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Sweat isn’t an indicator of a good workout, but during this muggy summer you’re probably sweating no matter what kind of workout you’re doing. Let me explain why some people sweat more than others, and what you can do if you’re always soaking through your workout gear.
Why some people sweat more than others
As I’ve discussed before, sweat is just your body trying to cool itself down. When we exercise, our body heat increases, which is why we sweat. You’ll sweat more than others if these factors apply:
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You’ll sweat more if you’re a bigger person, because you have more body mass relative to skin area (this includes people who have a lot of fat, who have a lot of muscle, and who happen to be normally proportioned but also tall. Size is size).
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You’ll sweat more if you’re fit enough to work harder—the more work you do, the more heat you’ll produce. So people who run fast or lift heavy tend to sweat more than their less-fit counterparts.
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You’ll sweat more when it’s hotter, obviously. Expect more sweat exercising outdoors on a 90-degree day than a 70-degree day, and so on.
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You’ll sweat more if you exercise in a humid environment. It’s not just the heat that gets you, it really is the humidity too. When it’s humid, sweat doesn’t evaporate from our skin as easily, so we don’t cool down as well, so our body is still hot and keeps pumping out the sweat.
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You’ll sweat more if you’re used to the heat. That may sound backwards, but spending time in the heat trains our body to be better at cooling itself—which means sweating more, not less. Heat-adapted athletes sweat more than people who aren’t heat adapted, and they start sweating earlier in the workout, too.
You can change some of these factors, but most of them you wouldn’t want to. Do you want to get less fit just so you sweat less? Refrain from adapting to the heat, so that you sweat less but your hot workouts are also more miserable? Absolutely not. (The one place your goals might align is weight loss: getting thinner will improve your skin’s ability to cool you. But you still have all those other factors working to make you sweat more, so you may not even notice a difference.)
So if you can’t always make your body sweat less, what can you do to make the sweat that you are producing a little more manageable? Try these tips.
Use evaporative cooling
The purpose of sweat is to evaporate. When a cool breeze hits your sweaty skin, the sweat evaporates into the air, taking some heat energy with it.
The best thing you can do, then, is to help your sweat do its job. Allowing the sweat to evaporate will cool you down (sweat’s job) while also making you feel dry again. Or at least, less wet.
For outdoor workouts where you can’t control the climate:
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Choose workouts where you’re moving quickly, with air rushing against your body—like cycling or roller skating.
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Choose places to exercise where there’s a breeze. A hilltop or lakeside will usually have more airflow than a swamp or valley area. Pay attention to your local micro-climates and plan your routes accordingly.
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Wear wicking fabrics, so that sweat can still cool you through your clothes. Long-sleeved sun shirts can help a lot here.
For indoor workouts:
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Use your air conditioning, or go to an air-conditioned gym. Not only does A/C make the air cooler, it also dries it out, which gives it better evaporative power.
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Set up a fan. You can point a box fan at your treadmill or spin bike. If you’re lifting weights, I like to point the fan at the bench I sit on when I rest between sets.
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Use a handheld fan. This is a good option if you’re in a public gym or if you can’t set up a stationary fan in your workout space. I have this one and it’s fantastically refreshing to switch it on and hit my face and the back of my neck, even if only for a minute between workout intervals.
For those of us with exercise-induced asthma, dry air might trigger some wheezing. That’s why I avoid airbikes and I try not to point fans at my face unless I have my inhaler handy (just in case).
Soak it up
Even with the tips above, you’ll probably still be pouring sweat on hot days. That’s why it’s good to have ways to towel it off, soak it up, or divert it before it annoys you too much.
Let’s start with towels. I like a basic gym towel like these, because personally I prefer regular terry cloth to fancier fabrics like microfiber. Microfiber has its fans, though, and one plus is that it dries more quickly than cotton. Here’s a microfiber set if you’re into that sort of thing. Don’t be afraid to bring two towels to the gym if you think you’ll need them. Bringing a towel on an outdoor run is a serious quality-of-life improvement—try it if you haven’t.
Next up: something to wear to soak up the sweat. Long-sleeved clothes and long leggings or pants can not only wick sweat away, they also prevent it from dripping. (I hate that feeling of dripping.) I also need to throw in a good word for sweatbands. This Junk one is lightweight and wicking, but again, I prefer good old terry cloth. A terry headband will completely stop sweat from running down your forehead, and the matching wristbands give you a way to wipe sweat away from anywhere else it happens to be bothering you. They’re also cheap as heck. The real cost: embracing the retro aesthetic. You can pull it off. I believe in you.
Deal with the aftermath
After a sweaty workout, a shower isn’t really optional. Dermatologists recommend the post-workout shower for skin health; sweat can irritate your skin, and you don’t want to create warm, moist places for bacteria to grow. If you’re stuck in a place where you can’t take a shower right away, at least wipe off what you can and change into dry clothes.
There’s another post-workout danger, too: all of that cooling sweat keeps doing its cooling job as long as it’s on your skin—even if you’ve stopped doing the workout that was driving up your body temperature. This is why events like marathons pass out those silver blankets at the finish line, to prevent runners from cooling down so much they get hypothermia. So if you can’t dry off right away, and you’re heading back into the air conditioning, at least cover yourself up. A cozy sweatshirt goes a long way for post-workout temperature regulation.
Finally, there’s the issue of laundry. Cotton (like that sweatshirt) may not wick or cool you very well, but it has the advantage that when you wash it, all the sweat and any stinky bacteria will wash right out.
Synthetic fabrics, on the other hand, tend to harbor bacteria that never really washes out. To prevent the perma-stink, rinse your workout clothes as soon as you take them off. This is easiest if you just rinse them in the shower, and hang them to dry. (Pro tip: hang a second shower curtain rod in the back of your shower, and festoon it with these hooks to hold your individual items while they drip dry.)
If you have workout clothes where the bacteria have already taken hold—you’ll know if they’re clean but start to stink as soon as you sweat in them again—use a laundry sanitizer like Lysol’s or an enzyme detergent like Hex. And get in the habit of rinsing your sweaty clothes so this doesn’t happen again.
