Beyond
Walking

By Ronda Gates, MS

Ronda Gates, MS, is a pharmacy grad who traded her white coat for a pair of athletic shoes and never looked back. Her health promotion business, LIFESTYLES, provides motivational speaking, program development, and fitness assessment services to support people making a lifestyle change. She has developed health promotion programs for many organizations nationwide.
Visit www.rondagates.com for a complimentary subscription to Ronda’s weekly email newsletter.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

— Henry David
Thoreau

What’s the Sweat?

My penchant for ferreting fact from fiction and clarifying myths and misconceptions keeps me on the job long past the day I once thought I would retire. Many of these opportunities come when I talk to my son. After an early life of swimming, hockey, and long-distance bike riding, he now maintains his fitness with daily excursions to the gym. During his post-workout trips to the steam room, he overhears the latest fitness fads discussed as though they were absolute truth. Happily, my in-depth knowledge of metabolism can usually confirm or dispel these easy-come, easy-go rumors. A six-mile Mother’s Day walk on the Oregon coast provided a recent opportunity to clarify whether the latest steam room rumors were fact or fiction. Not surprisingly, with a beach temperature of 90 degrees, the subject was sweat.

The myths about sweat are legion. Here are three that are easily dispelled.

MYTH ONE
If you’re not sweating, you’re not working out.
This claim came from a discussion after fans were added to a cardio-training area. The fans triggered the comment that, “If we get too cool, we won’t sweat, and if we don’t sweat, we aren’t gaining any benefits from the workout.”

There are a lot of misconceptions about sweat. Hear this fact: Sweat has only one purpose — to cool the body. When your body temperature rises as a result of the energy production required by exercise (or the heat of the day), a couple of responses are triggered. First, the heart beats faster to move blood around the organs more quickly to absorb heat. At the same time, capillaries just under the skin dilate so blood can be closer to the skin surface, which is usually cooler than body temperature. If these cooling mechanisms aren’t enough, your sweating reflex kicks in — something like a built-in shower. Water from the blood moves to the skin surface through a network of more than 2.5 million ducts, or sweat glands, in the skin. When this “sweat” — which is composed of 99% water and 1% salt and other protein and fat-based metabolites — evaporates, it cools the body and leaves a salty-tasting residue on your skin. You’ll notice the sweat if you live in a humid climate that deters evaporation. You may never think you sweat in a dry climate, where the same workout, at the same temperature, produces the same amount of sweat, but is not noticed because it evaporates so quickly.

Stop the Stench
Although sweat has no odor itself, when it is combined with bacteria on the body, it’s time to break out the deodorant to combat the unpleasant odor associated with sweat.

MYTH TWO
Sweating helps you lose fat.
My son reports that people still come to the gym wearing rubber suits designed to make them sweat profusely. Others bundle up in plastic and towels. If asked why they are using this gear, they often respond, “To sweat off fat.” Had they said, “To lose weight,” they would be accurate but misguided. Any post-workout decrease in weight is water-based sweat, not fat. Fluid replacement returns the scale to a pre-workout reading. The danger in this thermal approach to weight management is that any sweat produced cannot evaporate and cool the body.

MYTH THREE
Sweating rids the body of toxins.
My son asked about another common myth — that sweating rids the body of toxins. I’m always stunned when people attempt a variety of strategies to “clean their body of toxins.” Most of these practices sound logical, but body metabolism, which is sophisticated and complicated, is not a logical process. There are no toxins in sweat. Toxins are removed by a healthy kidney and liver working full time to counter all we do to abuse our bodies with poor exercise, eating, and lifestyle habits. The body isn’t detoxified when it sweats. It’s overheated.

The bottom line is don’t “sweat” excessively about how much you do or don’t sweat. Some people tolerate heat better than others, just as some people tear more easily when they cut onions or drool more readily when they go to the dentist.

Sweating dehydrates the body. A dehydrated body is prone to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Lost fluid must be replaced. Drinking water is a good place to start. If you are a noncompetitive everyday walker logging three miles a day, drinking a cup of water before and after your workout and sipping from your water bottle as you walk will suffice. If you are a competitive walker, it’s important to be proactive about fluid replacement, including working with your coach to compute your needs.

Misconceptions about the role of sweat will continue. The fact is that a daily routine based on a healthy lifestyle is what leads to fitness and fat loss.