Heat therapy boosts immunity by ramping up cell metabolism, but dehydration kills the effect. Your cells need fluid to swap oxygen and nutrients for waste like carbon dioxide. Drink water and electrolytes before and after heat exposure, even mild sessions.
Heat will dehydrate you. One of the things that's not great about heating your body up is if you get dehydrated, a lot of the immune benefits get muted. And that's because when we're looking at, let's take one cell, the good stuff goes in the cell, oxygen, nutrients, substrates, mitochondria runs faster, and then it ejects waste from the cell and carbon dioxide. If we get dehydrated, that fluid area around the cell will slow down its ability to remove the waste. Hydrate as much as you can before you do a heat therapy, hydrate afterwards. So hydration and electrolytes are 2 huge things, even if you're doing low-level heating up of your body.
