How to Sauna in the Finnish way?

[skyleaf]

Lately I built a sauna in game and start to wonder how it actually is IRL, well, Finnish style I mean.
It's kind of funny because in the region I live, how to sauna is not a good thing to know since it more or less gave people the impression of place to do lewd things.
And nobody (including me) understand why people would go to sauna in a place where basically no winter presence.
So I am quite curious about how to properly sauna since I found myself have zero knowledge about it. It there any differences on how ancient Finnish and modern Finnish do it? I saw one of the year's greeting film, Sami and Erikka burn the sauna oven from morning to dusk, does it always take that long to properly heat the sauna? Do Finnish do it on summer? only winter? or both? What's the vasta actually for? How long do people normally stay in the sauna? (Just wondering won't people get dehydrated in there?) Any other interesting fact/ experiences about sauna you want to share are also welcome

[JP_Finn]

Ways to bathe in sauna varies between families. One neighbor does X, another Y.
Most apartment building have couple saunas in basement or ground floor. Most homes have built in sauna. Most summer (or winter cottages/villas) have either built in or separate sauna.

Some are electric heated. Some are wood heated, with chimney and some, although more rare ‘in modern times’ a traditional, chimneyless “smoke sauna”

Apartment dwellers get to have either Friday or Saturday evening “sauna shift” usually limited to 30min of steam room access.
Many house owners/renters heat up sauna 1-3 days a week.
Smoke sauna is rarely heated more than once a week. (Unless at “experience resort”, then likely heated up more often)

Most folks with modern amenities, shower first, just simple rinse with water. Then get up on the rafters, throw water on the hot rocks/stones. Enjoy the “löyly” (sauna steam). Throw more water on the kiuas (sauna stove). Get sweat pour out from the pores. If private dwelling with private backyard, step outside in fresh air (summer, winter doesn’t matter), enjoy sip of cold drink. Water or beer, cider. If there’s lake or river, plunge in. In winter, making a snow angel is invigorating.

As for vasta, that’s heretical eastern dialect word for the real name of vihta. Needs to be made of several, fresh leafed birch twigs. Should be round, at least 12” (30cm) diameter.
Soak it in warm-hot water (the leafy end) for 5-15 minutes. Can lay it on top of kiuas rocks. Not needed though. Then beat/whoop back, legs, chest, abdomen with it. (It’s soft motion, not flogging. Set back in water every now and then.
If one uses vihta, all others should too or realize the escaping air in front of the vihta app s pretty darn hot.

Lakeside summer cabin with sauna the sauna session might be several hours, relax, sweat, unwind, swim. During one’s summer vacation, the sauna at the cabin will likely get heated up every day.

One can wrap a hot dog/sausage in some aluminum foil and place it on the rocks to steam it for a after sauna snack.

Some folks like to splash a little beer on the rocks, but that’s not for me.

And, another one here will likely do it differently.

[Erkka]

One of my neighbours (or, actually, they are a collective of some 30 adults living together in a big building) have a traditional smoke sauna. They heat it up every day. And in my previous home (that was also a collective, but a smaller one) we heated our smoke sauna twice a week.

The smoke sauna is the basically the same type as we have in the game. Heating up a smoke sauna usually takes 4 - 5 hours or so, you burn continuous fire to make the stove hot, and during that time the sauna is full of smoke. Once the fire is out you open all the doors and ventilation shafts to let the smoke out. So there is no more fire nor smoke when people go into the sauna. A decent smoke sauna might stay relatively warm for 12 hours, so one can have a hot sauna bath at evening, and then a mild mellow sauna bath early in the morning.

Vasta (or vihta, as western tribes call it) is like a combination of massage and herbal treatment. When you apply the vasta on your muscles it boosts local blood circulation, helping the muscles to recover after days toil and strain. And I'd guess your skin also absorbs some of the micronutritients and essential oils, which have further cleansing and relaxing effect. (For different purposes one can also make a vasta using juniper, nettles, oak, etc.)

Beer onto the sauna stove rocks - definitely yes =) That gives a nice aroma of freshly baked bread. For similar reasons some people might mix a tiny drop of pine tar into the water thrown to the stones.

To me half an hour of sauna is like a quick washing up. Two hours of sauna bath gives a deeply relaxing effect. (This is my personal preference, I understand that some people do it differently and that is fine.)

JP mentioned lakeside saunas, and I think the combination of a lake and sauna is like a sacred tradition =) Sauna + swimming + sauna + swimming + sauna + swimming just washes any and all stress away, leaving you feeling tranquil and refreshed. In the wintertime some people dip in a hole in the ice, some people roll in the snow.

[Dungeon Smash]

I'm curious if anyone knows typical temperature for a Finnish sauna? Obviously it must vary quite a bit, but approximately how hot is the one you use?

Here in America, we have a sauna at my local gym, i consider it to be quite hot at around 140 Fahrenheit (60 Celsius) round the clock. I can only stand being in there for 20 minutes or so at the max. It's difficult to imagine being in there for hours at a time. I'm wondering if Finnish saunas are a little cooler, or is it just that Finnish people have much higher resistance to sauna heat 

[Erkka]

Hehe, I'm under the impression that for Finnish people 60 Celcius is kind of a minimum. 80 Celcius is something like normal. 100 Celcius is hot, but I think some ice-swimming people like it hotter (even up to 120 Celcius). But it must be said that we seldom stay in the sauna for hours in a row - once in a while people go out to cool down and to have fresh air, maybe drink a can of cold beer and then go back to have some more löyly in the sauna.

