The first photo I ever saw of a person covering their laptops camera with tape was a publicity photo of Zuck. Everyone I personally knew in the intelligence-adjacent industry had already been doing it. He was the first "civilian" I saw who did it intentionally.
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.
Not saying you are wrong, but I'd like to see some evidence on that. Just because your heart is pumping faster doesn't mean your cardio fitness is getting better. Otherwise we could all just snort cocaine and skip the gym. Alcohol does that too, anyone with a fitness tracker can check that.
Athletes already know the answer from years of cultural knowledge, research, and firsthand experience. No, it doesn't make your cardio fitness meaningfully better. If you did sauna training for years and then tried to ramp up for a marathon, you'd be hopelessly out of shape.
Endurance athletes obsessively track VO2 max, basically your body's ability to consume oxygen during workouts, and it certainly doesn't improve with sauna training.
It's like asking "if you only did puzzles, would you be smarter?" Well, in a way, yes, but if you actually want to compete with someone with a good education you have to read.
Same with physical exercise. It puts a lot of different stresses on your body that saunas don't. The question isn't "do saunas make you physically fit," because they don't. The question is "for people who don't want to exercise, does sauna training alone meaningfully extend your healthspan?" I'm guessing the answer is "a little but not enough," but I'm not sure.
Cardio of course is short for "cardiovascular system," which consists of a whole lot of moving parts. Saunas improve some parts of it but certainly not all of it.
Will fixing up your radiator fix your car? Maybe, if the radiator was the problem, but there's a lot of other stuff inside a car to work on, too.
Your body evolved under the expectation that it would be stressed in numerous different ways, but those stressors can all be avoided in the modern era. If you want to most reliably recreate those stresses you need to do cardio and resistance training.
A light treadmill session won't do much to improve your cardiovascular system health either. I mean it's better than nothing but don't expect too much.
Moreover, I'm from a very hot and humid tropical region. Its normal to ne 40°C with 80% humidity there. And you dont see people having better health or longevity (Yucatan peninsula) .
Right, it's just that a sauna at 60 degrees is not warm, it's cold. Take a shower, go into the sauna at 60 degrees C, and it'll feel cold. Nothing happens in a sauna until you're getting near 80, and it's much better if you go somewhat higher (90 or more for active users). 60 is when a sauna will be closed off in public baths because there's a technical problem somewhere.
But that would be like exercise all the time which may not be optimal. (Not saying the theory holds that sauna equals exercise, but if it does, sauna all the time may not be great. Plus, there may be other confounding factors with living in various locations.)
The great but not super healthy Mexican diet might offset the potential heat exposure benefits! Although I’m basing that on the diet of my Monterrey-based in-laws, not sure how different Yucatan is.
Edit: I posted this accidentally when editing without noticing. Hypertrophy isn't necessarily a bad thing. I thought I was discarding the comment cuz I realized I was out of my depth. whoops
Please ignore my comment, though I will leave it to make the below comments less confusing.
Original: You don't want to "work out" your heart though. Cardiac hypertrophy is a bad thing.
The benefit of exercise is that your muscles become more oxygen-efficient. Your heart endures some stress now, so that it can work less in the future.
Cardiac hypertrophy is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be the result of positive adaptation, such as exercising.
Eccentric hypertrophy (athlete's heart) is the positive adaptation resulting from training the heart. The heart has a lower resting rate and is more efficient at pumping blood. It returns to normal size if training stops.
You'll never reach a state of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (the bad kind of hypertrophy) with exercise. Its cause is usually genetic.
Not true. You can't really train your muscles to use less oxygen for the same energy output (what "oxygen-efficiency" would imply). You rather increase their capacity to take up oxygen from the blood and burn it. They will use more oxygen to output more energy.
That additional oxygen needs to come from somewhere. Endurance training at the same time trains the heart to deliver more oxygen to the periphery; the primary mechanism is increased cardiac stroke volume.
You kind of can - the muscles can use aerobic or anaerobic processes. When you develop brute strength you are training those anaerobic processes. That isn't what OP was talking about, and overall it is much less energy efficient, but it does produce a large burst of energy when needed and you can train your muscles that way.
I would assume that another factor is that the technique for a given exercise on the other hand can be improved, and that can help with decreasing the necessary energy - would that be a correct statement? And as a follow up, depending on activity type this may or may not be significant?
Yes, definitely. Technique is partly about efficient mechanical movement, sending the various parts of your body in the right direction(s) and not waste effort on movement that doesn’t contribute to propelling you forwards. But for endurance sports, it’s really about minimizing energy cost at a given speed. To use running as an example, you can improve biomechanical efficiency through better timing, correct loading of tendons, tendon stiffness, elastic energy use, and more.
This is terribly uniformed. Do not listen to this.
