Dr. Stacy Sims: So inherently, women don’t need to be cold.
When we are looking at stress responses, because that’s how I view all the environmental and exercise data -what kind of stress does it put on the body when a woman gets into ice cold or cold water. It invokes such a severe, strong stress response, much stronger than a male’s response, that her body goes into more of a shutdown phase, where it invokes a sympathetic drive, and it doesn’t create the metabolic changes that we see with men. If you were to take a woman and put her in 15 or 16 degrees Celsius, which is around that 55 degree mark, she will end up with the same responses that a man has, because it’s not as severe a shock to a woman’s body as it is for a mans. Why is that? Because we have more body fat, we tend to vasodilate and vasoconstrict first for controlling our temperature.
Dr. Stacy Sims: Do women do better in the heat:
Okay, so when we look at sauna exposure, women can tolerate heat a lot more than men. A woman can sit in there, sit up high, 20 minutes or so, not sweating
yet absorbing heat and vasodilate – it’s great. So, we’re heating ourselves, our body’s responding to it by what we call heat shock protein responses which are these little proteins that will uncouple and then re-coup and be better for it. It’s creating a whole cellular change that then is stimulating better responses within the muscle. The muscle can use glucose a lot better and can use fat a lot better. Were also increasing blood flow to the brain. We’re also improving our blood vessels,so they respond to constriction dilation a lot faster, which is important as we get older and start hitting perimenopause where we start having blood pressure problems. It also allows us to hit higher temperatures on the outside, like summer times without having undue stress. When you’re in the sauna sitting there, it takes time for the body to heat up, because of our thermos-regulatory differences between what men do when they get in and they start sweating profusely, and then they get dehydrated, and they don’t have time to adapt as well to the heat as women do. Again, women vasodilate first, and then we start sweating.
Do you recommend Sauna
Yes, I do. If we are doing 10 to 15 minutes twice a week, at bare minimum, you get health benefits, better cardiovascular health, so better blood flow, better blood pressure. We have metabolic responses, so we have better blood glucose control and better fatty acid metabolism.
Are you going to burn more fat in a sauna?
Yes, if you sit in a sauna, you will use the circulating fat as a fuel instead of storing it.