Inside the Sauna Olympics

Minutes before the biggest aufguss of his life, Travis Talmadge can’t find his vial of chamomile.He’s outdoors, in a roped-off staging area behind the show sauna, with a bucket of snowballs—ice infused with scents like lavender and Siberian fir—at his feet, a stack of folded towels waiting inside, his second costume hidden nearby for a mid-set change. Talmadge works the line of icy globes nestled in bowls, sniffing, adjusting with another drop or two, sniffing again, like a chef checking each plate before it leaves the kitchen.He finds the chamomile and tips a couple extra drops onto a white snowball, making the top of it turn blue. Then the door opens, and he walks through it.For the next 15 minutes, Talmadge, 39, will whip a towel through thick, sticky air to push waves of heat and scent toward 200 naked strangers, including a six-person international jury. Aufguss is a sauna ritual; a performance is called a set, and the most elite of them combine choreography, scent, storytelling, steam, and stamina. A competitor—known as a sauna master—enters the sauna to music and places a scented snowball on the hot rocks, then disperses its aroma with their towel. For every one of three or four song changes, another snowball goes on the stove. Contestants are forbidden from drinking water while competing, and judges dock points if they appear fatigued. Within the span of his set, Talmage’s heart rate will hit about 195 beats per minute, according to the Whoop he wears on his left wrist.Bathhouse co-founder Travis Talmadge at the Aufguss Show World Masters. Photo courtesy of Aufguss-WM e.V./Ryszard Rak.Bathhouse co-founder Travis Talmadge at the Aufguss Show World Masters.Photo courtesy of Aufguss-WM e.V./Ryszard Rak.This is the Aufguss Show World Masters. Forty solo sauna masters and 40 teams from 19 nations have come to Satama, a lakeside resort near Berlin, after qualifying in their national championships. In Germany, where the modern ritual took shape nearly 80 years ago, roughly 30 million people use saunas. At Satama, the spectacle is so revered that attendees there line up a half hour before showtime to witness the best sauna masters on the planet.No one is more surprised about becoming a sauna savant than Talmadge himself. He’s an entrepreneur and CEO who cofounded Bathhouse, a contrast-therapy destination that opened in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2019. The business has since expanded both in New York state and across the United States. Bathhouse’s new downtown Brooklyn outpost contains North America’s largest sauna, designed to hold 120 people. There’s a third venue in Flatiron. A Philadelphia location opened last week. An Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Jersey City are next. Its investors include about a dozen professional athletes.Talmadge spent his 20s as a commercial real estate broker, negotiating eye-poppingly large deals. He's a Deadhead who loves golf and lifts weights. He has a wife and two young children, who by sheer proximity are fans of aufguss too. (His five-year-old daughter can already wave a towel, and his seven-year-old son loves smelling the essential oils Talmadge keeps at home.) Talmadge is also not one to seek attention. When I reached out for a quote before the newest Brooklyn location opened in May, the staff promised to deliver my messages but were skeptical I’d hear back. I did not.He’d rather let the space, the heat, and the aufguss ceremonies speak for themselves. He says he agreed to let me follow him through Worlds for one reason: He wants as many Americans to experience it as possible.Full disclosure: I, too, love aufguss. I began messing around with waving a towel in my apartment this past summer, and I have since completed my sauna master training. My interest in the activity coincides with a growing trend in the larger American wellness industry. Biohacking turned saunas and cold plunges into protocols—Bryan Johnson posts his sauna routine; Andrew Huberman has devoted hours of his podcast to the benefits of heat and cold exposure. Wellness has become increasingly social in the past five years following the worst of the pandemic: Run clubs double as third places and dating scenes, and bathhouses host moms’ meetups, guys’ nights, dates, even work meetings. The prospect of self-improvement got Americans into the sauna. Aufguss gives them a social reason to come back.Talmadge and cofounder Jason Goodman are betting millions on this next era of the spa while obsessively learning the ritual he thinks will help usher it in. “What we’re trying to build,” he says, “is actually a rebellion to spa culture.”At Worlds, the problem isn’t finding the heat; it’s pacing yourself. The resort has nine saunas and steam rooms, access to Lake Scharmützelsee for a cold plunge, and a packed schedule of aufguss sessions all day in the side cabins. Six hundred guests per day have come from around the world to sweat it out.The main event takes place in the so-called show sauna, which is exponentially bigger than the other saunas on-site. The cavernous, oval-shaped space is kitted out with four tiers of benches that seat 200 souls, or 230 when they’re packed in like sardines. Performances start at 10 a.m. and run through 9:15 p.m. Each one feels like some delightful combination of a rock concert, a Broadway show, and a major sports event all at once—except with the thermostat set to 180 degrees Fahrenheit.The modern aufguss ritual was born in Germany in the late 1940s, says Lasse Eriksen, president of Aufguss WM, of Norway. As he tells it, an innovative sauna-goer began using a towel to circulate the