Any day spa can have a sauna.  After all, a sauna is just a place where people go to sweat.  Of course, it’s a special kind of sweat, but its still sweat.  Few people pay much attention to how the sauna gets hot so it can generate sweat.  But the heat source is actually much more important than you might think.

Early saunas were heated by burning wood.  Many still are, depending on where you live in the world.  Later, natural gas became popular.  Up until recently, there was only one way to heat a sauna, really, and that was by burning something.  And the temperatures could get pretty high using the burning-something method.  It’s not unusual for a sauna to reach 180 degrees Fahrenheit.  It has to be that hot for its users to gain the benefits it offers.

However, around 40 years ago, the Japanese found a way to harness the sun’s warming rays and capture them in a sauna.  This is literally true.  They started using far infrared sauna heaters.

Far infrared radiation is the same radiation that warms you when you lie on the beach in the sun.  It’s not the ultraviolet radiation that can burn you.  It’s completely harmless, but it has properties that make it ideal for the sauna.

For example, when you sit in a traditional sauna, you’re being warmed by heated air.  The sauna heater has raised the temperature of the air around you, and you absorb the heat.  This heat penetrates about an eighth of an inch into your body and, when the temperature is high enough, you sweat.

In an infrared sauna, the sauna heater heats you, not the air.  Yes, the air will get warm, but that’s mostly from the heat emanating from the objects the heaters have warmed.  You and everything else in the sauna are being heated from the inside out.  Infrared radiation penetrates your body up to two inches or more and turns to heat inside you.

One immediate result of this alternative method of warming is a lower air temperature in the sauna.  The temperature can be more than 60 degrees Fahrenheit lower than in a traditional sauna and still deliver the same benefits as a traditional sauna — only more so.

For example, the deep heating generates a deep sweat that is much more effective at detoxification than sweat generated in a traditional sauna.  Studies have shown that sweat from people who use traditional saunas contains about 3 percent toxins.  Sweat from people who use an infrared sauna contains about 20 percent toxins.  Both kinds of sauna do their job, but the infrared sauna does it more effectively.