A short how-to (YouTube transcript) by Ben Greenfield demonstrating a do-it-yourself method to use a biomat as a makeshift infrared sauna. The speaker defines a biomat, lists required blankets/materials, explains controller/power settings, and gives step-by-step setup and recommended duration (20–60 minutes) for sweating and sauna-like benefits.
Hey, I'm Ben Greenfield. And you may have noticed I've been talking a lot lately about saunas. How they're good for everything from heat shock proteins to nitric oxide to detoxification. The problem is saunas can be kind of big. You might have a hard time finding room for one in your house. Sometimes it can be a pain in the butt to drive to the gym to find the sauna there. Sometimes. Sometimes these fancy infrared saunas, which give you the best heating effect, can simply be hard to get, hard to find, or even expensive. So I'm gonna show you how you can turn something called a biomat into a sauna. What is a biomat? A biomat is a special mat that you lay on. I have one right here. It produces infrared from the actual surface, but then it also is lined with a bunch of rocks that you lie on that make it very similar to grounding or earthing. So google that if you don't know what it is. The biomat is less expensive than a sauna. It's still a chunk of change. It'll cost you about $1,500 to get a biomat. However, once you have one, it's incredibly versatile. It has a ton of cool healing effects. And as you're about to see, you could turn it into a sauna. So what you want to do first is you go down to your biomat controller here. This thing blocks all electrical pollution from coming off of outlets, which is kind of cool. So I'm going to turn this on and I'm going to put the power all the way up. So I jack it up until the red light is showing. Now the next thing I'm going to do is get a blankie. So bigger blankets are going to produce more warmth. So the bigger the better. But I'm going to lay one blanket down on the biomat, like, so I'll be lying underneath that blanket. I've already got the COVID that comes with the biomat. It's just like a wool cover that comes with the biomat on top of the biomat. So the next thing that I've got is one of these space age blankets. Voila. $5.99 from Amazon. These are just like these space age thermal blankets. And this is what's gonna hold in heat. Okay, So I lay that down on top of the first blanket, and then you want to get the biggest, heaviest blanket you can find. It could even be a big old duvet if you want to go that route. And you're going to take this big heavy blanket, and then you're gonna put that on top of the silver blanket. Now, once you've got this all made up, you will, just like a good kid, wanna tuck in your coverings around the edge so that the heat stays in. And you're gonna wanna leave this on for about 20 to 30 minutes while you go do whatever it is that you like to do. So once you come back after 20 or 30 minutes, you're going to be ready to actually climb inside your homemade sauna. So all I do from here is find a good book, mp3 player, audio podcast, whatever, climb inside just like. So lay here for about 30 minutes. You will be sweating buckets within about 30 minutes. You can stay here for 30 to 60 minutes. You can flip from your stomach onto your side, etc. And that is how you turn a biomat into a sauna, an infrared sauna.
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