Let’s face it, most of us don’t like to be uncomfortably hot. We use air conditioning and even special “coolmax’ clothes to keep ourselves cool.
What if allowing yourself to be uncomfortably hot and to sweat for just a bit could help you build muscle faster and lose fat?
You still don’t want to be uncomfortable? What if I told you it might increase your lifespan?
Studies show that people who get hot tend to live longer and be healthier Specifically, those who use sauna the most live the longest. Most sauna using people tend to live in Sweden and places where it’s cold and dark for much of the year.
Using a sauna can be a huge advantage from a health, performance, and longevity standpoint.
We need to create a sauna culture in our country, especially in areas that experience winter.
Sauna can also be used to put on muscle and lose fat.
Why Does Heat Burn Fat?
Heat acclimation
- Burns calories
- Increases growth hormone
- Improves insulin sensitivity
- Reduces fat through norepinephrine release leading to increased metabolism
How does Sauna Build Muscle?
Heat induces muscle hypertrophy. To optimize muscle gain, use a sauna immediately following a workout. Do not get into a cold shower or cold tub.
Cold will mitigate the benefits of your workout. Upon finishing your workout, spend 20-30 minutes in the sauna before you do anything else.
If you have more time, do two 20-minute sessions with a 30-minute break in between, which has been shown to double growth hormone over baseline. Doing this multiple times a week has been shown to increase growth hormone even more.
A 30-minute sauna session was shown in one study to increase muscle regrowth 30% more than those not using a sauna.
You can take the cold shower after you emerge from the sauna.
Sauna use after a workout has been shown to
- Increase GH which leads to muscle synthesis
- Increase heat shock proteins
- Decrease overall stress
- Improve athletic performance
- Reduce protein degradation
This is a super simple hack to massively speed up fat loss and build lean muscle.
Finish your workout and hop in the sauna for 20 minutes. I usually bring a book and get some reading in during y sessions. I’m also detoxing heavy metals and phthalates at the same time, so bonus!
It can take a few sessions to get used to the heat and feel comfortable sitting and sweating for 25 minutes, but after years of doing this, I rarely get uncomfortable in the sauna. A side benefit is that you are more comfortable in the heat of the summer while everyone around you is sweating and complaining.
I’ve had great success combining a short but intense workout session with sauna. I’m able to keep more muscle while spending less time at the gym floor and enjoy my experience at the gym more because 30 minutes is spent relaxing and reading in the sauna.
Make sauna sessions a common addition to your workout days!
How to Gain Muscle Using Heat
When you’re jacked, people don't ask if you lift. They ask you for advice.
When I was trying to gain muscle, I tried tons of gimmicks:
Legendary Abs…
Whey Protein…
BCAAs..
Creatine..
Drop Sets…
Eccentrics…
Start using science to build the body you want!
Most people look to bodybuilders to learn how to get jacked.
But these guys are both genetic lottery winners and gym residents. They do things you will not.
The problem is that bodybuilders bulk up by eating a ton of food and lifting for 2 hours a day.
Who has time for that?
They end up gaining a bunch of fat with their muscle.
Or they use illegal supplements.
After bulking they cut a ton of fat, and a bunch of muscle, in the weeks before a contest.
They literally starve themselves and live off oatmeal, chicken breast, and beans.
They get to look totally jacked for about 5 hours. They spend 5 minutes on stage.
After the contest, they start eating again.
They typically gain a ton of water weight and a bunch of fat back when they start eating again.
Then they start the cycle over again by training in the gym for 2 hours a day.
Want to avoid all that hassle and gain some muscle without putting on fat?
You’ve probably heard of steroids, pre-workout supps, and post workout shakes.
Steroids are illegal and have negative side effects most of us don’t want.
Stuffing yourself with shakes and pre-workout supplements likely isn’t helping you in any way other than giving you gas.
Yes, you have to eat excess calories to gain muscle, but often the hormones your body produces help determine what you do with the food you eat.
But you still want to look good naked.
You want more muscle than other people.
Maybe you’ve thought of using steroids to enhance your recovery and performance in the gym.
But steroids have downsides. You don’t want shrunken balls and TRT the rest of your life.
Steroids are probably only necessary for professional athletes who have to recover quickly and perform at high levels in sport to get paid.
But pro athletes can’t use steroids because they’re banned.
Short of steroids, you’ve likely tried a ton of other supplements to mimic the effects of steroids without the downsides.
Most of them don’t work.
You may have done some research and self-experimentation and found some supplements that did work, and without the downsides of steroids.
You may have found SARMs.
SARMs are Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators and they stimulate the androgen receptors to do things like help you gain muscle and lose fat.
But even SARMs have some downsides, like the nasty taste, and a decrease in your body’s own production of testosterone during use.
I tried SARMs three separate times. The taste was TERRIBLE!
But I did gain almost 16lbs of muscle in 6 weeks.
So how can you build muscle more naturally without gaining fat?
How is Muscle Built?
You probably know by now that muscle isn’t built in the gym.
Muscle is built when you’re recovering from what you did in the gym.
Workouts damage muscle fibers.
When the body repairs them it rebuilds them thicker and lays down more to build muscle, known as hypertrophy.
You want a short, but intense gym session.
Then you want to recover like it's your job so you can build more muscle.
When you are recovering, growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor are laying down more muscle.
What's the One Thing You Need to do to Build Muscle Faster?
Increase the hormones that build muscle!
Muscle is built with hormones like IGF-1, testosterone, and growth hormone.
Some bodybuilders inject these substances into their systems to recover and build muscle faster.
But you can increase muscle growth without injections!
Simply increase the amount of growth hormone your body produces.
NASA and the Mayo Clinic point out that in people with a deficiency in growth hormone:
Growth hormone supplementation has been shown to
- Increase lean muscle mass
- Decrease body fat
- Increase bone density
Increase Growth Hormone and gain muscle by Using The Sauna
It's simple.
If you could do just one thing, get in the sauna after a workout.
Sauna has been shown to increase growth hormone up to 16X over baseline.
That’s a huge increase in growth hormone.
To get that big of a bump in growth hormone you would have to do two 1-hour sauna sessions broken up by a 30-minute rest and cool down period.
The best way is to use a sauna immediately following your workout for 20-30 minutes.
If you have time, take a 10-minute rest and do another 20 minutes for best effect!
However, even one sauna session has been shown to increase blood levels of growth hormone by 140%.
This trick may help you gain more muscle by increasing growth hormone right after your workout.
So, workout out hard and get your Sauna on.