All of these studies are always performed by Finns (or SE / DK / NO + maybe Russia).
I'd love to see this (and other sauna studies) replicated by someone somewhere to the south or hotter climates in general (southern Europe, Africa, hotter parts of Asia and the Americas).
I doubt they would replicate it or any of the magical effects of saunas. Lots of the sauna studies suffer from the same issue where people self-report sauna usage rather than being assigned randomly to a treatment group. In countries where saunas are readily accessible and most people are under the impression that the more you use sauna the healthier you are, the ones that use the sauna less are probably because they tolerate it far worse. And that's probably related with age, comorbidities, physical condition, etc.
Basically, the sauna studies are probably mostly discovering that "healthier people can stand sauna longer". In countries where most people don't stand sauna for more than a few minutes, that self-selection bias won't exist.
Also location. In my country, saunas at home aren't as common in Finland, but basically every gym has one. So the people that use the sauna the most, are likely to be the most active.
If you want to experience positive health effects from sauna, you don't have to set records in heat and duration. You just get hot and sweat as much as you feel is fine. So you can do it in almost all conditions. Sweating out bad stuff from your body, activating the blood flow, unless you are at risk of a aneurysm - of course it is beneficial, even though it doesn't magically turn your health around. But a proper sauna and ice bath do revive and make you feel reborn. Try it at least at some point and then you can judge if it did not make you feel more alive and healthier and that all the studies around it a "probably bullshit".
I don't know about that. As in yes I agree but that seems to apply to Western countries in general. For example in Tunisia, people go to public baths at least once a week and part of that involves sitting in a hot steamy room for 30+ minutes. So here you have an example for a population that does use sauna (in a way) but aren't relying on self-reporting.
As an Estonian, anything below 80°C is considered a "kids sauna". 80°C - 90°C is a cold-but-workable sauna and proper sauna starts from 90+°C. I'd assume it's the same in Finland as we share a lot of the sauna culture.
This would be same in Germany and eastern european countries too. But it really depend on humidity. High humidity saunas don't have to be hot and get tough pretty quicky. 100c dry sauna is lot more manageable than 60c humid sauna (atleast to me).
Indeed, humidity matters a lot. Most our saunas here are löyly (in Finnish) saunas, so you get a rollercoaster of dry - humid - dry cycles. Once you get to 100+c and throw a good amount of water on the stones, it can get quite challenging to endure :)
Everybody has their personal preference of course. For me, the sweet spot seems to be a moderately humid sauna at 93c. At that point, the löyly is not too harsh yet but is still hot enough to make you feel alive :)
Whether sauna is hot or not depends on whether you enjoy the cold water plunge afterwards :)
The typical preset on dry saunas in Bay Area is ~165 F (73 C). Which is cold. Waste of time and money :). Usually, by closing or pouring cold water on sensor, one can make it to 180-190 F (82-87 C) - this is where you start to feel like you are in sauna, though it takes prolong time to heat you up enough to enjoy the cold plunge. If you're lucky enough, you can get to 200, 210, 220 F (104 C) - this is where you start to feel relaxed like as if the heat is working inside you.
>Are you actually throwing water? Because even with 80 the steam is pretty hot
Of course those numbers would be impossible to enjoy in steam sauna. The only steam sauna that had a wall thermometer that i've visited in recent years was showing 55 C when it already felt pretty well and hot.
Note - steam sauna and "throwing water" are 2 different things. The steam sauna is a machine generating a lot of steam, so the room is close to 100% humidity.
The "throwing water" is like Russian "banya" - it is in-between of dry and steam, though frequently is more close to dry Finnish sauna - wooden walls, stove, etc. where in addition to the heated air, you'd throw a water on the heater/stones thus adding a hit of hot steam to that air (in some "banya" configurations if you happen to be close to and in the immediate path of that steam you can sometimes get light burns).
Would those be "dry saunas" or proper ones where you're allowed to throw water on the rocks? Adding humidity ('löyly') is kinda the point, and 73°C might be just fine for a small sauna, giving you a nice punchy löyly.
Depends on the location!
Very often, at public locations there is a "saua master" taking care, in smaller locations I have seen people handling this on their own.
And in one location there was a sign: "no private watering due to electrical issues"
I think I've heard US it's mostly no water at all on stove and Germany I've heard they have had these sauna-masters who come and cast water on stove.
Neither of these are practised anywhere in Finland at least. But there are at least one Finnish swimming bath where they had to limit steam competitions and made a button controlled mechanism to administer water instead of free usage. Not because electrical shock prevention but because bad human behaviour per se.
Yes every sauna I have ever been to in Europe (spas, various gyms) have electric heater with stones on top. Infra saunas are only for cheapest installs at home and usually dont generate enough heat.
Also, 80° celzius minimum for proper saunas, I have been to >100 celzius ones and its a struggle to remain for 15 mins inside.
Another point - I consider the after-part most crucial for health benefits to me - as-cold-as-possible long shower or even better a similar dip pool. Few days after that my cold resistance is significantly higher. Just the heating of body in sauna I can reach also ie with cardio workout or free weights, which brings tons of other benefits.
That "electric heater stones on top" is usually called stove, "kiuas" in Finnish :)
When needing to define type of stove, it's electric stove, wood heated stove. Latter has two types, which continuous wood burning is still common (this stove you can add burning wood during bathing) and older not so much any more used before bathing heated type stove which you cannot add wood while bathing. Oldest type is smoke-sauna, which doesn't have chimney at all. Wood is burnt in stove when heating, then when burnt enough sauna is ventilated first and then bathing starts.
But all these different heating elements are commonly stoves, just adding electric-, wood-, or smoke- stove is added context requiring.
