Many people usually think of an infrared sauna as a device for those who have just finished their workout, had a long and stressful day at work, or who enjoy the relaxing, gentle heat of an infrared sauna. However, regularly using a sauna can provide amazing health benefits such as muscular endurance and shorter recovery time after exercise. Regular sauna sessions can even be beneficial for life expectancy and sauna weight loss.

The Benefits Of Infrared Sauna Use

For centuries, saunas have been used, most commonly in many Eastern European countries. In some countries, for instance, Finland, almost every home has a sauna that is used for relaxation, detoxification, and much more. 

More and more athletes have joined the sauna bandwagon to receive many health benefits besides a method of post-workout muscle relaxation. Many doctors and holistic practitioners claim that increasing core temperature for short bouts of time, for example, a sauna session, can provide substantial improvements to an individual’s athletic performance.

This is referred to as “hyperthermic conditioning”, which many researchers have reported to have severe positive effects on the body, from increased endurance to the growth of new brain cells.

How Does Heat Acclimation Boost Endurance?

An athlete’s prime goal is to increase their endurance, and in actual fact, anybody can benefit from a high level of endurance. An increased level of endurance is a good indicator of overall health, including heart health.

When you exercise, especially at a high intensity, you can help build your endurance, and it also increases your body’s temperature.

So, this form of hyperthermic conditioning can increase your endurance because it forces changes in your body and makes it easier for you to do arduous activities when the body’s temperature is elevated. 

As a result, the body is subjected to reasonable amounts of heat stress, it slowly becomes acclimated to the heat, triggering several advantages of beneficial changes to happen in the body.

These transformations include higher plasma volume and blood flow to the heart and muscles which boosts athletic performance and enhances muscle mass because of the greater levels of heat shock proteins and growth hormone.

A study found that participants who had a 30-minute sauna session twice a week for three weeks after their workouts raised their time it took to run before they had to stop because of exhaustion by over thirty percent.

Do Saunas Help You Lose Weight?

Besides increasing your endurance so you can run for longer to burn more calories, sauna weight loss is possible in other ways. One such way is that saunas can trigger insulin sensitivity. Insulin has several functions in the body. For example, it helps to mobilize or signal a specific kind of protein to mobilize glucose from outside the cells, and it is part of mTOR (Mammalian Target of Rapamycin) mechanism, which causes protein to be produced and builds muscle.

However, this factor is important for sauna weight loss since insulin resistance helps chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. A study conducted on animals revealed that 30 minutes of hyperthermic treatment, three times a week for 12 weeks, provided an outcome of a 31 decrease in insulin levels and a considerable reduction in blood sugar levels.

Infrared Sauna Use Can Support Muscle Recovery

If you are trying to shred down, you need to be in the gym working out as many times a week as possible. That means there is no time to sit back on your sofa, especially because you suffer a muscle injury during your last workout.

Receiving infrared sauna heat treatments has been shown to be an effective way to induce heat shock proteins that help protect you against “rhabdomyolysis”, which is a serious degenerative muscle tissue condition that is one of the most common side effects that are linked to the use of statin cholesterol-lowering drugs.

If you have a muscle injury, and you are taking statins to lower your cholesterol, you could be immobile for a lengthy period of time, which usually leads to your muscles to start to atrophy.

An animal study showed that hyperthermic conditioning can slow down muscle atrophy during disuse by up to 32 percent. Regular infrared sauna use for whole-body treatment can prevent muscle atrophy and increases muscle regrowth because of increased levels of HSPs

Does An Infrared Sauna Session Burn Calories?

While you are waiting for the heat shock proteins to kick in and help you recover from your muscle injury, you can still lose weight just sitting in an infrared sauna. Even if you are not athletic, and you are trying to shed some pounds off with minimal effort, an infrared sauna can help you out.

People who are in poor shape, to begin with, usually experience high amounts of calorie burn at the start. Infrared saunas help you to lose weight since the gentle heat can penetrate deep into the body which makes you sweat profusely and that requires a lot of energy.

This energy is obtained from the conversion of fat and carbohydrates in a physical process that burns up calories. An average person can sweat off 500 grams in one single sauna session. The body consumes these calories because of the acceleration of heart activity. As the body’s cardiovascular system increases its function, it demands more oxygen, the body starts to convert more calories into usable energy.

An Infrared Sauna Session Can Improve Longevity

You might think that longevity goes hand in hand with better heart health and feeling lighter on your feet, and it does. A study with 2,315 Finnish men had their heart health, and their sauna habits tracked for over twenty years.

The study found out that the group of men who had the lowest mortality rate were those who had a sauna session four to seven times per week. The men who used the sauna more often saw a reduced risk of sudden cardiac death, fatal coronary heart disease, fatal cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality.

Researchers think that this heart-protecting benefit is brought about by the increased heart rate that happens to the body while in the sauna, which corresponds to performing low to moderate-intensity exercise.

Therefore, regularly using an infrared sauna can improve your endurance and shorten your recovery time. Also, if you are on a mission to lose weight, besides burning calories on the track or at the local gym; you can slim down in an infrared sauna.