Brian Richards - Is near-infrared the most therapeutic of saunas?

This week, I'm excited to welcome Brian Richards. In 2008 SaunaSpace founder Brian needed to make a decision: fill prescriptions for acne, insomnia, and adrenal fatigue, or take a chance with Near Infrared ( NIr) Sauna Therapy, as recommended by an alternative medicine doctor. For Brian, it was a no brainer. But there was a problem, at the time you couldn’t find an NIr sauna. So, he began his journey to change that.

Over the following years, Brian became consumed with creating the perfect product, fueled by the healing transformation of his personal experience with NIr Sauna Therapy. At the beginning, SaunaSpace was one big DIY project, where Brian did everything from designing his logo and website to building every sauna himself.

With so much to do, Brian brought in his trusted friends Rusty as Lead Design and Tony for Chief Ops to accelerate SaunaSpace Product & Production Development. Today, Brian heads our ten-person team that operates 3,500 square feet of workshop space spread over two locations.

Questions we ask in this episode:

• What are the main benefits of infrared saunas?
• Is EMF a concern with infrared sauna use?
• What are your thoughts on mixing infrared saunas with cold therapy?

https://180nutrition.com.au/shop/

This week, I'm excited to welcome Brian Richards. Brian is the founder and lead product developer of SaunaSpace, an innovative company doing remarkable things with near infrared saunas in order to help others discover the pathway to natural healing. In this episode, we discuss how Brian fully healed his toxin related acne, brain fog, adrenal fatigue, and more with the power of incandescent sauna therapy, full spectrum near infrared light and heat therapy. We dig into the science behind Near Infrared Saunas and discover how we can use this technology to optimize our own health. Over to Brian.

Hi, guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I'm delighted to welcome Brian Richards to the podcast. Brian, how are you, man?

Brian

00:01:30 I'm good. Thank you. How are you doing?

Stu

00:01:33 Yeah, very well. Thank you. Thanks so much for your time. Before we get into the questions, I'd love it if you could just share a little bit about yourself for our audience that may not know or have heard about your work, please.

Brian

00:01:46 Yeah, of course. So, I'm the founder of SaunaSpace. We manufacture incandescent infrared saunas is a very special type of sauna, it's a very special type of infrared called Near Infrared. But my story is, I think, similar to many people nowadays. Six years ago, over six years ago now, I had what I eventually understood to be adrenal fatigue problems. I had mind racing, insomnia, I had this weird acne that was only in my torso. I was also kind of negative and irascible and low energy kind of lethargic. This was at the end of my college career while I'm still young but at this point I felt like there was something intractably wrong with me.

I went to the dermatologist and they prescribe Accutane, which it turns out is a horrible thing. And all the other pharmacological approaches as well. So I said, "No, there's got to be something else." I got on the internet, like everybody does nowadays and I searched for an answer, for my own answer. And I kept encountering sauna and detoxification and this idea that environmental toxins are a core contributing factor to disease and these other things, all these problems. So, sort of at the end of that I stumbled upon this really unique type of sauna. It's called it it's called the Incandescent Sauna, what SaunaSpace does. It was actually invented and pioneered by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in 1891. So, for those of you are not familiar, Kellogg's cornflakes, this is an interesting aside.

At that time, in the early 20th century, out of control male libido was thought to be a problem. So they thought, oh, well, we'll feed the all the adult males this bland food that we call cornflakes now and it'll lower male libido. So fast forward today, and they have achieved their goal. So, funnily enough though, this guy had really, he was very avant-garde. He was doing some very unique approaches, alternative healing approaches in the early 20th century. One of them was this. He said, "Hey," three years after the labels were invented, "Let's use them for sauna heaters and we'll heat the body and we'll heal people."  And so you can see in 1910, he wrote a book called photo therapeutics. So here we have light therapy been understood over 100 years ago, and it was not just him, but he pioneer this, he called the electric incandescent bath, you can actually see photos of these big victorian looking cabinets from that era there. They're insane. And so there's there's a modern book called Sauna Therapy for Detoxification and Healing by Dr. Lawrence Wilson, to whom I'm eternally grateful for re-popularizing the concept. And so I said, "Hey, I'm a tinkerer. I'm a builder, I'll build my own." I built my own. I did a session right before bed, and then another one right before bed the next day and it was like, boom, my insomnia was completely gone. I slept like a log and I woke up in the morning and I felt truly rested. Instead of, normally, I would sit in bed and just stare and my mind would be racing. So I thought that intrigued me. That was the initial thing that intrigued me so quickly, how could this be? Subsequently, I used it for six months with discipline, 45 minutes a day. And this is before I understood any of the science and any of the things that we'll talk about.

But essentially, it was out of self interest. I had health problem, I wanted to fix it. I stumbled on this and I had an amazing recovery. So, six months later, I realized, " Oh, that's what adrenal fatigue is." I was qualitatively better. I was less irascible, I had more patience, more energy, a qualitatively better mood, just more of a go getter like more ready to just concentrate and complete tasks and complete things, and how do you measure this? For me, it was priceless. The change. And yet, if you met the old me six months prior, you'd say, "Well, what's wrong with you? You look fine." And so I kind of figured it out on my own. It started slowly but I built a few for this, and that and my friends and family and it slowly became SaunaSpace.

I got my own business loan, that was six years ago, and I started with a very bricolage kind of garage project to now, it's a completely custom made, custom designed to make a commercial properly designed, safely designed product that anyone can use at home. And it's been a long journey from there to here but I now have like 24 employees. You can see behind me, this is our new shop, we just moved into. It's huge. [crosstalk 00:06:47]

Stu

00:06:46 Yeah. It's so [inaudible 00:06:48] there in the background for sure. Wow.

For full transcript and interview:

https://180nutrition.com.au/180-tv/brian-richards-interview/