This is one of the most common misconceptions that the more you sweat while working out, the more calories you burn. There is another misconception that fat in your body burns and melts into sweat and thus more sweat means more fat and calorie burn. Although it may sound good to measure the efforts you put into working out, it does not burn any calories.
Sweating and calorie burn are two different mechanisms of the body but they have an indirect relation with each other. In this article let’s understand Sweating, Calories burn, and its relation more precisely as we move further.
What is Sweating?
Sweating is a mechanism that helps to control body temperature. Sweat consists of 99% of water and 1% salt and fat. It can occur in any stressful situation such as workouts, sickness, or even eating spicy foods. Stressful situations trigger a mechanism in the body leading to the temperature rise. When the body temperature rises, your sweat glands which are located beneath the skin, near hair follicles release sweat to the surface of the skin. Water contained in the sweat gets evaporated in the air and makes the skin surface cool.
External factors also play a considerable role in sweating. If you go out in summer, you will be full of sweat all around because the outside heat makes the skin surface hot. But if you go out in winter with double the clothes you wore in summer, you will still not see a single drop of sweat that is because winter cold does not allow the body to get hot and the sweating mechanism is not triggered.
Can Sweating Burn Calories & Fat?
Sweating occurs when body temperature rises. Similarly, as we exercise our muscles and body parts get engaged and generate heat resulting in the rise of body temperature. This process activates our sweat glands And forces them to release sweat to cool down the body.
Technically Sweating cannot burn calories or fat and there is no way to specifically identify calorie and fat burn. But most people engaged in cardio exercise tend to lose weight, which people are often seen as piled in sweats all around. Thus it becomes very natural to relate sweating with fat burn.
If you are working out for weight loss, sweating isn’t a good gauge to look out for. As you can sweat even when you do nothing. Instead, focus on increasing the intensity of the workout once you are comfortable at a level.
Sweating Heavily in Some Body Parts?
Some people complain that they sweat heavily in some parts of the body. Let us understand this Although Sweat glands are present all over the body, there are some parts such as the Forehead, Armpits, Palm, and Foot Sole where it is present in most. There is a simple maths behind this, which is More Sweat Glands, More Sweating. Thus we tend to sweat more on these parts than on other parts of the body.
Why Some People Sweat more?
There are various factors that define our sweat volume. Which means how much you will be sweating. These factors include body size, age, health, and fitness. Thus different people have different sweating capabilities. A common observation is such Old People sweat less than an Adult or Teen. That’s because Sweat glands keep shrinking as we age.
More Sweat means More Workout? Is it True?
This seems to be true as we may believe that the more workout we do the more heat is generated in the body. And to cool the extra heat that got generated, we sweat more. It sounds true to some extent that More Sweat means People had a high Workout or vice versa.
But as we know our Body is a complex machine and Its complexity plays some role here. It is been observed that as we start exercising, we tend to sweat more in the initial days. But as soon as our body adapts to the habit, we start to sweat less in comparison. And several other factors affect how much we sweat.
Thus concluding that If We Sweat More Means We Workout More or If We Workout More Means We Sweat More cannot be true.
Conclusion
Thus we can clearly understand that Sweating does not burn fat or calories while working out. Neither we can say that we did a lot of exercise if we sweat a lot while working out. Sweating is just a mechanism of the body to cool off the elevated body temperature.
So don’t bother sweating and keep exercising…
Hope you liked this article. Also, don’t forget to checkout
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Credible Reference & Sources
- MedlinePlus – Sweating
- NHS – Understanding Calories
- NIH – Relation between sweat rate and weight loss
