Sweat, Steam, and Zero Towels: Inside America's Unexpected Sauna Boom
There's a moment every first-timer at a communal sauna knows well. You've paid your entry fee, you've got your locker key on the little wristband, and you're standing in the changing area clutching a towel like it owes you money. Somewhere down the hall, a door opens and a cloud of eucalyptus-scented steam rolls out — along with a guy in his fifties, completely naked, holding a cup of ice water like this is the most normal thing in the world.
Because for a growing number of American men, it is.
The Bathhouse Invasion
Ten years ago, if you wanted a proper sauna experience in most US cities, your options were a hotel fitness center with a sad little glass box or a Korean spa your buddy swore by. Today, Nordic-style bathhouses and social sauna clubs are opening in Brooklyn basements, Austin warehouses, and Seattle rooftops. Cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Portland now support multiple dedicated sauna venues, and cold plunge studios — the sauna's chiller cousin — have become a wellness-industry goldmine.
What makes this wave different from your gym's steam room isn't the temperature. It's the nudity. Or at least, the option of it.
"We have men-only hours, co-ed hours, and everything in between," says the owner of a sauna club in the Pacific Northwest who asked to go by his first name, Lars, because, well, obviously. "But the guys who come on men's nights, most of them ditch the towel by visit three. There's something about the heat that just — melts the armor off."
Culture Shock, Then Culture Shift
The American relationship with male nudity has always been complicated. We're the country that turned the communal locker room into a national anxiety, where generations of guys learned the towel dance — the frantic, one-legged contortion of changing under cover. As we've covered on the podcast before, the death of the American locker room didn't exactly leave a naked-friendly culture in its wake.
Which is why the sauna boom feels like a genuine plot twist.
Marcus, 34, a software developer in Chicago, started going to a River North bathhouse on a coworker's dare. "First time, I wore shorts in the sauna like a total rookie. Everyone was polite about it, but you feel it — you're the one being weird." By his fourth visit, he was going full commando. "Here's the thing nobody tells you: nobody looks. Nobody cares. And once you realize that, it's genuinely freeing. I've never felt less weird about my body than I do at 190 degrees, naked, next to a retired cop and a grad student."
That's the pattern almost every regular describes: a short window of awkwardness, followed by something closer to relief. The sauna is one of the last spaces where a man can be seen — literally, fully seen — without performance attached. No gym mirror, no dating-app framing, no Instagram filter. Just a human body doing what bodies do.
The Nordic Import, Localized
In Finland, where sauna-going is practically a civic duty, this would barely register as news. There are more saunas than cars in Finland, and the national attitude toward communal nudity is roughly equivalent to America's attitude toward wearing flip-flops to Target: unremarkable.
American operators are adapting that template with some local flavor. Some venues lean wellness — cold plunges, breathwork classes, NAD IV drips in the lounge. Others lean social, with communal tables, live music nights, and the kind of lingering conversation that's become endangered everywhere with Wi-Fi. A few are explicitly clothing-optional; many run gender-segregated hours where nudity is the norm rather than the exception.
The men showing up cut across every demographic line you'd expect. Tech bros and tradesmen. Twenty-somethings who found the cold plunge on TikTok and sixty-year-olds who remember the YMCA before it went private-rooms. The common thread, owners say, isn't fitness or longevity hacks — it's hunger for a third place that doesn't require a drink in your hand.
"Guys come for the heat," Lars laughs. "They stay because someone asked them how they're actually doing. That doesn't happen at the office."
The Confidence Nobody Brags About
Here's what doesn't make the Instagram posts about your local bathhouse: the quiet body-image work happening in there.
Spend enough time in a communal sauna and you will see every kind of male body there is — scars, surgical incisions, dad bods, swimmers' backs, weight-loss skin, the works. And the uniform reaction, after the initial adjustment, is shrugging normalization. There's no ideal on display to measure yourself against, because the whole point is that there is no ideal. There's just a bunch of guys sweating.
Regulars describe it in almost identical language: it recalibrates you. One Brooklyn member told us that after two years of Thursday-night sauna sessions, he stopped sucking in his gut at the beach. "Not because I got in shape. Because I finally saw what normal actually looks like, and normal includes me."
That's a body-confidence outcome no amount of gym motivation content delivers. You can't think your way into body acceptance reading affirmations in a mirror. But you can sweat your way there, one naked hot-room session at a time, surrounded by strangers who become regulars who become, weirdly, a community.
Start Where You're Comfortable
If you're sauna-curious but towel-clutching, the veterans we talked to all say the same thing: nobody's watching, and the towel is fine while you need it. Most venues offer men-only hours to ease the transition. Bring water. Sit on a towel — that one's actual etiquette. And don't be the guy who does a full workout routine in the steam room.
The sauna boom might be powered by wellness marketing, but what's keeping guys coming back is older and simpler than any longevity hack. It's the radical, unsexy, deeply human act of being a body in a room full of bodies — and finding out it's fine. Better than fine.
The Finns could've told us that decades ago. We're just finally hot enough to listen.
