111–120 of 244 posts
Anecdotal, of course, but the biggest change I ever made in my life was right before bed: take a screaming hot shower with dim lighting. I'd say 95% of the time, I get in bed and just pass out and have no real memory of time passing before falling asleep.
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The most important thing you didn't measure: does this affect long term health in the same way exercise it known to. That is can I put a TV in my sauna and watch that for an hour every day instead of getting out and exercising - yet get the same better long term health outcomes? My current guess is no. That is this improves a marker for good health without improving health. However this is a guess by someone who isn'…
I recently listened to a podcast about the benefits of sauna or deliberate heat exposure and the gist is that if you get your core temperature at about 39 degrees celsius your cardiovascular system is working comparably hard to light exercise. My take is that your heart and lungs are working out, even if your body is not. Do you get the same benefits as going for a run or bike ride for a comparable amount of time? no…
Maybe the conclusion is correct, or maybe not, but as written the methodology is under specified, statistics are not supported, and there too many confounders not addressed. One should not take anything from this without a better write up. Just misunderstanding what n= means is a huge flag.
Since the author is here, I have to ask: Why a blog post and not an actual paper? Why spray this onto the internet without validating the work? Or, conversely, why not caveat the work as exploratory data science?
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> What wearables were used? These devices don't usually have enough precision to reliably detect ~3bpm changes. For large sample averages this doesn't really matter.
It does, specially if the error bars from multiple measurements show higher precision than what would be expected.
Precision (inverse of variance) of estimate of mean increases directly proportional to number of samples (given some assumptions that very likely hold here). If you have measurement standard deviation of say 10 bpm, with 100 measurements you have mean estimate standard deviation of 10/sqrt(100) = 1 bpm.
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I recently listened to a podcast about the benefits of sauna or deliberate heat exposure and the gist is that if you get your core temperature at about 39 degrees celsius your cardiovascular system is working comparably hard to light exercise. My take is that your heart and lungs are working out, even if your body is not. Do you get the same benefits as going for a run or bike ride for a comparable amount of time? no…
Not saying you are wrong, but I'd like to see some evidence on that. Just because your heart is pumping faster doesn't mean your cardio fitness is getting better. Otherwise we could all just snort cocaine and skip the gym. Alcohol does that too, anyone with a fitness tracker can check that.
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There is some evidence suggesting that "blue zones" are largely about pension fraud. https://fortune.com/europe/2024/12/14/are-blue-zones-myth-ex...
You're saying that crime leads to longevity? Big if true.
Put differently, relying on self reporting for any sort of status from people is just not a reliable methodology.
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No idea. How hot is and was your sauna? Is it possible that it's hotter than it used to be? Maybe try one that's slightly less hot? I've got the opposite problem: saunas don't seem to be able to make me sweat anymore, so I'm looking for the hottest saunas I can find.
The usual 95"C, nothing extraordinary. Sweating after covid got impaired, I might have some thermoregulation issue.
Author here. Methodology upfront because I'd ask the same things: Data: daily records from wearable users who logged sauna sessions via connected apps. Within-person design — each user is their own control, comparing their own sauna-day nights against their own non-sauna-day nights. No cross-user comparisons. Stats: paired t-tests, FDR-corrected p 0.2 threshold for "meaningful effect." Anything below d=0.2 we don't r…