasn't been offered a professorship of somewhere who am I to say if you're offered a professorship do you call yourself professor or doctor yes if you were offered a doctor I think you already know the answer to that if I were offered a doctor would I use it yes I would if anyone is out there who fancies offering me a doctorship of any kind.

36:24Dr. Matthews I think has a good ring to it. Similarly to Dr. Dre or any other doctor. Dr. Dr. Alex from Love Island. Perhaps a poor example. He's a lovely chap. He might actually be a doctor. He's a genuine doctor. Of course he's an HSGP. Well, there you have it. Legend. That all being said, sauna is extremely good for sleep, good for recovery, good for circulation, good for stretching, good for the brain, good for detoxification, good for exercise memetic, good for, again, triangulating three-dimensional cells, good for, good for, good for. All of this goes in, there's outside of that group, you know, I've got some underdeveloped or undiagnosed cardiovascular disease, or I'm stressed to the brim, and I'm ready to, you know, fold.

37:11It is a rock star move. But, but lots of the question I get asked most is, I mentioned it earlier, infrared versus finish. Have you been in an infrared? I have. Listen, I know that you like an infrared. I love an infrared. I don't love the infrared. I kind of feel like I'm being kind of shortchanged in the infrared. I can understand. Do you know why that is? Because it's slower and not as hot. It's slower and lower. I get in and I kind of feel, you know, what am I really doing in here? And then, you know, a bead of sweat drips down my back eventually and i go someone else come on i said when i get in my sauna at home i'm like a tap yeah you know i get in and give it a few minutes but you know i've got i've got stuff like seeping out of me in an uncontrollable way yeah you know i don't i don't get i don't get that in the in the infrared unfortunately yeah you know and of course you know i don't have the luxury of endless time it sort of feels like i need a good you know hour in there maybe and that is a great great description.

38:16It doesn't have that wall of heat. So we walk into it, it's not heating you through the ambient air. So if I go into, the definition of a sauna is a hot room. And interestingly, infrared isn't a hot room, it is a room of light. So infrared is light. And actually Every room is a room of light. Well, technically unless the lights are off. But in this room, turn the lights off and it'd be pitch black. But it wouldn't be a sauna. It would. Either. Would it? it's actually not that hot it would not but infrared light so it means I can't it's not in the visible light spectrum it's the light that goes into your tissue vibrates your water and in putting so much energy into the water in your tissues it generates the heat that makes you sweat so it is now it's important because everyone goes well that sounds like a microwave so it's not a microwave it's non-ionizing which means it doesn't create the sort of radiation microwaves like can you imagine inventing the microwave what a genius imagine It's the same principle.

39:14It vibrates the water. It puts energy into the water and that creates the heat. That's what infrared is doing. So the fact it's 55 degrees, so it might be 55 to 65 degrees, is sort of irrelevant because you're really sweating because the light is targeting the water molecules in your tissues, causing them to generate so much energy that it creates heat, which causes you to sweat. And what's interesting to the running community is you will see now the rise of full spectrum light, which means they're not just including far infrared. Far infrared is the one that makes you sweat. Near infrared is anti-inflammatory.

39:47So while you're seeing infrared everywhere, is in infrared you can also include red light therapy, you know these red lights that again directly pass energy into tissues of your cells and might reduce inflammation, might provide energy, might do all these things. But near infrared goes again centuries and a half, two centimeters into your tissue and decreases inflammation. And what you don't want today before you run your 5K tomorrow is excessive inflammation in your quads, in your back, in your neck. So the idea that you would use a light therapy box to detoxify to get some of those benefits and get this potential anti-inflammatory benefit is why you're seeing a bit of a dogfight between the two modalities.

40:24And at the moment, all the real rich data is on that Finnish sauna study, which is ambient or it's called dry sauna or Finnish sauna. But what we're seeing is the anti-aging, better tolerated more mainstream option might be infrared because not everyone likes that feeling when they walk in and they're blasted by the heat and if i put an average non-heat acclimatized individual so you and i do sauna a lot so we are much more tolerant if i take your average person walking on the high street stick them in 85 degrees they're like oh god this feels awful and and that you don't get from infrared so if you wanted the benefit of sauna to an audience who aren't heat acclimated, or you want the light benefit and potentially a slightly better detox benefit.

41:07So we see more metals excreted in the sweat of infrared than we do in finish. It's a really interesting science. And the blend seems to be do a bit of both. So I've got infrared at home, but then I go and do finish elsewhere because that's my journey as a sauna meister. Listen, each to their own, my friend. But I love the fact that you love all this different kind of saunering. I think it's fantastic. and if there's a great sauna out there I just think journeying to saunas of the world is a really fun thing listen there's a TV show in that for you and me oh my god you and I touring the world's best saunas I think genuinely listen you heard it here first but that's got like sky that has legs hasn't it that has legs I'm calling my agent I'm being serious as soon as we finish it Ollie Patrick and I want to discover the world's best saunas what a great idea that is a great idea will you lose a couple of kilograms of muscle mass just before we get in there?

42:03I hope so. Good. Okay, that would be helpful. No, no, that would be great. I'd be delighted. I'd be delighted. That's great. It's a good idea. Yeah, that's a great idea. One of the best saunas in the world is up at Glen Afrik. Ooh. Just outside of Inverness. About an hour and 20 minutes from Inverness. Tell me. It is quite something. Really? We shall go. What have you got? You've got obviously views over a lock. A view over the long mountains. Put a horse paddock on the opposite mountains. Snow-capped mountains. You go there in the early evening, perhaps with a cheeky dram just outside the sauna.

42:40A cold shower outside the sauna, a little plunge pool. Anyway. Oh, God. God, this show's doing well. My tummy's rumbling. It wouldn't be if you had eight kilos. Right. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode on saunas. I love you, my friend. I think you're just brilliant. The Alaskan crab, Olly Patrick. It's a mutual love. We hope you enjoyed the episode. Lots of love. Catch you next week for a brand new episode of Untap the Extra Mile with a couple of lads that love physiology.

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