John Baker - Sauna for Your Health

Sauna for Your Health

Lose weight

Look Younger

Strengthen Immune System

Sauna bathing offers a lot of health benefits to the users and so it has become the newest trend to follow this Finnish practice regularly. Nothing seems more reviving than shedding refreshing and healthy sweat for a couple of hours every day. Muscles get to unwind and all the stress just fades away with the dripping sweat, making our mind and body relaxed and rejuvenated. A healthy body and a re-energized mind are all you need to face the challenges of everyday life.

All it takes is a few minutes every day to make one feel and look better. People all over the world claimed that the persistent, gentle heat of sauna has proven to be beneficial for their health. For this reason, more doctors are recommending the multiple benefits of the sauna to their patients.

The sauna is primarily discovered by the Finnish when they realized that pouring water on hot rocks inside a small enclosed room makes a very hot, dry smoke that causes people to sweat. Nowadays, the concept of sauna has extended to different usages like at home, resorts or health spas. Sauna is a natural and effective way to treat many health complications and with the help of this book, you can try it now if you havent yet. The multiple benefits will soon convince you to make sauna-visit a regular practice.

People have been using saunas for hundreds of years and this practice is still popular in this modern era. Nowadays, everyones life has become robotic and full of stress. In this situation, many people prefer to sit quietly in a warm sauna until their sweat relax and unwind their bodies. Bathing in a sauna can make both your mind and body feel good, as well as, offer you additional health benefits besides relaxation. If you like to hang in communities of health-conscious people, eventually you will get to hear about the multiple benefits, particularly about detoxification of the body, of bathing in saunas. As a matter of fact, different kinds of saunas are advertised most of the time for their usefulness in cellulite reduction, weight loss, flushing of toxins and much more. There are also some sites who claim that their infrared saunas can assist in reversing cellular damage caused by EMFs and also detoxes heavy metals from the users body.

A sauna is basically an enclosed room that is heated to a temperature to between 70-100C. Usually, the traditional Finnish saunas use dry heat.

Typically, the humidity of these saunas remain are kept between 10-20 percent. However, there are also other saunas available with a higher level of humidity, for example, the Turkish-style saunas.

Sitting in a sauna can raise the temperature of your skin to about 40C. As the temperature of the skin increases, the person will also sweat heavily. The rate of heartbeat mounts as the body tries to keep itself cool. It is a common scenario to shed around a pint of sweat while sitting in a sauna only for some time.

Based on the way a sauna room is heated, you can find several types of sauna. These are:

• Wood burning: Wood is burned to heat the sauna rocks and the sauna room. This type of sauna is normally high in temperature but low in humidity.
• Electrically heated: This sauna is quite similar to a wood burning sauna and also has low in humidity and high in temperature. However, unlike the previous one, this type of sauna is heated using an electrical heater which is fixed on the floor to heat the room.

• Infrared room: This type of sauna is different than both the electrically-heated and the wood-burning saunas. Here, special lamps are used to radiate light waves in order to heat only the body of the person and not the whole room. Still, the sauna room becomes slightly heated but the temperature in this sauna remains relatively lower compared to other saunas. Typically, the overall temperature of the infrared saunas is kept at 60 o C.
• Steam room: This sauna is not a traditional sauna but still sometimes considered as one due to its similar properties. The steam room uses high humidity and moist heat instead of dry, moisture-less heat.
• Smoke sauna: In Finnish, smoke sauna is also known as savu-sauna. This type of sauna has a large wood-burning stove but does not have any chimney, unlike the other types. Nowadays, it is very rare to find a smoke sauna. Most probably because it needed to be heated for several hours by burning loads of wood to heat the large rocks. After you are done heating the room and have properly ventilated, you can now enjoy the authentic sauna experience.

The oldest Finnish saunas happen to be almost 10000 years ago, right after the Ice Age. These saunas were originally made of the earth pits hat were concealed with animal skins. You wont find these saunas anymore in Finland. However, the modern equivalent of earth pit ones are the tent saunas.

After the Stone Age, the arrival of the ground sauna took place. The construction of this type of sauna only requires an earth floor, a turf, a wooden door, three walls and few trunks of trees. A stove was placed at the corner of the sauna and the benches were made of logs.

The end of Iron Age brought us the smoke sauna with large stoves. This is the 3 rd -generation sauna that maintained its popularity till the 1930s. Smoke saunas were not like the modern saunas as smoke saunas used heated rock piles on fire for 7-8 hours until smoke came out and heated the room for some hours. Modern sauna lovers prefer the smoke sauna rather than other types. In the 18 th and 19 th century, the first sauna stoves were made with chimneys in Western Finland and soon became famous in the sauna city. In the 20 th century, the arrival of the barrel-looking, sheet stove took place.

Soon after World War II, there came a wood-saving sauna option where the room was heated using either gas or electric heater. This 5 th -generation sauna stove could heat the room within half an hour and it is still used in several backyard saunas and Finnish cottages.

Beliefs

In Finland, people have been using saunas for various purposes ages after ages. They used it to treat diseases, for relaxation, for religious rituals, to cleanse the body, for social interaction and so on. Not only this, saunas were used to purify women prior to their weddings, to give birth to children and bring old people to die in there too.

Historically, people used to believe that saunas must be built in specific locations only and a particular type of firewood must be used in saunas. In order to make sure fine sauna experiences in the future, the first bath had to be done following ancient traditions. There were also specifications for using someone elses sauna.

Sauna Elf

There was a common belief that every sauna is guarded by a spirit of its own. The spirits appeared as gnomes who used to protect the sauna from catching fire and other possible damages. People satisfied the gnome spirits by following sauna traditions, for example, by leaving a bowl of porridge during Christmas or a cup of water for the spirits when they go outside. As a remembrance of the ancient Finnish beliefs, some traditional saunas still keep gnomes inside the rooms.

Statistics

According to some researchers, a sauna is more than a sweat initiator it is rather a life saver! Several new studies show that the death rate of middle-aged men dying from heart conditions is half among regular sauna users. A regular visit to sauna also lowers the risk if early deaths caused by any health complications, like cardiovascular diseases. In other words, daily visitors can experience the multiple benefits better than occasional visitors. The health benefits can also be extended by increasing the amount of time spent sweating in the sauna with at least more than 20 minutes.