I try to do 180 minutes a week of cardio. Mostly Zone 2. Biking, elliptical, tKD. But once in a while my legs feel too tired, so I complete my weekly minutes going to the steam room. It makes sense to me since it raises your heart rate. Also, my samsung watch can measure stress (whatever it means). It always shows the very, very minimal stress for me. The only time that I have been stressed was the day that I spent a…
FWIW you should probably be doing some max intensity, or at least high intensity cardio.
Zone 2 is great but the best health outcomes are from people who do high intensity exercise interspersed with zone 2 exercise.
A delta of 3 bpm on sauna days corresponds to around 4% delta if the baseline is 72 bpm. I've gone from a resting heart rate over a 7-day average of 64 bpm to 58 bpm by jumping 15 min. of rope a day, 4 times a week. I've lost weight, body fat, and I feel like my body is more efficient with corresponding lower heart rates throughout my active day. I like saunas for recovery and aches, they put me in a relaxed state af…
PSA: if you like saunas but don't have easy access to one, those IR sauna bags you can buy online work great.
Some people find it gross to basically sweat inside a powered sleeping bag, but if you don't mind that you can get the same effects of a sauna while lying on your (covered) couch and watching YouTube.
Not to be glib, but being dead lowers your night time heart rate more then exercise as well. Is having a lower night time heart rate the core goal of exercise? Is it even a goal at all? Or is it just an indicator of other goals being reached? I'm genuinely curious, I wasn't aware that the number mattered, more than what that number actually represents.
The goal is improving cardiovascular fitness, and a low heart rate means your cardiovascular system is operating efficiently.
Zero shot you'd make it an hour in a proper sauna for an hour. People have this idea that saunas are always enjoyable. I sauna daily, and its nice up to a point. For me thats like 10-12mins in. From then on, its tough.
You are clearly not Finn (/s)
lol, this is true. Wish I could tolerate it longer like a proper Finn. I’ll go 25 mins occasionally but mostly I do 15 mins, break, another 5-10 mins..
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.
Increasing skin temperature is known to induce sleep (can't find a source currently, sorry). Something about your skin being warmer allowing your body to cool more effectively, I think. So a hot shower before bed is actually great for sleep, because you get the increased skin temp, relaxed muscles from the warm water, and general relaxation because showers are (for many people) relaxing.
That's funny, I find it much easier to fall asleep in a cold environment. Then again, I also like to use a heavy blanket, so maybe it's the weight more than the cold that's helping me.
i was mostly refering to humidity/duration/temperature given that most devices do not report back these values
I'm equally confused as the other person above. Why not just ask participants to report what type of sauna they used? Sure humidity/duration/temp would be awesome to have, but at the very minimum knowing if a dry sauna would get the same results as a traditional steam sauna.
What if they jumped between saunas? And with self-reporting, the more you ask I guess the less precise the result... Sensors, however...
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.
Athletes already know the answer from years of cultural knowledge, research, and firsthand experience. No, it doesn't make your cardio fitness meaningfully better. If you did sauna training for years and then tried to ramp up for a marathon, you'd be hopelessly out of shape. Endurance athletes obsessively track VO2 max, basically your body's ability to consume oxygen during workouts, and it certainly doesn't improve…
You’ve honed in specifically on VO2 but what about cardio health in general? Like light treadmill, not like a demanding marathon.
Problem is sauna use and genetic factors corrolate too strongly to make any conclusion to the broader population. If you live in/near Finland you likely sauna often, as have all your ancestors for thousands of years. If you don't live there both are false. Thus we can't know if Sauna is helpful for the general population who isn't of a Finish background.
Japan has a +4 years lead of life expectancy over Finland; Norway almost +3 years on Finland. I am not saying this is conclusive per se, but to me the sauna-people-live-forever is not backed up by the data. I would instead reason that, e. g. weight correlates a lot more here.
Your comparison reads to suggest that Japan doesn't have Onsen culture or that sauna does not exist in Norway.
That's to say, many cultures from around the globe have developed similar activities that heat the body.
Athletes already know the answer from years of cultural knowledge, research, and firsthand experience. No, it doesn't make your cardio fitness meaningfully better. If you did sauna training for years and then tried to ramp up for a marathon, you'd be hopelessly out of shape. Endurance athletes obsessively track VO2 max, basically your body's ability to consume oxygen during workouts, and it certainly doesn't improve…
You’ve honed in specifically on VO2 but what about cardio health in general? Like light treadmill, not like a demanding marathon.
Cardio of course is short for "cardiovascular system," which consists of a whole lot of moving parts. Saunas improve some parts of it but certainly not all of it.
Will fixing up your radiator fix your car? Maybe, if the radiator was the problem, but there's a lot of other stuff inside a car to work on, too.
Your body evolved under the expectation that it would be stressed in numerous different ways, but those stressors can all be avoided in the modern era. If you want to most reliably recreate those stresses you need to do cardio and resistance training.
Not true. You can't really train your muscles to use less oxygen for the same energy output (what "oxygen-efficiency" would imply). You rather increase their capacity to take up oxygen from the blood and burn it. They will use more oxygen to output more energy. That additional oxygen needs to come from somewhere. Endurance training at the same time trains the heart to deliver more oxygen to the periphery; the primary…
I would assume that another factor is that the technique for a given exercise on the other hand can be improved, and that can help with decreasing the necessary energy - would that be a correct statement? And as a follow up, depending on activity type this may or may not be significant?
Yes, definitely. Technique is partly about efficient mechanical movement, sending the various parts of your body in the right direction(s) and not waste effort on movement that doesn’t contribute to propelling you forwards. But for endurance sports, it’s really about minimizing energy cost at a given speed. To use running as an example, you can improve biomechanical efficiency through better timing, correct loading of tendons, tendon stiffness, elastic energy use, and more.