The Peak Saunas Podcast

Skin. It's the largest organ you have, it's the first thing people see, and it's the one most of us quietly track as we get older, noticing things we'd rather not notice. And the sauna has a real relationship with skin. Not a magical one, not an instant one, but a real one that's worth understanding, because there's a lot of noise in this space and I want to give you the signal. Let's start with sweat, because that's the most immediate thing that happens.

Sauna and weight loss. I'm going to give you the honest version of this, which means part of this episode is going to disappoint people who came for the shortcut, and the rest of it is going to be more useful than the shortcut ever was. Let's start with the part that disappoints. The scale after a sauna. You get out of a twenty-five minute session, you step on the scale, and you're down a pound, maybe two. That's water. Every bit of it. You sweated it out, and the next glass of water you drink puts it back.

When is the best time to sauna? I get this question so often that I'm going to give you the answer first and then spend the rest of the episode explaining it. The best time is the time you'll actually do it four times a week. If that's the morning, morning. If that's the evening, evening. Consistency beats timing. But if you have a choice, and you have a specific goal, timing does matter, and morning and evening sessions do different things. So let's go through both. Start with what's happening in your body across the day, because the sauna plugs into that rhythm.

If you train and you own a sauna, you've probably stood there at some point wondering which order to do it in. Sauna then lift? Lift then sauna? Same day at all? The internet has strong opinions in both directions, and most of them are missing the one thing that actually decides it, which is what you're training for. So let's go through it properly. Start with what the sauna does to your body, because that determines where it fits. A sauna session is a cardiovascular load. Your heart rate goes up, sometimes into the range of a brisk walk or an easy jog. Your blood vessels dilate.

Back in episode two I talked about EMF and infrared saunas, and it's still one of the episodes people write to me about. So this is part two. Not because the science changed, but because the questions got more specific. People aren't asking me whether EMF is scary anymore. They're asking me what the numbers on a spec sheet mean, how they're measured, and how to tell a real low-EMF claim from a sticker. That's a better question, and it deserves a real answer. Let's start with what EMF is, in plain language. Any time electricity flows, it produces two fields.

Every single person who buys a sauna from us asks the same three questions in the first week. How hot? How long? How often? And the answers are all over the internet, half of them wrong, so let's settle it. This is the dose episode. I'm going to give you the numbers, tell you where they come from, and tell you how to adjust them for yourself. First, a framing that makes all of this easier. Sauna is a stressor. That's the point. Your body responds to heat the way it responds to exercise.

Red light therapy is one of those things where the marketing got ahead of the science, and then the science caught up more than the skeptics expected. So today I want to give you the grounded version. What red light actually does in the body, what the research supports, what it doesn't support, and how to use the panel in your sauna so it's doing something. Let's start with what it is. Red light therapy, sometimes called photobiomodulation in the research, is exposing tissue to specific wavelengths of red and near infrared light at a meaningful intensity.

If you've shopped for an infrared sauna, you've seen two phrases on every listing. Far infrared. Full spectrum. And if you're like most people, you nodded and kept scrolling, because nobody explained what they mean. So let's do that today, because the difference is real, and it's one of the few things in this industry that isn't marketing. Start with the basics. Infrared is light. It's the part of the light spectrum just past what your eyes can see. You feel it as warmth. When you stand near a fire and your face gets warm without the air being hot, that's infrared. The sun does it.

Let me start with the question I get more than any other. Infrared or traditional? And I'll give you the honest version, not the sales version, because I sell infrared saunas and you already know that. So the only way this episode is useful to you is if I tell you where traditional wins too. Here's the short answer. A traditional sauna heats the air. An infrared sauna heats you. Everything else in this conversation flows from that one difference.

Let me sit with that for a second, because it should feel incongruous. Five-point-six trillion dollars. That's the size of the global wellness industry in 2024. Supplements, wearables, apps, programs, functional foods, spa treatments, biohacking devices, recovery tools — a staggering, almost incomprehensible amount of money flowing into people's health.