Longevity
Why Sauna Is So Healthy
Regular sauna bathing trains your cardiovascular system like moderate exercise while stimulating heat shock protein production. These proteins are essential for longevity and preventing age-related disease.
Longevity
Regular sauna bathing trains your cardiovascular system like moderate exercise while stimulating heat shock protein production. These proteins are essential for longevity and preventing age-related disease.
Line items
If you've already seen our Instagram post this week about the benefits of regular sauna bathing, you're already familiar with some of the extremely positive effects on our health. But let's dive a little deeper into this topic.
Anyone who's spent time in a sauna will have noticed these changes in their body:
These are exactly the same effects we get from exercise! This means a sauna session simulates moderate aerobic training. You can think of sauna bathing as being similar to a short, relaxed run or easy cycling on your bike.
Both sauna and exercise are initially a stressor for the body. Both feel strenuous to extremely uncomfortable. Anyone who's sat in a 90°C sauna for 20 minutes knows this feeling. So how can such stress actually be good for our health?
The term hormesis describes the principle that initial stress leads to long-term improvement. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," so to speak.
Specifically, this means: During sauna bathing, blood pressure and heart rate increase. After you leave, both values drop back down—in fact, below their original level. Your body makes these adaptations to be better prepared for the stress next time.
Regular sauna bathing can therefore lower blood pressure and resting heart rate. And both of these are important factors for long-term health and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease.
It sounds tempting, but you shouldn't skip exercise despite regular sauna bathing. Quite the opposite: the combination of exercise and sauna is very beneficial. One study showed that male runners significantly improved their performance through sauna sessions after training.¹ Researchers had both the sauna and control groups run at maximum speed until they couldn't continue. The result: the sauna group increased their time to complete exhaustion by 32%. Not bad, right?
Beyond the cardiovascular benefits just mentioned, heat also influences metabolism and the nervous system.
…thinks the cell, and produces heat shock proteins for protection. Normal cellular proteins don't like heat and begin to lose their structure or fold incorrectly at higher temperatures. Such dysfunctional proteins can no longer perform their tasks and, in the worst case, accumulate into a kind of junkyard (plaque). These same plaques are found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, for example.
Heat shock proteins can protect other proteins from this fate by stabilizing them and helping them fold correctly.
An increase in heat shock proteins—for example, through sauna bathing—leads to the following improvements in the body:
When you look at this list of positive effects, it's no wonder that heat shock proteins are associated with longevity.²
So do yourself a favor and sauna regularly!
(1) Scoon, G.S.M., Hopkins, W.G., Mayhew, S. and Cotter, J.D. (2007). Effect of post-exercise sauna bathing on the endurance performance of competitive male runners. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 10(4), pp.259–262.
(2) Singh, R., Kolvraa, S., Bross, P., Christensen, K., Bathum, L., Gregersen, N., Tan, Q. and Rattan, S. (2010). Anti-Inflammatory Heat Shock Protein 70 Genes are Positively Associated with Human Survival. Current Pharmaceutical Design, 16(7), pp.796–801.
