Sauna Facts: 10 Interesting Facts about Sauna

1. A sauna is a great way to relax and burn off a few calories without much effort, as your metabolic rate and volume of perspiration increases when you are in a steam room or sauna.

2. One of the rituals of sauna, which is practiced only rarely in Finland today, consists of a medicine woman making small cuts in the back of the person and then sucking out the blood! This was believed to do a lot of good. This process is called couparri and requires special permission from the Finnish National Board of Health.

3. Another activity in saunas is the lashing of yourself and your fellow bathers with a bunch of silver birch twigs, called a vihta or a vasta. This kind of gentle whipping is good for the skin and for circulation. You can also use the same twigs and leaves to get a delightful aroma by pouring hot water on them

4. In rural Finland, it was quite common for children to be born in saunas, even as recently as the 1930s. Today, there are competitions to see who can stay in a sauna for the longest time.

5. As part of their burial rites the dead were bathed in saunas prior to being dressed for burial. Fortunately this practice has fallen into disuse.

6. Usually, bathers are in the nude in Finnish saunas, even with both sexes present. There is no stigma attached to this nudity, and no sexual overtones - for the sauna is considered to be a sacred place.

7. In the winter in Finland, people dash out into the open and plunge themselves into fresh snow soon after a sauna!

8. Philadelphia in Pennsylvania was once called Sauna. The Finnish and Swedish settlers who began to live there in the 1600s named the area ‘Sauna’ in honour of the practice they love so much.

9. The Infrared heaters used in saunas first originated in Japan. They were invented in 1965 by Dr.Tadashi Ishikava, of the R & D department of Fuji Medicals.

10. For about a thousand years after they came into use, saunas were constructed without chimneys.