Cardiac hypertrophy isn't a "bad thing". This is completely contextual. What you don't want, for example, is pathological hypertrophy from things like hypertension, or exclusive left ventricular hypertrophy without associated increase in chamber size.
The heart is very complex. You 100% should exercise it.
This is why I hate health science. Informed people can have the same information and come to opposite conclusions. The entire field is made up of contradictory explanations and principles, to the extent that it’s unknowable what’s true or not.
It’s not really about this particular claim. It’s that I can read a comment that has a reasonable chain of logic and I don’t know if it’s true. This topic is just not easily studied and theories are hard to falsify.
For endurance training the main benefit of heat training is raising blood volume.
Lungs are not a limiter. Developing stroke volume I imagine requires much higher intensity but that's just a wild guess based on my limited understanding of physiology.
If heat training is better than another interval session remains to be seen but it seems a lot of smart people believe it's worth it nowadays.
Fellow Spaniard here. Our ancestors were definitely onto something! I think the most important thing when it comes to napping is to show up: find a comfortable spot, use an eye mask, and set a timer for whatever time you have (I typically do something between 10 to 30 minutes). Just close your eyes and don’t open them until the alarm goes off.
I don’t always nap, but I make sure to do so if I haven’t had enough sleep or when I’m stressed or overworked. The more work I have, the more naps I take. Three back to back meetings? 15 minutes nap for your brain to organize and process the information dump. You get the gist. Doesn’t have to be after lunch, just a few minutes when you need/have them.
I used to do the Dali nap: find a comfortable spot, hold a spoon in your hand, and close your eyes. Once you fall asleep the spoon will fall from your hand and wake you up. That makes sure you go into hypnagogic state, great for problem solving as the brain is in a creativity sweet spot.
The technique I use now is not strictly a nap but a relaxation technique called NSDR: Non-Sleep Deep Rest. It’s kind of a guided meditation that deeply relaxes your body and nervous system. Just 10 minutes can feel as restorative as hours of sleep. You can check Andrew Huberman's scripts or Youtube videos for a more body-hacking, science-backed vive, or channels like are Ally Boothroyd's [0] for a more spiritual take on the concept, also known as Yoga Nidra.
I hope that helps. And best of luck with your napping, honor the ancestors!
Thank you so much for your detailed answer! I definitely try to show up, but I am an anxious person and sometimes trying to nap makes me even more anxious. However, it is true that even when I don't manage to sleep it helps relaxing me and giving me some extra energy.
I've also read about NSDR and wanted to try it, so having some sources is really helpful. Do you always practice it with some guided meditation or can you do it on your own? I kind of not like guided meditation. (No reason, it's just that kind of feel wrong. Probably I should just open my mind and try it more.) Thank you so much!
Practice makes perfect! Keep on showing up and it will most likely get easier :)
I currently do not do guided NSDR that much, but it helped a lot at the time learning how to calm my thoughts and become deeply relaxed, especially the Ally guided sessions (as everything else, takes practice) so I would recommend to try the guided ones even if it feels awkward, until you learn how to stop your mind from wandering. I find it helps both with quick reset/recharge naps and falling back asleep if I wake up in the middle of the night (happens often for me).
I'm trying to get into the NSDR and although I am not totally convinced, it is true that give some insights about calming down and it's easier that non-guided meditation. Thanks! I'll keep practicing.
I'm in the process of migrating to self-hosted immich and the experience is being great so far. If you have a beefy home lab it is incredibly fast and performant. One thing to mention is that you should have a good backup strategy not to risk losing your photo library
I've been waiting for this release for a long time. I lost my first gen Maxes and was expecting for a significant upgrade to get a new pair. This feels like a very minor update to the originals and not really a new product.
Considering the modest update and the fact that they lose many of the quality of life features if outside of the Apple ecosystem, which I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with, I will be looking elsewhere.
I watched the whole video and there is no heartbeat sound, which is what I was expecting as well. I think that they recorded the signal, not the sound that the heart makes when pumping blood.
My off-prem backups are in a Tailscale connected NAS at my parent's house. I'm in the process of talking a friend into having Tailscale configured to host more off-prem backups at his place as well. I'm moving out of iCloud for photo library management and into Immich. I really don't want to lose my photos and videos hence the off-prem backups. Tailscale has been a blessing for this kind of use case
I'm in the process of moving all my backups to Immich - honestly it's best in class software.
I'm able to set it up so that my SO and I can view all the pictures taken by the other (mostly cute photos of our dog and kid, but makes it easier to share them with others when we don't have to worry about what device they're on), have it set to auto-backup, and routed through my VPS so it's available effectively worldwide.
The only issue that I run into is a recent one, which is hard drive space - I've got it on a NAS/RAID setup with backups sent to another NAS at my parents' place, but it's an expensive drive replacement in current market conditions.
I can also recommend Ente. It is pretty polished. Go-based backend using Postgres DB, Flutter-based android version, React-based web frontend (electron for desktop).
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