steam and heat. Somewhere around the early 2000s, more sensory elements were added: essential oils, music, elaborate towel techniques, and eventually the costumes, lighting, and storylines. Then in 2011, 22 elite sauna masters from seven countries descended upon South Tyrol, Italy, to compete in the first Worlds with the scorecards of show aufguss. (America wasn’t invited to participate until last year.)The purpose behind the pageantry, though, is moving heat around the room. “Increase and distribution of heat” is a judged category that accounts for almost 20% of a competitor’s overall score. Water hits the stones; steam and scent rise toward the ceiling. Martijn Vanhoorelbeke, a Belgian sauna master and jury president at Worlds, calls what happens next “chasing a cloud.” The sauna master catches the hot, humid air with a towel and distributes it through the room. Talmadge says the test is reaching the people on the top row—the hottest part of the sauna—without making the heat unbearable.Every sauna master begins by learning two foundational moves, the helicopter and the parachute, which are to aufguss what scales are to piano. Once you ace those, however, there are many more elaborate moves to try. At Worlds, I watched a Czech sauna master named David Zatocil, dressed in a tuxedo, do something called a backhand: The towel starts like a pendulum at one hip and zips upward before being whipped taut while the torso rotates 180 degrees. The next morning, as Talmadge and I were drinking coffee and sipping creatine, I told him I wanted to learn the technique.“Do you have your towel?” he asked.Aufguss towels are stitched along one end, creating a spine the sauna masters grip. Talmadge likened the motion of a backhand to an upward medicine-ball chop. He wasn’t particularly concerned with my awkward form. He wanted me to understand the physics: gathering the towel at hip height to scoop air into it, then swinging upward so it bloomed open and sent the heat where I wanted it to go. When I didn’t turn my upper body enough, he tried a new cue: “Show off your back like a bodybuilder on stage.” Sure enough, my towel caught more air. “Why do you move this way?” he asked me, like a Jedi. “Where is that cloud of heat and scent going? And how do you bring it to the guests?” I wanted to learn the backhand because it looks cool; he was thinking about the person on the bench receiving the gust of aroma.Talmadge waves his towel with an unhurried tempo that belies the power behind it. Aufguss is physically demanding, and as a set builds toward its finale, the waving gets faster and more forceful. But it still has to be “clean,” a word I heard constantly at Worlds: no fumbles, dropped towels, or missed cues. Via squeaky-clean mechanics, every shape the towel makes appears effortless, mesmerizing, like a sleight of hand. The ultimate compliment in aufguss circles is: “Ooh, that’s pretty.”Talmadge found aufguss by accident. About a month after Bathhouse opened, a pair of visitors developing a contrast-therapy concept in Canada came through town and offered to lead a session for the staff. Talmadge sat in. “Aufguss is the only thing I’ve found where, when you’re there, it’s like the world doesn’t exist,” he says. “You’re just locked into this thing and really present.”He tracked down Vanhoorelbeke in Belgium and asked him to fly to New York to train the team. The pandemic delayed the visit two years. When Vanhoorelbeke finally arrived in January 2022, Talmadge joined the training at the last minute as a team-building exercise. “I think those two days changed his life,” Vanhoorelbeke says.Most beginners want tricks, he continued. Talmadge wanted to understand how it all worked: where the heat in a sauna pools, how aroma travels, what a small change in the towel’s angle does to someone 10 feet away. With almost nowhere to continue learning in America, Talmadge scoured YouTube and found grainy Italian training videos. He practiced in his living room at night, 10 minutes snatched here and there while he and his wife traded shifts with their newborn daughter.Aufguss also solved a business problem. His cofounder, Jason Goodman, runs operations; Talmadge is the finance partner. He loves people but not managing them—of Bathhouse’s 400 employees, he oversees four—and as the company grew, he started to feel “like I was visiting my own business.”In the sauna, guests didn’t know he owned the place. He stood barefoot and shirtless in black lounge pants at the stove, so people told him what they really thought about Bathhouse. He had a towel, a few scented balls of ice, a hot room full of people, and 15 minutes to make them feel something. What he learned informed both his sets and the experience he is building on for his customers.Talmadge has a slide at the front of his investor deck that says We are not a spa. The American spa, in his telling, is a 1990s hotel invention built around passive relaxation: fluffy robes, cozy slippers, indulgent treatments, soft music, an hour of being left alone. At Bathhouse, “it’s comfortable and uncomfortable,” and the feel-good payoff comes after sweating and cold-plunging.The appeal of sauna isn’t subjective. Research has associated regular sauna bathing with cardiovascular benefits, per a two-decade study of more than 2,300 middle-aged Finnish men. A recent review of controlled trials found modest improvements in depressive symptoms from deliberate heat exposure. Stay in long enough, and a session stimulates heat shock proteins, which help cells respond to stress. In the Finnish data, longer sessions tracked with better outcomes; the protocols most often studied ran 15 to 20 