I think that at some areas in Russia the local culture is to have the sauna heated up to 140 Celcius, but then you can only stay in for a shor period sitting still and then go out to take a dip in the fresh cold water of River Volga. And then repeat. But this is only something I heard from a single person from that area, so I really don't know if this habit is more widespread - I welcome our Russian players to comment on their sauna habits, for it would be interesting to hear what we have in common and what differences there are to our Eastern neighbours.

EDIT: For clarification, I'm clearly writing from a countryside point of view. My own sauna is a separate building, and it is very easy to go outdoors to cool down. But in apartment houses and other urban environments sauna time often gets reduced to some 20 - 30 minutes. Like JP also mentions, longer sauna sessions tend to require access to fresh air and preferably also a lake.

Typically one would say that sauna + private yard is a countryside luxury. But I think that in cities there are also public saunas with outdoor access. At Kallio neigborhood in Helsinki you can spot people wearing a towel around their waist, sitting next to a street in front of a public sauna. They are cooling down for a while, to go back to have another round of löyly in the sauna.

[JP_Finn]

The sauna temperature isn’t the only gauge, also the humidity plays a big role. Which often tends to be drier in electric stove saunas. When I lived in apartment building (decades ago) in Finland, first thing getting in the sauna on our shift was to grab the hose from the shower room and wet the rafters and walls. I’d say 85C-90C(185F-194F) is comfortable Max in “moisturized” sauna. 80-85C in dry electric sauna.

Wood burning stove tends to give less harsh heat and bathing in 90-110C(194-230F) is comfortable maximum.

And some like it hotter, while others like it cooler.
Gym saunas are odd, most have zero(0) clue how to bathe in sauna. Almost all of them prohibit throwing water on the rocks... *triple facepalm*

[skyleaf]

That's a mix of interesting and terrifying feelings to me at the same time to know sauna is way hotter than I would expected. Sounds quite fun and relaxing to enjoy the smell of grain and drinking beers through
Maybe some stupid questions but I have admit I don't know the Finnish culture that well, what's a "sauna shift"? People take turns to enter the sauna base on some kind of roster?
Also I am quite curious about, did the public sauna closed during the time of pandemic? We got a cluster of infected cases due to their dinner, the hotpot (火鍋, people put raw ingredients into a constant boiling soup and a steamy environment is created). Experts claimed the virus could become airborne/ aerosol-base in steamy environment so basically every hotpot restaurants in town were closed till now.
Wish one day I can visit Finland and try out some of the sauna, preferably the traditional smoke-with-no-chimney one. I wonder if different woods give different aroma in this kind of sauna. 

[PALU]

A technical reason for prohibitions against throwing water on the stones is that there are electric sauna heaters where the heating elements get damaged if you throw water on them repeatedly. That type typically has a small trough for pouring water in, though, but I guess you can't expect ignorants to use it properly.

Also, there are jerks who just throw water on the stones repeatedly to drive everyone else away (I'd prefer to prohibit the jerks from the sauna rather than the water from the stones, though, if it was my decision).

The "sauna shift" mentioned is the same as sharing other common resources, such as e.g. washing machines. You claim a time slot, and if you don't show up in time to use it you've lost it, as someone else has the slot after yours, so it's not a traditional culture thing, nor tied to saunas specifically.

[Erkka]

Also I am quite curious about, did the public sauna closed during the time of pandemic?

Well, I live in the countryside and didn't visit any cities while the pandemic situation was acute in Finland. But I'd guess all the public saunas were closed (city dwellers, please correct me if I'm wrong). But that wasn't because of sauna conditions - there is some evidence suggesting that actually the virus gets destroyed in sauna temperatures - but just because of the general social distancing measures.

Wish one day I can visit Finland and try out some of the sauna, preferably the traditional smoke-with-no-chimney one.

Finland offers a plenty of sauna possibilities. One of them is a whole Sauna Village

I wonder if different woods give different aroma in this kind of sauna. 

That I can't really say - but in the old folk culture there have been habits of using different woods for different purposes. Smoke sauna has been a place where people gave birth, and also a place where dead bodies were washed and prepared for burial, and a place for various kinds of folk healing methods. And other kinds of ritualistic use - for example a soon-to-be-married bride had a special sauna before the marriage. And for those different purposes different kinds of wood were used to heat up the sauna, as there were beliefs that burning different kinds of woods has different ritualistic effects of preparing the sauna for specific purpose. Personally I haven't studied those habits in detail, although I do love sauna culture and I'm interested in many of the aspects of the folk culture, but there simply are that much details that I can't adopt it all =)

A technical reason for prohibitions against throwing water on the stones is that there are electric sauna heaters where the heating elements get damaged if you throw water on them repeatedly.

That sounds reasonable. Although I still wonder what is the technical difference compared to electric saunas in Finland. For example swimming halls and other such places have common electric saunas, and in Finland people repeatedly throw water on the stove, all day long, many days a week. I have always thought that it is the sauna stove rocks and stones which take the strain. There needs to be a decent layer of stones on top of the electric heating elements, so that the hot stones vaporize the water thrown on them, and hardly any water reaches the heating elements. The stones then need to be replaced on regular basis, as the constant strain wears them down.

[Galgana]

There's an article posted today on BBC Travel about Russian style sauna.