Is sauna good after workout?

Ask whether a sauna is good after a workout and you'll hear that it flushes toxins, melts fat and speeds healing. The research supports a shorter list. Post-exercise sauna sessions have been tested for muscle soreness, endurance, blood pressure and muscle growth, and the results differ a lot from one outcome to the next.

This page goes through the benefits of sauna after a workout one at a time, with the studies behind each. Then it covers how long to sit, whether to go before or after training, how much water you lose, and who should skip it. For the long-term heart data from Finland, see our review of sauna and cardiovascular health.

Benefits of Sauna After Workout: What the Studies Show

Here's each claimed benefit next to the best study that tested it after exercise:

Most of these are small trials, often in trained athletes, so treat the numbers as signals rather than guarantees. The pattern is still useful. Sauna helps most with how you feel the next day and with heat and blood-volume adaptations, and it does nothing extra for muscle or fat.

Sauna for Muscle Recovery and Soreness

The clearest test of sauna for muscle recovery comes from Finland. In Ahokas and colleagues (2023), 16 male basketball players did a hard session of maximal strength work and jumps, then either rested quietly for 20 minutes or sat in an infrared sauna at about 43 °C. Each player did both, a week apart. Fourteen hours later, jump height had dropped less after the sauna, muscle soreness was milder and players rated their recovery higher. Their night-time heart rate and HRV were no different, so the heat didn't disturb overnight recovery.

An earlier study is more mixed. Mero and colleagues (2015) had 10 active men sit in a far-infrared sauna at 35 to 50 °C for 30 minutes after either a 60-minute muscle-building session or a maximal endurance run. After the strength session, recovery was no different from sitting at room temperature. After the endurance run, jump height 30 minutes later was slightly better with the sauna.

The broader soreness evidence points the same way. A 2021 meta-analysis by Wang and colleagues pooled 32 randomized trials with 1,098 people and found that heat applied after exercise reduced DOMS pain both within 24 hours and beyond. Hot packs had the clearest effect, and other forms of heat weren't significant on their own. Cold worked about as well as heat. So a sauna can take the edge off next-day soreness, but expect a modest effect, not a fast track.

Does a sauna after lifting hurt muscle growth?

No. Ahokas and colleagues (2025) followed 40 female team-sport athletes through 6 weeks of strength and power training. Half sat in an infrared sauna at 50 °C for 10 minutes after training three times a week. Both groups built the same amount of muscle, and the sauna group showed small extra gains in one loaded-jump test. That sets heat apart from ice baths, which have trial evidence of blunting muscle growth when used straight after lifting, as our cold plunge recovery review explains.

Infrared Sauna for Muscle Recovery vs a Traditional Sauna

An infrared sauna heats your body with radiant panels and runs at about 35 to 50 °C. A traditional Finnish sauna heats the air, usually to 80 to 100 °C, and you can add steam by throwing water on the stones. The infrared version feels gentler. In Mero's study, a traditional-style session at the same 35 to 50 °C but with more humidity left heart rate at 92 beats a minute afterward, against 71 after infrared.

The research splits along the same line. The recovery and soreness studies above used infrared saunas. The endurance and blood pressure studies below used traditional saunas, mostly at 65 to 108 °C. So if your main goal is feeling fresher for tomorrow's session, infrared has the more direct evidence. If you want the heat adaptations behind the endurance and blood pressure results, a traditional sauna is what was tested.

Sauna After Exercise for Endurance

This is where post-workout sauna has its most striking results. In Scoon and colleagues (2007), six competitive male distance runners sat in a humid sauna at about 90 °C for about 31 minutes straight after training, roughly 13 times over 3 weeks. They also did 3 weeks of training without it. After the sauna weeks, they ran 32 percent longer before exhaustion at their 5 km race pace, which the authors estimated as about a 1.9 percent improvement in a race. Plasma volume, the fluid part of the blood, rose 7.1 percent, and the runners whose plasma volume rose most improved most.

Two later studies back up the blood-volume story. Stanley and colleagues (2015) had seven well-trained cyclists sit in an 87 °C sauna for 30 minutes after training for 10 days, and plasma volume peaked about 18 percent higher after just four sessions. Kirby and colleagues (2021) gave 20 middle-distance runners, 13 of them women, 3 weeks of normal training with or without about 28 minutes in a very hot dry sauna roughly three times a week. In a hot running test afterward, the sauna group's peak core temperature fell 0.2 °C more and their heart rate 11 beats a minute more than the training-only group's. Their VO2max and running speed at a set lactate level also improved more.

These were trained athletes using long, very hot sessions, and the effect works through heat adaptation. If you have a summer race or train in hot weather, a few weeks of post-run sauna sessions are a practical way to get some of that adaptation without running in the heat.

Sauna After the Gym and Blood Pressure

The best evidence that sauna adds something to ordinary exercise comes from the Lee trial. The researchers randomized 47 inactive adults, average age 49, each with at least one heart disease risk factor, to one of three groups for 8 weeks. One group exercised three times a week, with a 60-minute session of bodyweight and basic resistance exercises plus stationary cycling. The second did the same exercise plus 15 minutes in a sauna right afterward, starting at 65 °C and rising 5 °C every two weeks. The third group did neither.

