I recently listened to a podcast about the benefits of sauna or deliberate heat exposure and the gist is that if you get your core temperature at about 39 degrees celsius your cardiovascular system is working comparably hard to light exercise.

My take is that your heart and lungs are working out, even if your body is not. Do you get the same benefits as going for a run or bike ride for a comparable amount of time? no, since your limbs don't get fit, but your heart and lungs do.

Agreed - one is muscular/metabolic demand, the other (sauna) is thermoregulation.

Agreed on the long-term effect too: doing a study on long term health is a completely different story

Since you mention the TV, it seems there's a big factor missing in both the article and the discussion here. Namely, that sauna time is for many people the only time they ever take to be in silence, without the countless distractions otherwise bombarding our nervous systems. I.e. it's basically a form of informal meditation, which is known to have a lot of benefic impacts on body and mind. So maybe skip the TV part?...

> That is this improves a marker for good health without improving health

There is a substantial body of existing research to peruse about the impact of regular sauna use on health outcomes, much of it from Finland given the prevalence of sauna usage there allowing for larger sample sizes. It's a body of evidence rather than one knock-out experimental design.

This feels like a false dichotomy. Even if sauna doesn't impact long term health in a way that can replace exercise, that doesn't mean that it doesn't improve health.

My current guess is that you get much or most of the benefits, but not all (by both value and number). If you look at the actual changes in the body during both of these activities, most are the same as exercise, but not all.

For example: body temp increases, heart rate increases, and we sweat. But the muscles aren't "engaged", consuming stuff (glycogen, etc.) while doing sauna.

There could also be sauna benefits that exercise does not impart, or is less likely to do so: sweating greater than exercise could lead to excess excretion of plastics, carcinogens, etc.

Running in mild/cold temps we do little sweating (unless long duration exercise), whereas every darn sauna at sufficiently high temps we are going to be sweating.

Zero shot you'd make it an hour in a proper sauna for an hour. People have this idea that saunas are always enjoyable. I sauna daily, and its nice up to a point. For me thats like 10-12mins in. From then on, its tough.

My take is probably too nuanced here, but the reality is that we don't know. People living in areas with longevity (blue zones), didn't really excercise (as in sports) or take multivitamins. For all we know, it might even come out that regular, gym-style excercise is even worse for longevity.

Nordic people tend to live a long life even though they historically didn't have access to fresh vegetables or fruit and brutal winters (and darkness) prohibited excercise.

ps. I'm not arguing that excercise is unhealthy, it's just that its contribution to eventual longevity, is currently unknown. Whereas anectodal evidence of saunas (being around longer than "excercise"), seems to work.

I think that if you have one hour or more of free time and live in an area where you have easy access to a sauna, that would result in significant better health on it's own. Even if you choose to not use the sauna.

I looked into Saunas in detail sometime back as a replacement/complement to exercise. There is a lot of research out there which says Saunas are as beneficial - but at the end of it I reached a similar conclusion - exercise is just better understood, so no point experimenting when something can go wrong.

A sauna will do nothing for muscular-skeletal health.

I don’t think the TV in the sauna will have long term health outcomes.

One hour in sauna? :O