Is Sauna ACTUALLY Good For You? (90-Day Experiment)

Look guys, I've done a lot of crazy stuff when it comes to health protocols. I've injected millions of young Swedish bone marrow into my joint, I removed all the plasma from my body, I spent 9,500 minutes in a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber, and I even used my own sun as my bloodborne. But one thing I haven't tried yet, which is one of the oldest of all therapies, is a hotbox. Also known as a dry sauna. Sauna has become insanely popular over the past couple years. What about the sauna, bro? The more often you do sauna, the better. Saunas almost every day, regular sauna use reduced all cause mortality. So why haven't I been doing this? To explain, let's look at the origins of sauna in Finland. There are 5.5 million Finnish, but 3 million saunas, that's almost as many saunas as cars. Who are these people? 90% of these fins do sauna at least one time per week. And because of this, it makes sense that nobody's done more experimentational work on saunas than the Finnish. Specifically, heat exposure for health. Multiple long term studies linked four or more sessions of dry finished sauna per week, with a 40% reduced risk of all cause mortality. In other words, they were about 40% less likely to die from anything during the study compared to people who didn't do sauna. That number is gigantic. And to give you context on how big it is, a 40% reduction in all cause mortality exceeds data around exercise and a Mediterranean diet. It's only matched by either losing weight when you're obese or by quitting smoking. Now this sounds great, but here's the caveat. Most of these studies were done on the Finnish in Finland. Finland has a relatively small gene pool. So does everyone else respond the same. Fins live in a very cold climate and often cold plunge after sauna. Jumping into ice holes is basically a national sport. So does sauna still work without cold exposure? And even more importantly, sauna triggers some of the same effects as exercise. Faster circulation, sweating, higher heart rate. So would sauna add anything on top of my daily workouts? Or does it mainly help people who don't exercise much? It's for these reasons that I didn't prioritize doing sauna. We prioritized other therapies for the past couple years. But that changed when my lead physician, Dr. Mike Mallon joined me and said, brian, get the sauna right now. The benefits are way too good to ignore. I love sauna. Sauna is like I Feel like as soon as I started working with Brian, I was like, why are we doing sauna? So like all things blueprint, we went to the scientific literature and we said, what is the best 30 day protocol to implement? I'd do dry finish sauna and get one installed at my house. Each session would last 20 minutes at 200 degrees Fahrenheit, 83 degrees Celsius, and I'd go all in at seven days a week. This matches the study data that saw all cause mortality drop by an extra 16% for people who did four to seven sessions per week instead of two to three. I'm going to finish strong, then we're going to head off to the sauna. All right. My session is going to be 20 minutes according to the evidence. And like also that matches my subjective feeling. So when you get to, you know, the minute, 16, 17, you're pretty much done. You can't take electronics in there because they will die. I'm going to start the timer for 20 minutes and I'm going to put it right here so I can see it so I know when to come out. 20 minutes has started. Let's jump in and not waste any time. When I had done sauna before, it was something like 120 to 140, 145 degrees. But 200 is just next level. When you go in, it's hot enough that actually if you put an egg white in there, the egg white would actually be hardened by the end. So after this first sauna session, I had a few problems arise. I did not know that 200 degrees Fahrenheit was a fire breathing dragon situation. The second thing that happened, it was so hot and especially on my scalp, I wondered, is this going to burn my hair off? So what I did for both is for the nose. I learned that in the sauna I could do a 4, 6 breathing exercise. I like to do breath work because there's nothing else to do in here. No electronics, no one to talk to. So I tried to do four seconds in, six seconds out and just try to really calm myself. And two, I found I could take a ice pack, put a towel on my head and place it over my head to keep my scalp cool, to make sure my scalp didn't get dried out with extensive exposure to that kind of dry heat. And this is like a pretty janky solution. I just kind of put together the various things I had. So this is not like specially designed for saunas. It was like this was in my freezer. So, okay, we had several questions the first was, would sauna stack with the benefits of exercise? Second, would it help in removing toxins from my body? I started this protocol knowing I had high levels of toxins in my body since the LA wildfires. And number three, we wanted to run an experiment on fertility, but we'll talk about that later. So the plan was we would test all of these biomarkers as a baseline and then come back to them after 21 sessions. The main problem, though, is after a few days, I was wrecked. I'd wake up at night with these unbelievably terrifying cramps that hit my hamstrings and my calves so bad, I would jump out of bed. I'd try to walk it off. I just couldn't. I couldn't shake it. So while the sauna protocol was going well, my sleep was getting worse. So with all this going on, I brought this up on our science call with Dr. Mike Mallon, and he had a hypothesis. By heating up your skin way faster than your core, finished sauna quickly flips your core