Infra saunas then have those lamps of course, no stove there.
Also while 73°C is a proper sauna, there are plenty of hotter ones. 90°C is closer to what I'm used to at my apartment building's common sauna. I do take two breaks when I'm there for 30 mims though.
I knew a guy that would bring a steak sealed in a vac seal bag to the gym and leave it in the sauna while he worked out. One hour later he was done working out and it was ready to eat too. Not sure I can actually recommend it to others but the novelty was interesting till they nearly kicked him out of the gym.
What about Japanese hot springs? ("onsen")
Those are typically around 40°C but could be up to 60°C. Because it is hot water and not hot air the temperature would be transferred differently to the body though, so I don't think the numeric temperature is directly comparable.
Onsen baths are taken all year round: including summers that get hotter than in Finland, but especially enjoyed in winter.
I am a Spanish guy currently living in Japan, and honestly I hate sauna but love onsen. Most on my Spanish colleagues seem to think the same. I guess the main factor being that both Spain and Japan are have really hot summers, so why would you get in a hot room to sweat like a pig when you are already sweating outside?
And also replicated with participants not used to high temperatures inside a typical Finnish sauna. As the study said such people are very difficult to find in Finland. But I wonder if a person who has never been to a real sauna would tolerate this study protocol (2*15 min at 73° Celsius) without any training.
Sauna and hot climates may sound counterintuitive, but it has been tested by most Finns that when you come out of a hot sauna any outside temperature feels cool.
I'm an immigrant in Scandinavia, originally from a hot country, in my experience a 73C steam sauna is quite tolerable for a 2*15 min session.
The first time I was in a sauna after moving was a bit harder than after getting used to it but doable.
Nowadays I just love them, my friends and I built a couple of saunas to leave by the lake in their summerhouses, the cravings of going from hot -> very cold, and back to the heat is hard to explain, and I totally recommend it.
Northern Spaniard there, bring a Saunaa lover Finn with one of these climate-change induced hours at 43C at some day or two in Summer... in the Atlantic, in Bilbao, which is... inside a valley.
I've been in saunas at 60-70C and the feeling inside was much bearable because of the lack of humidity than 43C under a climate closer to UK than inner/Mediterranean Spain.
Hammam is not as hot as sauna and not as dry. Sauna's air temperatures can reach above 100 degress Celsius and humidity is usually relatively low (around 20%).
> Hammam's temperatures are around 40-50 degrees Celsius and humidity is close to 100%.
Which makes it absolutely unbearable. By the way, that combination of temperature + humidity will cause severe hyperthermia (which can be deadly) faster than people think.
Don't attribute to ideals what is simple self-preservation.
No sane person wants to become a legitimate military target. They want to sleep in their own beds, at home, without risking their families lives. Just like the rest of us.
As I've said before, Matrix really is the only viable open source solution for in-company communication.
Every other solution (Zulip / Mattermost / whatever) is too risky, they could easily bait-and-switch you like Gitlab did, by moving important features to different tiers, or engage in other shenanigans afforded by the open core model.
Matrix has a bad reputation because it used to be downright terrible (first time I tried it, in like 2018-2019), but is a lot better now.
Correction: Zulip is 100% open-source software, and has been for a decade now. (I lead the Zulip project). Zulip's protocol, which is used for client/server communication by all major clients, has extensive documentation including the complete change history for the last several years on https://zulip.com/api/ and https://zulip.com/api/changelog.
As far as I know, there is no mechanism through which Zulip could bait-and-switch a customer that Element could not also do. And I think that as a practical matter, it would be a lot easier for a new team to pick up developing Zulip if the Kandra Labs team were to disappear than the similar question for Matrix/Element.
The core reason is that Matrix is far less simple and self-contained than Zulip. I've talked to multiple groups who tried to build apps on top of Matrix and found it too difficult. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg... may be a useful third-party reference.
This isn't to say Matrix is bad. It's just targeting a different niche. Matrix was designed around the requirements of a global social network, where you want to be able to keep writing in channels even in event of a network partition. As a result, Matrix is far more complex and less self-contained than a Zulip server is. If you are doing internal communications with some external guests, you are far safer from technical risk with a robust self-contained system like Zulip than something like Matrix that is also a social network.
Zulip's goal is to be the best way to do complex work, focused on replacing tools like Slack, Teams, and Discord, without the ambition to support a social network, and that changes a lot about the architecture and what we can do in terms of performance and focus on the human experience.
The complexity associated with Matrix comes from wanting to build a multivendor ecosystem around an open standard, the decentralisation (and federation) to avoid building islands and then implementing things like multi-device e2ee and VoIP in such a context.
However, it is exactly these properties that make it so appealing to an organisation like the EC as they pursue digital sovereignty.
The goals of Matrix have nothing to do with being a social network. You could theoretically build a social network on top of Matrix (Matrix essentially syncs JSON in real-time), but I'm not aware of a project with traction, and more to the point, those projects are not relevant to this discussion. Yes Matrix is resilient to network partitions (that's a good thing for a messenger!), but that seems entirely orthogonal to your point on social networks.
Finally, I don't think it's fair to draw a comparison between the relationship between Kandra Labs and Zulip vs Element and Matrix. Yes Element is a major player in the Matrix eco-system having originally formed to hire the Matrix founding team, but since then many Matrix vendors have sprung up and if Element were to disappear tomorrow Matrix would continue. In fact, this is the whole purpose of having an independent Foundation, which in turn encourages multiple vendors to operate side by side.
I'd love to see this (and other sauna studies) replicated by someone somewhere to the south or hotter climates in general (southern Europe, Africa, hotter parts of Asia and the Americas).
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