You don't want this smoke 💨

This past week, Portland looked like the inside of a campfire, and we all became amateur meteorologists. Refreshing the air quality index and reporting the number to anyone within earshot became our whole personality 🙃. The sky's blue again, you can see the mountains again (and name them with slightly more confidence), and the timing is almost suspicious, because we've been meaning to give the steam room its own spotlight since the sauna piece — and it happens to be great at the exact thing everyone's airways have been through after a week of breathing smoke. 😮

Sauna and steam room are not the same thing 🙅

Quick clarification, because people sometimes use the words interchangeably (with slightly less confidence): the sauna is dry heat, the steam room is wet heat, and that one difference is their entire identity. The sauna is the cardiovascular overachiever we already gushed about — heart, brain, longevity, the works. The steam room is the one you want for your airways, because warm wet air plays a completely different game, and it plays it well.

What warm, wet air actually does 💦

Here's a phrase you didn't know you needed: mucociliary clearance. It's the tiny hair-like cilia lining your airways that beat in coordinated waves to sweep out mucus, dust, and whatever else you breathed in this week — a self-cleaning system that's been running since before you were born. Smoke throws sand in the gears, which is why a lot of chests have felt a little off lately.

This is where warm, humid air earns its keep. Steam won't repair that system for you or scrub anything out of your lungs, but it does something genuinely useful in the moment: it loosens and thins the mucus sitting in your nose and throat, opens up congested passages, and soothes the lining that smoke left irritated. It's the difference between congestion that won't budge and congestion that finally drains — temporary relief, but real relief, and after the week we all had, temporary relief sounds pretty good.

A bonus your heart appreciates 💗

The airways aren't the only thing that responds to a steam session. In a randomized controlled trial of 80 healthy adults, a single steam bath produced a meaningful drop in blood pressure that held steady for at least half an hour afterward, while the group that just took a shower got no such effect. The heat widens your blood vessels and lifts your heart rate into light-exercise territory, so ten minutes in the steam delivers a gentle version of the cardiovascular payoff you'd normally have to earn on the floor 😅

And there's a bonus your skin appreciates too — the moist air hydrates the surface instead of drying it out the way dry heat can, which is why people tend to walk out of a steam session looking suspiciously refreshed ✨

How to actually use it

Keep steam sessions on the shorter side, in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 minutes. Most of the airway-opening happens in the first few minutes, so a longer stay mostly earns you the risk of overheating rather than any extra benefit. Breathe slow and through your nose when you can, and hydrate before and after, because you're sweating plenty in there even if the wet air hides the evidence like a well-oiled camera lens. And if you've got asthma or another respiratory condition, run it by your doctor first, since humidity treats everyone a little differently.

Speaking of the air you're breathing

Since we've all been thinking about air quality more than we'd like lately, we've got HVAC filters, and the gym runs a set of dedicated air scrubbers — those seven or eight black units mounted up by the ceiling — each with a two-stage filtration system running the whole time you're in here. And we're getting brand new filters put in this week, which will make all of us breathe a little easier. 😌

Your es-steamed colleagues,
Your West Coast Fitness Family

P.S. Our own Steve Bradley steps into the ring this Wednesday when DOA Pro Wrestling brings "Where Eagles Dare" to the North Portland Eagles Lodge (7611 N. Exeter Ave), 7pm bell — about a ten-minute drive from the front desk, with trainer Amira on the card too. Tickets are $20 general or $30 for VIP first row at doaprowrestling.com. Go be loud 🤼