Unveiling the potential of sauna sessions to boost your calorie burning and overall health
Are you considering adding sauna sessions to your weight loss routine? It’s essential to understand that while using a sauna, most of the weight you lose comes from sweating as your body works to cool itself down.
Despite this, saunas can still be beneficial for your health. They offer a soothing environment where you can relax without engaging in intense physical activity. So, does a sauna burn calories?
In this blog, we’ll reveal whether you can burn calories by simply sitting in a sauna.
Understanding Calories: Their Role in Health and Weight Loss
Before we answer whether a sauna session can affect your calorie count, you need a basic understanding of what calories are. Though they’re often mentioned when you’re trying to lose weight, it’s not something bad you need to get rid of. Calories are simply a measurement of the energy you intake from your meals.
You need some calories to simply live. However, when your body has an excess of calories, it’ll store them in fat tissue which will then increase your weight.
Does a Sauna Burn Calories?
Whenever you have a sauna session, you lose calories. You lose calories no matter what you do. Even if you’re simply lying down in bed, you lose calories since your body uses this energy to keep your heart pumping, brain thinking, lungs breathing, and so on.
Now, you might wonder if a sauna session burns more calories than if you’re simply at rest in a normal environment.
In general, using a sauna will increase your metabolism. Therefore, you sweat more, your blood vessels dilate, your heart pumps harder, and your circulation improves. All of these bodily functions require more energy than when you’re at rest, so using a sauna will help you burn extra calories.
The Maximum Calories a Sauna Can Burn
While researchers have found that you burn more calories while using a sauna, there are few studies that explore the subject. This could be due to the difficulty in standardising the studies since calorie burning depends on many factors such as age, ethnicity, and lifestyle. Therefore, there’s no established number of calories burned per minute when using a sauna.
Nevertheless, according to studies that do exist, the range of calories you could burn is as high as 400 – 600 with a 30-minute infrared sauna session. Another report says, you could burn 73 more calories than at rest with a 10-minute sauna session, but that number could increase to 134 with repeated sessions.
What Affects Calories Burned in a Sauna?
Though you could burn many calories in a session, whether you can achieve that goal will depend on the following:
Basal Metabolic Rate
Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the number of calories your body needs to maintain basic life functions while at rest. This rate significantly influences how many calories you might burn during a sauna session. It varies depending on your height, weight, and age, which all affect your metabolism. For instance, if you’re older, your body needs to work harder to maintain itself when you’re in a sauna, which means you’ll burn more calories. Moreover, if you have more fatty tissue, you’re likely to sweat more which also burns calories.
Temperature of the Sauna
The higher the temperature of a sauna, the more you’ll burn calories. When you’re in a high-heat environment, your body needs to work harder to sweat to keep you at an optimal temperature. The process of creating sweat uses caloric energy.
However, infrared saunas are the exception. This type of sauna generally has a lower temperature compared to traditional Finnish saunas. Yet the heat from this sauna penetrates the body more deeply rather than using heated air. Therefore, it can have a stronger effect even at a lower temperature.
Total Duration of Sessions
According to reports, the total time you spend in a sauna and calories burned have a typical connection. Rather than a linear increase in calories burned, it’s exponential. Therefore, you’ll burn more calories if you go to the sauna for multiple sessions back-to-back for an hour.
However, the period of time you can safely remain in a sauna depends on your body. If you can’t handle more than 20 minutes in a sauna, then trying to stay for an hour on that same day could lead to health complications.
Heat Tolerance
Though more heat can increase your calorie burning, your body will adapt to that heat if you go to the sauna often. This tolerance to heat will allow your body to cool down faster and more easily. Therefore, you won’t burn as many calories using a sauna as when you were just starting out.
