Ben Greenfield

So some things to think about are, first of all, if you look at sauna before or sauna after, if you want all of the performance-enhancing benefits of a sauna, like the production of new red blood cells and erythropoietin or EPO, like a precursor to red blood cells, and you want a higher amount of heat shock proteins, and you want better blood flow, getting in the sauna...

after you've exercised gives you way more benefits because your body is already kind of like hot and stressed and you're piling some extra heat on top of that.

Getting in the sauna or preheating before exercise compared to pre cooling

before exercise would technically not be as good because even though you're kind of like heating up the muscles a you can do that with just like a good dynamic warm-up and b you're shifting blood flow to the skin away from muscles away from areas of the body where you'd prefer to have blood for performance so this would be well let me ask you this like if you walk into your gym and your gyms

Mm-hmm.

You're a weird anomaly.

Really?

Well, let me explain why.

I am anyway, but that's— Hot yoga is harder than regular yoga cardiovascularly.

Right.

Because your body has to work that much harder to cool itself, and it has to shift between shifting blood to the extremities to be able to cool the body and also get enough blood to the muscles to be able to fuel the muscles.

Okay.

And so the heart has to work harder.

So the heart rate goes up.

So if you're working out in a hot gym, and it's an actual hot gym, not like hot enough to where your muscles aren't so cold that you can't move, but hot enough to where like you're sweating more, you're having to move more blood flow around.

Your rating of perceived exertion, like how hard you perceive that workout to be and how hard arguably that workout actually is, is going to be higher if it's hotter.

So if your goal is just like pure cardiovascular benefits, then working out in a hot environment might be superior.

But if your goal is like strength, power, biomechanics, etc.,

Like working out in a room that's like unreasonably hot would be less advantageous from a performance standpoint.

And there are nuances like if you're, I don't know, acclimatizing to go do some kind of like a race or something in a hot area.