to skin temperature gradient. This makes your body work on overdrive. The heart pumps blood up to 70% faster to get sweat to your skin to cool down. This gives cardiovascular effects similar to zone one or two. Cardio Basana does make you sweat a lot. For example, between 0.6 and 1 liter per hour. So, of course, Dr. Mike suspected I was dehydrated. We tested using this Gatorade patch, and it confirmed our suspicion. I was a salty sweater. And an each sauna session, I was losing 18 ounces of sweat and about 600 micrograms of sodium. And even though I was drinking enough to replace the water content I lost in sweat, I wasn't replenishing all the minerals I was losing, which caused the night cramps and other symptoms. So naturally, we increased the amount of electrolytes 50% before the sauna session and 50% immediately following. Now, first, if you don't know if you're a salty sweater, you can test it. Second, if you are a salty sweater, make sure you're consuming the appropriate amount of electrolytes to make sure you do not become dehydrated. By day seven, things were getting better because I had fewer cramps, but my sleep was still struggling. I've done a lot of therapies and a lot of treatments. That first week of sauna, I think, crashed me more than anything it did before. I suppose the funny thing about me is even though it was painful, I loved it. Am I weird? After the first week I was dying to get data. I love measurement. I it was exciting to see several of my vascular markers had improved, including my central systolic blood pressure. My heart, brain and all major organs were experiencing 5.83% less pressure. Okay, so why would sauna help blood pressure? Because of a process called heat induced vasodilation. As your core body temperature rises in the sauna, your skin and peripheral blood vessels widen to help release heat, letting the same blood flow pass through with less force. Force. This lowers the pressure inside your arteries, making them more flexible and reduces strain on your heart and organs. The fact that we saw this after seven sessions is like, is pretty awesome actually because it really suggests that the, the actual like dose happens relatively quickly now. In week two, my relationship with sauna was really developing. Every day I really looked forward to the challenge, especially after a really hard workout. It was the sauna and me going alone. My cramps are gone, my sleep's getting slightly better, my vascular markers were improving, but I didn't know what was happening to my toxins. There was also another danger. Was sauna actually making toxins worse? So I wear cotton because I'm mindful of toxins. And when you get in there and it's very hot, I don't know what the interaction is between the clothing, the chemicals and the heat and my skin. We wondered if we're going to sit in a 200 degree Fahrenheit box, what materials are used in the box and are they potentially toxic? We also started evaluating what other things could we do to reduce toxins. Well, one obvious one, which is maybe not so obvious, is to not put water on the rocks. Water can have toxins like pfas, forever chemicals. If you put them on the rocks, they become airborne. So we didn't put water on the rocks. Two is to make sure I had cotton clothing, not synthetics, that would might be bad. And finally to shower immediately following the sauna to make sure you're removing toxins from the skin. But you may be asking, Brian, why weren't you naked? I thought people sauna naked. That's because I was wearing an ice diaper. Don't laugh. Once I shared on social media I was wearing an ice diaper, I got a lot of questions. Now, in reviewing the scientific evidence, we saw that there was a potential of the heat actually hurting fertility markers pretty significantly. So we took precautions to say we're going to put ice on the boys to prevent this harm. So I went to my freezer and fortunately I had a whole bunch of ice packs from A whole bunch of different therapies and I selected them trying to find the right match. Here's the ice pack for the boys. So I just slipped in. Human Testes operate at 2 to 4 degrees Celsius, cooler than core body temperature. Even a 2 degree Celsius rise can derail spermatogenesis, the process of producing sperm for 74 days or a full cycle. I wasn't trying to get anyone pregnant, but Project Blueprint is about making the body as vital as possible in every organ, and that includes sperm health. Now a question that came up is what about other types of sauna and specifically wet sauna? Dry. Finished saunas, as the name would suggest, are pretty dry. They have a relative humidity of 10 to 20%, whereas a normal room temperature has about 30 to 50% relative humidity. But that can be a lot lower in the winter. Wet saunas have roughly 100% relative humidity. That means they can't get above 115 Fahrenheit, 46 Celsius without causing you to burn or overheat. And as we know, most of the evidence for sauna's health benefits, especially long term quality cardiovascular studies, focuses on finished sauna, where the combination of high heat and low humidity places the body under significant thermal and cardiovascular stress. The other popular sauna option is infrared saunas because they heat up faster and generate less steam and condensation. They are way lower maintenance than dry or wet sauna, which makes them very popular with spas and wellness centers. But the problem is they can't get you much above 150 degrees Fahrenheit, which doesn't match the existing studies on sauna benefits. That's why I use a dry sauna. There's no real studies like that on an infrared, so we stuck with dry sauna. By week three, I'm feeling really good. No cramps, sleep