Compared with exercise alone, the exercise-plus-sauna group finished with systolic blood pressure 8.0 mmHg lower, total cholesterol lower and cardiorespiratory fitness 2.7 ml/kg/min higher. Fat mass didn't fall any further with the sauna. Exercise alone also beat the control group on fitness and fat mass.

A single session lowers blood pressure too. In Laukkanen and colleagues (2018), 102 adults with heart disease risk factors sat in a 73 °C sauna for 30 minutes, and their average systolic pressure fell from 137 to 130 mmHg while their arteries became less stiff. That drop is part of why some people feel light-headed when they stand up after a post-workout sauna, because exercise also lowers blood pressure for a while afterward. The long-term picture, including the Finnish studies that linked frequent sauna use with fewer heart deaths, is in our sauna and heart health review.

How Long to Sit in Sauna After Workout

Ten to 20 minutes suits most people. Here's what the post-exercise studies used:

The 30-minute sessions at 90 °C or hotter were done by trained endurance athletes in lab conditions. If you're new to the sauna, start with 5 to 10 minutes in a traditional sauna at 70 to 80 °C, or 15 minutes in an infrared one. Build toward 15 to 20 minutes over a few weeks, two to four times a week. Leave right away if you feel dizzy, sick or confused.

What do 20 minutes of sauna do?

Your heart rate climbs, the blood vessels in your skin widen to shed heat, and your blood pressure dips, as in the Laukkanen study. You also sweat. In Podstawski and colleagues (2014), 674 young adults lay in a 90 °C dry sauna for two 10-minute sessions with a 5-minute break. Women lost 0.37 kg on average and men 0.50 kg, and people with overweight or obesity lost the most, about 0.7 to 0.8 kg.

Sauna Before or After Workout?

After. Every study above put the sauna after training, and there's a good reason to keep it there. A sauna before a workout warms you up and drains fluid before you've started. The American College of Sports Medicine's position stand on exercise and fluid replacement (Sawka and colleagues, 2007) sets the aim of drinking during exercise as avoiding a water loss of more than 2 percent of body weight, because larger losses compromise performance. Starting a session already short on fluid and already hot moves you toward that line before the first set.

Give yourself 5 to 10 minutes after training, until your breathing settles and you've had some water. Then go in.

How Much Water You Lose in a Post-Workout Sauna

A post-workout sauna stacks a second sweat on top of the workout's. The Podstawski numbers, roughly half a kilo in 20 minutes, come on top of whatever you lost training. The ACSM position stand recommends weighing yourself before and after to estimate what you've lost, and the goal afterward is to replace that fluid and its electrolytes.

Drink more than you lost, because some of it passes straight through. Rehydration studies give people about one and a half times their sweat loss. In Shirreffs and colleagues (2007), volunteers who drank 150 percent of their sweat loss as low-fat milk stayed hydrated over the next five hours. Those who drank the same amount of water or a sports drink were back in deficit within about an hour.

That water loss is also why the scale drops after a sauna. It's not fat, and it returns as soon as you drink. Our review of whether sweating burns calories goes through why a hotter, sweatier session doesn't burn meaningfully more energy.

Who Should Skip the Sauna After a Workout

Sauna is well tolerated by most healthy adults. A review in the American Journal of Medicine by Hannuksela and Ellahham (2001) lists the clear exceptions, and a few more apply after hard training:

• After drinking alcohol. In Kenttämies and Karkola (2008), deaths in Finnish saunas over 13 years were rare, fewer than 2 per 100,000 people a year, and half involved alcohol. Hannuksela and Ellahham note that alcohol in the sauna raises the risk of low blood pressure, heart rhythm problems and sudden death.
• With unstable heart disease. Unstable angina, a recent heart attack and severe aortic stenosis are contraindications. Most people with stable coronary heart disease tolerate a sauna, but that's a conversation to have with a cardiologist first. The same goes for anyone on blood pressure or heart medication.
• During pregnancy, without medical advice. In a study of 23,491 pregnancies, Milunsky and colleagues (1992) found that heat exposure from hot tubs, saunas or fever in the first trimester was linked with a higher risk of neural tube defects. The sauna-only estimate wasn't statistically significant, but avoiding overheating in early pregnancy is the safe default.
• When you're already overheated or unwell. After a long session in hot weather, with a fever, or if you feel dizzy, nauseous or confused, skip the heat and cool down instead.

What This Means for You

If you enjoy the sauna and you're healthy, it's a reasonable add-on to training. Cool down for 5 to 10 minutes, sit 10 to 20 minutes, two to four times a week, and drink back what you sweat out. Expect slightly less soreness, a calmer end to the session and, over weeks, a small boost to the heat and blood pressure gains your training already brings. Don't expect extra muscle or fat loss from it.

The sauna is the easy part. The workout before it is what drives every one of those results, and the hard part is still showing up week after week. Sleep, food and sensible training load matter more for recovery than any heat session, and our guide on how to recover faster from a workout ranks them. If you train with weights, build in what brings you back: a fixed time, a session short enough to survive a busy day, and a streak you don't want to break. Mike, 23, who got visibly stronger in four months, said, "The streak system got me hooked. I didn't want to break my chain." FitCraft's dumbbell and bodyweight strength workouts are led by a 3D AI coach who demonstrates every exercise, and our roundup of the best strength training apps compares which ones help people keep going.