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Mikrodermabrazja kontra sauna - Która metoda pielęgnacji skóry jest lepsza?
A Word From Verywell
It is important to take all of the necessary precautions to stay safe when you use a sauna. Although it has overall health benefits, don’t use a sauna as an alternative to any standard medical treatment.
Verywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
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Precautions and Safety
If your doctor says you can use the sauna, keep these precautions and safety measures in mind.
- Limit your time: Keep sauna use to less than 20 minutes. For first-time users, as little as five minutes is enough. It is important to see how the body reacts to the environment of the sauna.
- Hydrate: Drink two to four glasses of water after using the sauna. It is OK to drink water while in the sauna as well.
- Supervise children: Some pediatricians recommend children under six years old avoid saunas, since babies and young children have difficulty regulating their body temperature. Older children should always be supervised in the sauna, as some may experience symptoms such as dizziness.
- Avoid cold showers afterward: This may increase the risk of a cardiac event in people with pre-existing heart disease.
- Avoid alcohol: Alcohol promotes dehydration and increases the risk of arrhythmia, hypotension, and sudden death. Since saunas also cause water loss, steer clear of drinking before and after use until you're fully rehydrated.
Types of Saunas
Sauna bathing is known as whole-body thermotherapy or heat therapy. It is used in different forms in different parts of the world.
What Is Thermotherapy?
Thermotherapy, or "heat therapy," uses heat to treat symptoms.
Throughout time, saunas have been used for hygiene, health, social, and spiritual purposes. There are a couple of different types of saunas.
Modern-Day Sauna
The modern-day sauna follows the traditional Finnish-style sauna. These saunas have dry air with humidity ranging from 10% to 20%.
There are increased periods of humidity, where the temperature ranges between 176 and a maximum of 212 degrees. Other styles include the Turkish-style Hammam and Russian Banya.
Infrared Sauna
The infrared sauna is a dry heat sauna. It has a temperature range between 113 and 140 degrees.
Different types of saunas can be distinguished by their level of humidity, heating source, and construction style.
Hydrate to Replenish Lost Sweat
The purpose of a sauna’s high heat is to make you sweat. While the process is healthy and beneficial, it is also extremely dehydrating. You can actually lose a couple of pounds of water when you’re in the sauna (we explore this in detail in our article about calorie loss in the sauna).
To replenish lost sweat, it’s important to drink at least six cups of water throughout your entire sauna experience, beginning before you enter and continuing after you exit. Keeping a water bottle with you while you’re relaxing inside the sauna helps with hydration and makes post-sauna hydration much easier.
Make sure to avoid using a metal water bottle when you’re in the sauna because it will become uncomfortably hot due to the high room temperature. Using a BPA-free plastic water bottle like this one (on Amazon) makes staying hydrated convenient, easy, and safe.
When you step out of the sauna and begin cooling off, continue to drink. When you sweat, you don’t just lose water but also lose important electrolytes, essential minerals like potassium, sodium, calcium, and magnesium.
Electrolytes help regulate nervous system functioning and muscle contractions, balance your pH levels, and play a key role in hydration. Therefore, after the sauna, you may want to drink beverages that contain and help replace electrolytes.
While sports drinks do contain electrolytes, they often don’t have enough to replace what is lost during the extreme perspiration caused by the sauna. Also, they tend to have a lot of added sugars and food coloring, which are unhealthy. Other electrolyte-replacement drinks that are healthier include:
