How to work out in the heat
Summertime, and the living is...sweaty. People love summer, I kind of hate it – but then I instantly burn when exposed to sun, and sweat a thoroughly rugged, manly amount in a day. The worst part of summer by far, however, is trying to work out when it's hot. It's got to be done, but it's unpleasant and excessively draining to your energy and motivation. Here are my tips for keeping up with the good stuff when the mercury rises.
Disclaimer: I'm no fitness expert, nor am I a personal trainer. I'm just a smoking hot woman who has improved her fitness, dropped 12 pounds of fat, and started fitting into old clothes recently, after a few months of working out during hot summer weather.
Be like Batman
What's Batman, if not prepared? Batman examines the angles and calculates the way to get the most good done, with the least harm. Be like Batman. Plan ahead. Be prepared. Get all the gadgets. Figure out what workouts you need to do and when, and how you can achieve the most with the least output. For me that's working out for around 45 minutes at least 5 days a week, taking my rest days whenever my body tells me I need one, and alternating cardio and weights.
Control your environment
Summertime brings unpleasant heat, earlier dawn, and horrible dryness or gross humidity in turn. To work out in comfort, I take steps to control my gym environment as much as possible, and reap the benefits.
Be flexible and choose your venue: if you usually run an exposed route, consider doing circuit training exercises in the shade; if you use a gym but it has no air-con, get a mat and workout at home...in front of your fan. Figure out the optimal space and way to move your body, and go for it. If you have a pool nearby, swimming can be a great way to stay cool(ish) while getting in both cardio and resistance in at the same time.
Due to a congenital condition, working out is necessary for pain management and the maintenance of my bodily integrity, and I'm fortunate to have a crosstrainer, weights bench, free weights, step and a mat at home. But don't underestimate the shit you can get up to with just a little floor space and some free weights.
Timing is everything: where I am, the temperature (usually) drops to a reasonable heat overnight, which means keeping the windows open allows the house to cool. Hence, early morning is often the best time for exertion, and I take advantage of this. Working out early has other benefits too, like revving up my metabolism for the rest of the day. Win-win. And on a related note...
Get your shit together: I lay out my workout stuff the night before. That way I have everything together (no sleepily traipsing around to find a hair tie) and I don't have the Herculean task of getting enough motivation to find it all on top of trying to get up and work out when I could go back to sleep.
Your friends the machines: get a fan or air-con unit trained on you, stat! Fans may be a no-brainer, but evaporation is also your friend when it comes to cooling an area, and just a few degrees can be the difference between SHE CANNAE TAKE NO MORE CAP'N and WATCH ME WORK IT.
If you can put a bowl of ice in front of the fan, or jimmy up some other kind of swamp cooler, you can often feel instant benefit. Sticking your humidifier on in front of the fan can help (provided it's not already humid) and offers the double whammy of diffusing fresh, motivational oils like grapefruit or lemon while you make your money moves.
What not to wear: anything, if you can avoid it! It's not rocket surgery to say the fewer layers you have to insulate your steaming flesh, the cooler you'll stay – heck, this is one of the primary reasons I work out at home. There, if I want to wear a thong and sports bra and nothing else on the crosstrainer, I can. If I want to do weights in the nude, who's to stop me? Where we're going, we don't need shoes.
(If that's not an option, there's a whole sports industry just dying to sell you all kinds of sweat-wicking tops.)
Use your noodle
In your Batman planning, consider ways to reduce the time you spend working out, or increase your time working smart. For example...
Compound exercises: these are moves that engage several joints and muscle groups at once, for example, squats, bench presses, military presses. More bang in less time.
Supersets: subsequent sets of exercises that engage different muscles, meaning one muscle set can recover while you work out the other. E.g. bicep curls then tricep dips. The internet can furnish you with plenty of info on these, including whole workouts that let you move on quickly from one group to the next over the course of a session or a week.
High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT: this is more the cardio side of things and involves short bursts (say 30 seconds to a minute) of all-out, go cray-cray levels of output, interspersed with recovery periods (of 2 minutes or so) of much lower effort movement. Personally it makes me want to die, but my kind-eyed-boy swears by it.
Change it up: consider doing shorter, more intense workouts, or going down weights and up reps with no breaks. I like to mix it up depending on what I can handle that day, which is all down to how I've slept, and how hot it still is after the overnight temperature dip.
