Train Like an Athlete by ATHLEAN-X (Video Podcast)

Have you ever wondered if sweating more during your workouts burns more fat. In this video, I’m going to explain whether trying to get your sweat on is actually increasing the amount of body fat you are burning in your workouts or just burning you out and hurting your overall workout quality.

To start, it is important to differentiate between losing weight and losing body fat. When you lose weight, it is very possible that none of the loss came from a true loss in adipose tissue. In fact, it is not uncommon for someone to lose even ten pounds in a single workout. That said, this is all water loss through sweating. If you rehydrate properly, you should put back on this weight within hours of finishing your workout.

In fact, your body is built for survival. If it senses a dramatic loss in water through a monitoring of blood volume then it can trigger your thirst mechanism. The need to drink is our body’s way of helping us to replace lost fluids and get back to an environment in which we can thrive. For those of us trying to not just burn body fat but also build muscle, it stands to reason that you will never want to be dehydrated.

Now, when people are looking to burn fat faster in their workouts they may wear heavy workout gear like a sweat suit or a rubber suit. The thought is, this will make them sweat much more and will accelerate the fat burning process. This is not correct at all. In fact, it could actually be defeating the purpose by accelerating your path to dehydration and therefore impacting the quality of your workout leading to fewer calories burned.

When your core body temperature is elevated, your body releases water through the pores of your skin that eventually evaporate and help to cool you off and bring your body temp back down closer to your normal. Physical activity is not a prerequisite for this to occur. I could be standing in the middle of the Sahara desert and start sweating profusely. No physical activity is being done and therefore my caloric expenditure is greatly minimized.

On the other hand, I could be doing a gut busting conditioning workout that includes burpees, box jumps, jump rope, etc in the middle of the frozen tundra in negative degree temperatures and not break a sweat. The reason is simply that the outside temps are so cold that even with all the physical activity I am not able to increase my core body temperature at all to necessitate a sweat. That doesn’t negate the fact that I’m working really hard and burning calories.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters when it comes to fat loss is that your body is being placed in a hypocaloric state quite often and consistently. This means that you are burning more calories than you are taking in. This is why fat burning workouts are not actually necessary to be lean and ripped. If you managed to decrease your calories through diet alone you could wind up getting very lean without every having to do specific conditioning workouts.

That said, we tend to opt for the fat burning workouts and in doing so need to throw out the sweat factor and focus most on the intensity of the training. Now one last point that should be made. Likely if you are doing harder exercises with more effort for a longer period of time you will sweat more than if you did easy exercises at an easy pace for shorter. The first scenario is likely going to be able to raise your core temp more and increase your sweating. That could lead to the confusion of sweating equating to fat loss. Don’t be confused. It is just a byproduct of the high intensity and caloric burn.

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