Sauna Health Benefits
11 benefits for the best of health

Sauna health benefits include lowering blood pressure, stress relief, easing tension and anxiety, helping muscle pain, and release of toxins in the body through sweat.

Sauna Health Benefits for relaxation, anxiety, and stress!

With the growing concern for staying healthy without visiting a crowded gym, and the need  to have the gym experience in our homes, people are searching for the best home sauna brands, and weighing the benefits verses investment cost.

11 Top Sauna Health Benefits

1. Helps sweat out toxins - Although the liver does a great job of processing toxins in the body, so much enters our system each day that helping the process along, can only make us healthier. Solvents, pesticides, drugs, nicotine, chemicals, and alcohol are the main culprits, and time in the sauna can actually help us secrete about a quart of sweat in 15 minutes.
2. Improves the effects of exercise - because dry heat and humidity mimics exercise by increasing the heart rate, increasing perspiration and body temperature helps relax muscles and opens blood vessels to allow better functioning of those vessels.
3. Good for heart health - studies have shown enhanced longevity in patients with heart problems, although it was unclear if it was heart relaxation, or the socialization in the sauna that made the biggest impact on health.
4. Naturally lowers blood pressure - several studies have shown that sauna time actually helps lower blood pressure, reduce anxiety, ease joint pain, and help the body naturally relax.
5. Reduces muscle pain and spasms - because high heat actually increases blood circulation, and we accumulate lactic acid after working out, increased blood flow from saunas can ease the soreness caused by lactic acid after a workout - that's why all the good gyms have saunas.
6. Helps clear skin - saunas are a treatment of choice for those with skin conditions, as steam opens pores and clears bacteria out of pores, helping clear acne blemishes.
7. Helps aid weight loss - although weight loss primarily comes from burning more calories than we consume, saunas help us sweat water weight, increase metabolism, and burn more calories.
8. Helps ease chronic pain - by helping relax muscles, patients with Fibromyalgia, Chronic pain syndrome, Osteoarthritis, Rheumatoid arthritis, and chronic fatigue, report that sauna heat helps muscle and joint pain.
9. Helps us manage stress - because the sauna helps relax body and mind, it can also help to reduce tension and stress, reduce the hormone cortisol, and naturally relax the body.
10. Helps fight illness - while saunas may not help cure disease, it can certainly help us manage the symptoms, especially sinus infection and respiratory illness, and the heat may also help to kill viruses.
11. Helps improve endurance and increase tolerance in exercise -  because saunas increase blood circulation, over time, it can help us exercise longer and harder

Beyond relaxation, clinical studies suggest that regular time in the sauna has several more significant health benefits, like the lower risk of vascular diseases such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease (CVD), stroke, and neuro-cognitive diseases like Alzheimers, Dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease.  But, those studies also suggest that sauna time also helps certain nonvascular conditions such as pulmonary diseases including COPD, asthma, and recurrent pneumonia.

Read more about those studies at MayoClinic.org

Sauna bathing is a popular healthy tradition all over the world, but most especially in Finland, where for thousands of years it has been used for relaxation and better health, and it is becoming increasingly popular now in the United States for that very reason. Several emerging studies suggest that beyond it's use for pleasure, sauna health benefits may be linked to many more health improvements in the near future.