Hi everyone,
We hope you're having a great summer so far! We're about to go through another brief temperature spike, so I felt compelled to slide into your messages with a perhaps unusual perspective: sauna isn't just for winter, it's amazing during the summer too.
I know it seems counter-intuitive. “But I'm already too hot!”
Therein lies a hidden statement: “I can't handle this heat!”
And that's where sauna is an awesome weapon against temperature intolerance.
Cold water exposure is excellent for making us more resilient to the cold. It literally builds our “brown fat”, kind of like our body's layer of fiberglass insulation that keeps the heat in and the cold out.
Sauna doesn't build brown fat to do the reverse in summer, like our homes do (keep cool in and heat out), but a consistent sauna practice does influence a biological process known as “hormetic adaptation". The TL;DR version of what that means could be stated as: “whatever doesn't kill you …”. It's the process your body goes through when it's under stress. The more it experiences a stress on a consistent basis, the more it adapts to tolerate that stress.
So, in this context, the more your body experiences extreme temperature, the more adapted it becomes to experiencing extreme temperature, and so the less extreme temperature starts to feel.
When you cold plunge regularly, you can easily (relatively) immerse yourself into 45 degree water for minutes at a time without completely freaking out like your average humans would. In fact, you learn to control your breath and your stress, instead of being controlled by it.
The same is true of sauna. When you regularly spend time in 190 degree heat, a 90 degree day - like we're about to have close to for a couple of days - is a cakewalk. While everyone else is feeling overwhelmed and drained, your temperature-adapted body kind of looks around with a casual shoulder shrug and gets on with its day, relatively free of the stress of high temperature.
Embracing hormetic adaption is like levelling up your biological toolbox. While your regular humans burn up energy (and the planet) cranking up their AC during the summer, or throwing on layer after layer and again cranking up their energy use during the winter, hormetically-adapted humans become something more, something super. What's a good word for that? Super … humans? 🤔😆
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Contrast Therapy in our new Fire & Ice room is our superhuman factory 🧊
Through controlled circuits of exposure to:
🔥 190° Finnish sauna
🌊 60° Nordic cold dunk
🧊 Aromatherapy-infused ice therapy for use inside or outside of the sauna
😊 And cycles of rest in between …
… you will train your body to not only tolerate, but fully relax into, both intense heat and contrasting cold.
You'll immediately come out feeling refreshed, reinvigorated, and maybe a little bit super.
But the real benefit will be later on, when you realize that you're not affected by heat the same way everyone else is. That's when the real gift of a consistent summer sauna practice shows up.