minutes. An aufguss, incidentally, maxes out at 15.Bathhouse’s big bet is that people want the heat alongside something conventional spas don’t offer: a social experience. Spa programming consultant Jennifer Lynn has watched the industry change from the inside. As director of spa at Resorts World Las Vegas, she oversaw what she says was the country’s first operational aufguss program in 2021. She calls the 2002 debut of Massage Envy, a massage chain with an affordable monthly subscription plan, an inflection point. “The membership model helped turn massage from an occasional splurge into a regular habit,” she says. Fast-forward to 2026 and Americans are consistently booking wellness experiences and stacking them for cumulative effects.At Bathhouse, aufguss is more halo effect than direct revenue driver. Talmadge calls it “a piece of guided programming within the unguided experience,” which, as a bonus, acts as a retention tool. Guests roam the pools and saunas as they please; every 90 minutes, a sauna master walks in with towels, snowballs, and water. A hush falls over the room until the rocks start hissing and the music begins. Every set is different, giving regulars a reason to return.Eriksen calls the sauna “the hottest room on the planet people voluntarily enter.” He says a sauna master’s first job is making guests feel safe. “If I can make you feel safe, you can access your parasympathetic nervous system,” he explains. “You will eventually surrender. And it’s only at the moment you surrender, that the magic happens.”Talmadge, a former real estate broker, frames it like an investment: pain up front, compounding returns. Wellness, he says, is “a summation of sacrifices and stress that you endure for greater benefit.” Aufguss “makes the medicine less bitter.”Back in the theater at Satama, Talmadge walks in and introduces himself as Jimmy, a jittery production assistant whose director is running late. Everyone in the room, he announces, has been cast as an extra in a movie. He assigns roles row by row: top bench, featured stars; middle, background players; bottom, just extras, you don’t matter. The crowd laughs. The lowest bench is the most comfortable because heat rises. Sauna jokes.Jimmy is supposed to be nervous, a strategic creative decision on the part of Talmadge. At his first Worlds a year earlier, adrenaline got the best of him: His first snowball was a mess, and he knocked over a vase filled with water that was meant for the hot rocks. This year, instead of hiding his nerves, he’s made them part of the bit. Before he performs, his mind races. “What am I doing with my life? Why am I doing this? This is so much pressure. Why?” he says. Then the set starts, “and I’m just like, ‘Okay, it’s happening, and I’m doing it,’” he says. Wearing a ball cap and holding a clipboard as Jimmy, the anxious Talmadge I’d witnessed backstage came to life as a character. Then, partway through his set, the lights go out for less than 30 seconds, and he reemerges in dark gray pants, a pressed white dress shirt, and black loafers. Now he’s Sydney Gold, a director with the ego of Les Grossman and the ambition of Steven Spielberg. Talmadge plays him like a different man: shoulders back, barking voice, pure swagger. It’s hard to reconcile him with the guy who couldn’t find the chamomile half an hour ago.Gold’s entrance brings the second snowball, infused with mint and vetiver. New music and scents build the heat toward the finish. Talmadge has studied his competitors’ heat graphs all week and planned the stove like a chess problem, working the rocks one section at a time while saving untouched stone and a bucket of ice water for the finale: the hottest rocks and coldest water for the biggest explosion of steam.For the heat shower, he lets it rip—elbows bent and hands gripping the towel at the nape of his neck, muscling it overhead with a snap, over and over around the giant sauna—throwing heat down from the ceiling in waves. We’re all dripping with sweat, and we’re all smiling.Then one of his towels sails into the audience just beyond his reach while he attempts a challenging move. The room gasps. But when the music stops, everyone is on their feet, roaring with a standing ovation.Talmadge finishes 29th out of 40. He’d wanted a clean set and a spot among the eight finalists, and the gap between the standing ovation and the judges’ scorecard is hard for him to square. “Was it good, or what is ‘good for an American’?” he asks. Show aufguss is, he says, “so fucking hard—the craziest and most intense multitask imaginable.” And yet, he’s soaring from the moment. “I love aufguss more than I did when I got to Germany,” he says.The Monday evening after Worlds, Talmadge is back on home turf at Bathhouse Flatiron, where he leads a weekly aufguss. I count 50 guests, some of whom build their week around his sessions. The woman in front of me on the second row claps and cheers when he spins two towels like pinwheels during Florence + the Machine’s “Seven Devils.” Afterward, I meet Talmadge’s wife, Alison, flushed and smiling from his set, a towel around her waist, gently reminding him they need to get home to relieve the nanny.This week, he’ll head to Norway for the Modern Classic World Championship, a version of competitive aufguss without the costumes or props: just a sauna master, a stove, oils, music, and a towel. It’s the version he loves most, because it’s closest to what he and his team of sauna masters do at Bathhouse seven times a day, seven days a week. “When I dream of aufguss, I don’t dream of show aufguss,” he says. “I dream of a random Wednesday night when the vibe hits and the room gets liftoff.”