A Get Wet Kit
During the excruciating minutes of my actual workout I use certain items in concert to get an immediate cooling effect, and keep going long enough to make it through.
The cooling towel
This thing is simply phenomenal. I bought one at first...and now we have three, so there's always one fresh for when I want to work out. It's a 'towel' made of a a synthetic material, but you don't use it to stay dry: you soak it through, wring it out, 'snap' a few times, and it becomes cold to the touch. It just...works. (Thanks, science.) I put it around my neck, or tuck it into the straps of my sports bra like some comical superhero cape, and dab strategically when I need a blast of cool. They can be washed in the machine, and stay soft when wet or dry. The brand I use is Mission Enduracool, and I cannot recommend them enough. (And nah, nobody reads this blog, so my endorsement is not sponsored.)
A fine water spray
Refill an old spray bottle (I used one from rosewater so it smells lovely) with cold water and keep it in the fridge. Pull it out when it's time to work, and spray liberally all over your face when you're too hot. Amazingly cooling and refreshing.
A pressure pump bottle
I bought a generico brand one of these and it's great when the rosewater bottle isn't quite cutting it, because it's the same thing on a grander scale. It's a robust drinking bottle that has a hand-action pump and a nozzle you can change from mist, to shower, to a stream like a water pistol. Pump it to build up the pressure, and press the button to spray. Simple.
It's my go-to water drinking bottle because I'm rubbish at drinking while running, no matter what kind of special cap the bottle has. Plus, at the inevitable point in cardio when I'd dunk a whole bottle of water over myself, instead I pump this up and spray myself cool instead. Soaked, but cooler, and able to continue.Which is what matters.
A microfiber towel
Now I'm soaked, but the water heats up instead of evaporating, meaning I'm soaked in warm water. Grody. The towel lets me dry off enough to use the cooling sprays again. Dry, rinse, and repeat, to remove the heat.
Hand sanitiser
This stuff is just alcohol gel, so it evaporates quickly taking heat from my skin with it. Squirt out a handful, rub it liberally over areas in the airstream of the fan. Sigh, and smell kind of nice in a sort of medical way for about a nanosecond.
Bring the chill with you
If you have an ice pack (like the ones hungover men would be shown clutching to their heads in old movies), fill it up and use it. Or, take a newish disposable water bottle, fill three-quarters and freeze. Even better, get some gel compresses that can go in the icebox – they're great for aching muscles or sprains, too. Regardless of what you use: get your ice out, keep it to hand, and grab it whenever you need a hit of extreme cool during your workout.
Get yourself a playlist
Music motivates like nothing else. When you're stuck in your head feeling your body complain, feed that inner voice with something else to think about instead. Listen to tunes that get you going, keep you going, and feed your soul. I made a rad cardio playlist a while back, and there'll be more music – and music for weights sessions – coming up soon, too.
Hydration is everything
You can only keep going if you have the energy to do so, and a lot of that's really about being hydrated. Drink plenty to hydrate a couple of hours before you work out, and make sure you keep drinking water during your workout to offset what you lose by sweating. Some folk I know swear by electrolyte drinks, but I rarely work out for more than an hour at a time, and I'm not a professional athlete (or willing to drink a whole load of weird sugar and additives during my workout) so I stick with water before and during. Your mileage may vary, so do what feels good to you, but keep the river flowing.
After weights, it's worth considering a protein shake. This helps in lots of ways: by offering your depleted body more liquid, maxing your efforts by feeding the microtears in your muscles with a source of immediate protein, and to give yourself a delicious chocolatey/berry and peanut/vanilla/matcha iced treat after all your hard work. Well done, you!
Perchance to dream
Healing and regeneration is really important in getting and staying fit, and a lot of that happens while you're asleep.
Summertime messes up my sleep schedule, with light creeping in and birds announcing their woke status (SO WAKEY! GOOD MORNING!) from 3 or 4am in my neighbourhood. To combat this, I sleep with a full coverage eye mask and a white noise machine each night – and keep earplugs handy for when the windows have to stay open to cool the place down. I also take supplements (like 5-HTP) to help me sleep, but that's as a result of years of tweaking. Point is, if there's something you can be doing to get better sleep, it's going to help you get up and work out.
All the best with your fitness adventures. Enjoy them when you can, just punch your card and make it through when you can't enjoy them, and work your body regularly to keep it in tip-top condition. At the end of the day, you're the only one that has to live there, so you might as well be kind to yourself.
Love always,
Fay
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