Inside Norway's World Cup Heat Plan: Sauna Sessions, Urine Tests and Olympiatoppen Science

Before Norway's national football team boarded the plane to the 2026 World Cup, the squad completed multiple sauna sessions — the visible part of a heat-acclimation plan built with Olympiatoppen, Norway's elite-sport institute, for a tournament where their opening match in Foxborough was forecast between 24 and 31°C. The less visible part, as manager Ståle Solbakken cheerfully told NRK: "Now it's a World Cup in piss tests."

What the plan actually looked like

Piecing together NRK's reporting, Norway's heat block had four parts:

• Sauna sessions before departure — repeated heat exposure to kick-start the adaptations (earlier sweating, expanded plasma volume, lower perceived strain) that make 30°C football survivable.
• Daily hydration testing. "We shall have urine samples each day the entire next week, and then we'll weigh ourselves before and after training," defender David Møller Wolfe told NRK. Weigh-ins before and after sessions measure exactly how much fluid each player loses.
• Fuelling adjustments — gels in the evening, sports drinks and electrolytes on tap.
• Training in the real conditions. Once in the US — where the squad's Greensboro base hit 30°C, feeling like 35 with humidity — midfielder Sander Berge called training in the actual heat "the most important" factor. Goalkeeper Ørjan Nyland noted the federation had coordinated heat protocols with Olympiatoppen.

None of this is exotic sports science. It is the standard heat-acclimation playbook — sauna as the pre-adaptation tool, then obsessive hydration management — executed with national-team discipline. The research behind it (plasma volume expansion, earlier sweating, lower heart rate at a given workload) is covered in depth in our guide to sauna for athletes.

Why sauna specifically, rather than simply flying out earlier? Passive heat does the adaptive work without adding training load — a squad can bank the 7–14 days of heat exposure the physiology requires while still at home, without burning recovery capacity on extra sessions in the American sun. The sauna block effectively pre-pays the adaptation bill, so the days on site can go to tactics and rest instead of acclimatising the hard way.

The cultural home advantage

Here is the quietly funny part: Norway treating the sauna as standard match preparation is not a stretch — it is culture. Norway ranks 9th in Europe for saunas per capita (1.6 listed saunas per 100,000 people in our saunas-per-capita study), the fjord-sauna scene in Oslo has boomed, and Bergen has even piloted "sauna on prescription" through its public health system, as NRK has reported. When Aftenposten's A-magasinet wanted a long-form interview with Erling Haaland this July, they did it in a sauna.

Contrast that with the tournament's traditional heavyweights: France (0.47 saunas per 100k), Spain (0.31), Italy (0.30) and England (0.20) all sit in Europe's bottom third for sauna density — a gap we explore in the football–sauna paradox.

Borrow the plan (the amateur version)

You do not need Olympiatoppen to copy the useful parts:

1. Two weeks out from a hot event, add near-daily heat. Sauna after easy sessions is the lowest-friction way in — the research protocols use 25–30 minutes, 3–5 times a week.
2. Track hydration like it matters — because it does. Weigh yourself before and after hot sessions; the difference is fluid you owe your body back, at roughly 1.5× the loss.
3. Do your hard training in the conditions you'll compete in whenever possible; heat exposure supplements it, it does not replace it.
4. Keep it boring and consistent. The national team's edge is not a secret protocol — it is doing the simple things every single day, urine tests included.

Frequently asked questions

How far ahead of a hot event should heat acclimation start? The adaptations build over 7–14 days of near-daily exposure and fade within weeks if you stop — which is why Norway's sauna block sat directly before departure rather than months out. One to two weeks ahead is the evidence-backed window.

Do daily urine tests actually tell you anything? At team level, urine concentration plus before/after weigh-ins gives staff a cheap daily read on each player's fluid status, so dehydration is caught before it costs performance. The amateur version is simpler: check your morning weight and urine colour during a heat block, and treat a big overnight drop as a debt to repay.

Does any of this help amateur players? Yes — the adaptations are basic physiology, not elite magic. A recreational player facing a summer tournament gets the same earlier-sweating, lower-strain response from two weeks of post-training sauna. The caveat is load: heat is itself a stressor, so add it to a manageable training week, not a brutal one.

Is sauna normal in football, or a Norwegian quirk? Heat and cold have long lived in football's recovery rooms — but as club facilities, used ad hoc. What stands out in Norway's case is the structure: sauna as a planned pre-tournament block with daily measurement, run in a country where the squad can walk into a public sauna in any city. That last part is the cultural difference, and it is measurable.

Visiting Norway and want to train like a local? Start with our guides to public saunas in Oslo and Bergen.

Last updated July 2026. Team details cited from NRK's reporting; this is general information, not training advice.