It wasn’t the fiber-optic lighting, nor the tepid heat, that shocked Cécile Méguère the first time she entered a New York City sauna.
It was the young woman in a bathing suit, bent over in downward dog.
“I was looking at her, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, she thinks this is a hot yoga session!’” said Ms. Méguère, 39, who relocated to the city from her native France in 2022.
She soon learned that some people in New York danced at bathhouses, too. Occasionally, there were D.J.s. This wasn’t a rave, she thought. What could these people be thinking?
As health-conscious Americans have jumped headfirst into saunas, some Europeans have at times also found themselves a little baffled by their fellow steam lovers’ behavior, worried a millennia-old tradition is being warped by American wellness culture.
Growing up in Finland, Eero Kilpi, 66, said the sauna was seen as a community hub — the equivalent of a backyard barbecue. In the countryside, Saturdays were often spent socializing and steam bathing as friends and family gathered to lose themselves in a relaxing afternoon, deep in conversation or their own thoughts.
They would lounge naked in the sauna, swim in the river, eat wood-fired sausages or freshly caught fish and rest in the open air with a refreshing beverage, often of the alcoholic variety, Mr. Kilpi said. “Two or three hours of sauna, a good meal and you’re in heaven.”
But in the United States, he and others have noticed an approach heavier on optimization and performance. At times, the environment can seem almost competitive. Some have detected more of a Burning Man mentality — group breathing exercises and the like. In Mr. Kilpi’s estimation, Americans often rush too quickly through the sauna experience, sometimes squeezing it in for a few minutes before or after a workout, not long enough to truly relax. Rarely does the environment resemble the leisurely experience he grew up with.
“The United States is missing out, and that breaks my heart,” said Mr. Kilpi, who now chairs the North American Sauna Society.
Even in the misty sauna itself, phones have become a distraction, said Daniel Bondarenko, the Latvian-born owner of The Banya House, a remote Slavic-style experience in the woods in Minnesota. Rather than losing themselves to relaxation and conversation, people obsess over their heart rates and post selfies and progress updates. Mr. Bondarenko has had to confront one of his own cousins for pulling out his device while inside the banya.
“Everyone wants technology to tell them what they need to do to achieve results,” he said, adding, “They don’t know how to feel it.”
Megan Kress, the owner of Sauna du Nord in Duluth, Minn., has taken to referring to the more competitive and tracking-obsessed types as “sauna bros.”
The term is not gender-specific, she said; it applies to anyone who fist pumps in the cold plunge, times their humidity exposure or performs push-ups on the top bench.
“I once watched a video of a person getting into a cold plunge and saying, ‘I can feel my dopamine being regulated,’” Ms. Kress said. “I mean, we’re missing the whole point.”
Susanne Wellenhofer, a yoga instructor from Austria, said her issues with American sauna culture go back decades, to when she first moved to the United States in 1986. She could not believe what she saw: women in saunas wearing bathing suits, even workout gear.
“I find it disgusting,” she said. “It would be a total no-no to go to a sauna in Austria with your bathing suit, and an insult to wear workout clothes.”
She now saunas at home.
A culture’s bathing practices can tell us a lot about it, said Mikkel Aaland, a Norwegian-American photographer who spent decades studying sauna cultures and is known by some as the “godfather of sweat bathing.” When he hears about competitive cold plunge sessions in California and sober sauna raves in New York, he’s not surprised.
If Roman bathhouses were places of leisure, American power sauna sessions are a reflection of a culture that is “always doing things to the extreme,” he said.
U.S. sauna practices are far from perfect, said Robert Hammond, the president of Therme Group U.S., the stateside arm of a wellness resort operator in Europe. He doesn’t love when he can smell cologne in the sauna, or whenever someone “screams and sprints between the cold plunge to the hot tub.”
Still, Mr. Hammond said, it might be unfair to grade America’s infant sauna culture against Europe’s — after all, the Europeans have been mastering the craft for thousands of years. “Give us a break,” said Mr. Hammond, who also writes a newsletter about bathing culture.
“Even if Americans are doing it wrong right now, it’s still healthier than not, right?” he added. The issue to him seems obvious enough: “We just need more help doing nothing than the Europeans.”
The post The Europeans Have Some Notes About American Sauna Culture appeared first on New York Times.
