Burn Calories
Members are often curious about how to use the sauna for weight loss. When you are producing sweat, your body is expending extra energy. This causes your basal metabolic rate to rise and can keep your metabolism risen far beyond the length of your session. This means that the infrared sauna burns more calories than if you were to work out and leave the gym straight away.
Probably the most obvious way that a sauna can help with weight loss is by water weight alone. At any given time our bodies can hold up to five pounds of water weight. By sweating in any way, whether through exercise or sweating it out in a sauna, you are able to shed some of those pounds. However, be aware that water weight is easy to lose and easy to gain, and should, for the most part, not be something you worry about. Generally, you will gain any pounds lost as soon as you hydrate yourself, which is something that should be done after every single sauna session.
Infrared saunas use infrared light to raise your body temperature without affecting the room's temperature, and this makes them much more bearable than regular saunas where high heat tolerance is necessary to withstand a session. This radiation penetrates almost 4 cm into your skin and has effects on the cellular level that have positive repercussions in your body as a whole. Their main effect is stimulating the mitochondria. Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, and they produce all the energy that keeps us alive and fuels all the chemical reactions that happen in our bodies all the time. Thus, stimulating the mitochondria results in more energy production and an increase in your metabolic rate. This boost to your metabolism is the reason why you can burn anywhere between 200 to 600 calories during a half-hour session in an infrared sauna [1,2].
The effect infrared saunas have on burning calories was demonstrated by a study at Binghamton University in New York, where they exposed their patients to infrared saunas three times a week for 45-minute sessions. They continued the study for four months and in the end, those exposed to infrared radiation had a 4 percent drop in their body fat, while the other group's body fat remained the same [3].
There’s another way in which infrared saunas can help you lose temporary weight. Just like with regular saunas, when you’re exposed to infrared light and your body heats up, you end up sweating. This can help you get rid of your water weight, but the weight will come back once you start drinking water [4]. This can be a good option for when you’re feeling bloated. An example of when an infrared sauna session could be beneficial is on women who experience bloating right before or during their period. While the effects aren't permanent, they can help you get rid of the extra water weight.
