Deliberate heat exposure through sauna or hot tub use can increase blood flow, mimicking moderate-intensity cardiovascular exercise and aiding recovery.

“Furthermore, evidence continues to accumulate that it may even be helpful for promoting various types of exercise adaptations.”

“In no way is this an argument for sauna acting as a permanent substitution for exercise; however, sauna use can be: • potentially additive to training • useful during recovery • beneficial for the elderly or in situations where the work can’t be done in the first place [e.g. convalescence]”

“engaging in deliberate heat exposure from something like a sauna or even hot tub hot bath there's a lot of physiological um adaptations and effects that happen that are very similar to aerobic exercise and those things are like increased heart rate you're getting increased plasma volume you're getting increased stroke volume”

“observational studies looking at people that are and this is in Finland where saunas are pretty ubiquitous and most people are using them um so people in Finland that have sauna are using sauna and they exercise have a better cardiorespiratory Fitness than people that exercise alone we're talking about you know same volume of exercise and these people the ones that do that but also sauna had had a better cardiorespiratory Fitness than people that only engaged in exercise”

“so starting with deliberate heat exposure drawing from um some of the leading experts in the this area of sonor research um Dr Yari linan being one of the world's experts on how the sauna is affecting cardiovascular health I've had him on the podcast many years ago and he has published just numerous studies on how this sauna affects cardiorespiratory Fitness how it's affecting blood pressure cardiac compliance arterial compliance just a lot of different cardiovascular health parameters and his research has shown in a couple different ways so there's been observational data showing people that exercise and use the sauna have a lower all cause mortality than people that exercise and don't use the sauna but he's also done some Interventional studies where he's taken two groups of people and put them on an exercise protocol aerobic exercise on a stationary bike and then only half of that group then went into a sauna after the exercise and he measured cardiio respiratory Fitness and found that people that use the sauna in addition to aerobic exercise improve their card cardiorespiratory Fitness even more than people that uh only did the exercise and there were other cardiometabolic parameters that were also improved cholesterol was improved blood pressure was improved more as well so it seems as though adding the sauna in addition to an exercise routine is another way to improve some cardi metabolic end points and also cardiorespiratory Fitness”

“the sauna after a workout and extend that sort of aerobic exercise mimicking capacity a little bit further”

“So, what we can do sometimes is pull them off of that and insert sauna and they still can kind of feel like a little bit of I worked really hard. And some people need that, not for physical reasons, but for other rational. So, we'll use it in those particular cases.”

“It's not a substitute for exercise, of course, but it's better than sitting on the couch for most things. So, training is first. If on top of past that or we have an injury or fill in the blank there, then we can use sauna to keep maintenance, to keep pace, to keep some cardiovascular adaptation going.”

“But the other way to do that would be something that I've definitely talked about a lot in this podcast and I know that you're a fan of which is deliberate heat exposure through sauna or hot tub where you're also increasing blood flow. I mean it's sort of mimicking moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise.”