Sweating Is Not Fitness
June 14, 2015 // Fitness
“Did you workout yesterday?”
“Yea, but I only had 15 minutes so I just worked up a good sweat.”
This conversation happens far too often. A workout, which is designed to challenge the body through exercises, is measured in terms of effectiveness by sweating?!
A workout is made up of exercises and movements. A workout is effective when it causes the body to adapt, meaning fat loss and strength gains.
There are a plethora of ways to stimulate body adaptations, such as:
- Hypertrophy Training (Muscle Fatigue)
- High Intensity Training (Breathing Rapidly)
- Movement Control (Yoga & Pilates)
- Endurance Training (Sustained Heart Rate)
All of the above modalities have a common denominator: They can each be measured in terms of effectiveness & progressions.
For Example:
- You bench press an additional 10 pounds since last week
- You reduce your rest time between sprints by 5 seconds
- You increase the depth of your 1-legged squats
- You run your normal 5-mile course faster by 20 seconds
These type of measurements are quantifiable and are absolute. Sweating, on the other hand, is a bodily function — not a measure of fitness.
Sweating is a response of homeostasis, which is where your body is adapting to its environment. Since your body needs to maintain 98.6 degrees of operation, sweating is your body’s way of regulating its temperature.
Think about it — what happens to our bodies when we reach a temperature of 100+ degrees? Illness.
Since exercise and movements in general cause an increase in your internal temperature, your body initiates the sweating mechanisms as a way to literally cool off your skin. That’s right, sweat is simply a release of water (combined with salts and toxins).
It works like so:
You begin to workout. Your muscles become warm and your body gets hotter. Your internal temperature begins to rise. Your body initiates sweating to keep it cool.
That’s how sweating works.
You are not more fit because you brought upon a sweat.
In fact, every time you sweat you increase the need for more hydration to make up for the loss of water.
If sweating caused fat loss, there wouldn’t be any overweight people in the South, right? Those people sweat all day!
In the future, don’t use the bodily response of sweating as a way to measure of effectiveness from a workout. Instead, focus on what you did, such as the exercises variables, rather than what you caused, like sweating.