is better, and I'm now in a rhythm. Also, it was time for a big batch of results. We had done enough sauna sessions to know that if we were gonna see results, we'd see them by now. First up was measuring toxins in my body and man, we were shocked. There were significant, significant reductions in the levels of toxins inside my body. Three went from being abnormally high to undetectable and there was a huge drop across the board. This was beyond anything we'd expected. It was the best toxins result I'd ever received. As far as we could tell, this result was a pretty unique outcome according to the scientific literature. It seemed to suggest that sauna is potentially one of the best things you can do to detox your body. After 23 sessions, my cardiovascular results also continued to improve. Central pressure readings were down significantly, putting even less pressure on my organs. And my resting heart rate, a major marker for recovery and fitness, had dropped by 4.4%. And then came another twist. My fertility markers actually improved by 31% after 21 days. These were my best sperm health numbers to date and put me six times above the threshold for what's considered fertile by clinical standards. This made me wonder, should I bring this up on first dates? A future question we want to ask. Did my fertility biomarkers improve because of the combination of sauna improving blood flow and me using an ice pack? Or would an ice pack alone deliver similar results? There were a lot of people also wanting me to pair cold with the heat. But that's going to have to wait for another day because we wanted to see what sauna alone would do as a therapy. So just a few weeks in sauna was somehow improving my fertility, improving my blood vessels and removing toxins from my body. But at this point, my sauna experiment hit a snag. I was traveling to Europe for 11 days, to Scandinavia, ironically, and I'd have no time to find a sauna and sit in it for 20 minutes every day. So when I got back, we started sauna part two. The goal was to get to 48 total sessions. Here we had two main objectives. First, we wanted to see if the results would continue to improve, stay the same or get worse. Would my body just get used to the stress and results, meaning I'd lose my cardiovascular gains. Second, we decided to stop icing my boys for two weeks to see what would happen. Basically, we decided to cook my boys at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for science and your benefit. You're welcome. I hit the first, the 48 session mark. And now it was time for the big reveal, the results. The bad news though, was my fertility markers were demolished. I turned myself into a cautionary tale for every sauna enthusiast that has testicles. A 200 degree sauna with no ice protection led to a 50% reduction of my fertility markers across the board. So, boys, definitely ice your boys. But the good news is my blood pressure and my vascular health improved a lot. My arteries became 25 to 50% more flexible, effectively de aging them by about 10 years and giving me the vascular markers of a healthy 20 year old. So we had evidence it is worth stacking sauna and exercise. The second exciting result was a surge in vegf. This Is the signal your body says, hey, make more blood vessels. Think of blood vessels as roads carrying oxygen to every cell. VEGF is the helpful messenger calling for more roads, especially during repair or stress. That stress can increase VEGF because it tells the body, grow more vessels. Heat makes your heart pump harder, pushing blood through your vessels. This helps keep your organs strong and slows down age related decline. Previously, hyperbaric oxygen therapy had tripled my vegf. But since doing sauna, I'd boosted it another 5x on top of that. These improvements to my cardiovascular health probably explain the 40% reduction in all cause mortality that we saw in the finished studies for those that routinely do sauna. So a lot of people ask the question, is it worth doing? And after seeing the results, I think the answer is yes. Okay, so we've made it this far together and you may be saying, I'm in. Brian, let's do it. How do I do it? For frequency you want to target three to five sessions per week. The benefits seem to scale for duration. Target 15 to 20 minutes per session. For temperature, target 175 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit which is 80 to 93 Celsius. Now for the type of sauna I would do dry over wet or infrared. You could also do it after exercise for stronger effects. Now for safety, you want to gradually build up to higher temperatures. If you want, you can even breathe through a damp cloth for airway protection. Stay hydrated with sufficient electrolytes. And men, be sure to cool the boys with non toxic BPA free ice packs. To avoid toxins, wear cotton, bamboo or go naked. You want to try and avoid synthetic towels, synthetic blends and heavily treated fabrics. Don't put water on the rocks to avoid these toxins potentially getting in the air. Then immediately following sauna, be sure to shower to wash off the toxins. Now in terms of the sauna you choose, just be sure they choose materials that are non toxic. Best if you can check the air quality. Now you want to skip sauna if you're pregnant, if you have a heart condition or any of the following conditions. Now, if you don't have access to the sauna, your best alternative is exercise, which increases heat in your body. This is essentially free and achieves many of the same cardiovascular benefits. But doing both as we saw is ideal. Oh, and good news. I restarted icing the boys and my fertility marker started to improve 30%. I expect a full recovery within a few more weeks.