My name is Thomas Dori and I am from Vienna, Austria. I tried sauna multiple times but never got hooked. It just happened earlier this year that I really started to enjoy it. In the summer of 2018, I spent three weeks on the Outer Banks in North Carolina with my girlfriend and her family. It was a wonderfully relaxing time—which it actually wasn’t supposed to be. One of the reasons we went there was for kite surfing. You know, that sport where you glide on the water solely powered by the wind. There was only one problem: we had no wind. So, I spent most of my time on Pocketcast, exploring new podcasts. One of them was FoundMyFitness by Dr. Rhonda Patrick. When I listened to her interview with Dr. Jari Laukkanen, I got intrigued. Hitting the sauna several times a week really seems to increase your lifespan. Since our gym at home had a sauna, I thought, why not sweat a little more after each of my workouts? This is when I started to go to the sauna or steam bath on a regular basis.
Soon after that, I wanted to have an app to track my sessions so I could see whether my sauna habits comply with the practice recommended by science. There was nothing. In addition, I wanted to do something more creative again—a project where I could decide when and how fast progress happens. And I wanted to work with great people. So, I asked my friend Michael Paukner (the designer of HotLog) if he wanted to join me and he said “Yes!” So, I started coding. Four months and 400 hours later, we released HotLog on the iOS App Store.
I wanted to have an app to track my sessions so I could see whether my sauna habits comply with the practice recommended by science. There was nothing. In addition, I wanted to do something more creative again—a project where I could decide when and how fast progress happens.
The app allows you to track time, duration, temperature, and sauna type for each session that you spend inside a hot room. You’ll then get statistics on the average temperature, humidity, and duration for your sessions, as well as the average number of sessions per week and month. Latter is what interested me the most because I wanted to compare my habits to what research found out to be the best practice.
HotLog is for pretty much everybody who enjoys the sauna, steam bath, infrared, or hammam! Especially those who plan to use the sauna a certain number of times per week or month. For them HotLog is the go-to tool to track their sauna sessions.
HotLog will get multiple new features over the next years. It mostly depends on the needs of the community. If we see that people enjoy the tracking, we’ll add more fun to that (like badges, for example). If we see that there is more interest from science or sauna operators, we’ll go more into that direction. Either way, there is more to come in the app. I wanted to have an app to track my sessions, so I could see whether my sauna habits comply with the practice recommended by science.
You can download HotLog on the App Store Here.