Exercise with less heat problems

Exercise with less heat problems....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 5-3-2012

This is important for several reasons.

1.  In the United States right now the hotter summer weather is coming and will be here a for several weeks.

Exercising at strength training or interval cardio can begin to overheat you in hotter temperatures.  Longer cardio can be worse since it has far fewer breaks.

And, overheating you can be harmful- even dangerous.  Yet you may wish you could keep the heat from cutting back your exercise. 

2.  You may be making a special effort to do more at your exercises but find the heat build up slows you down.  But you still want to exercise hard enough to get good results.

3.  Last and for some even more important, for fatter and heavier people, exercise can be like exercising wearing a heavy coat.

This can be unpleasant and even dangerous while decreasing the exercise they can do.  Because gradually doing more regular exercise is an essential way for such people to lose their fat and keep it off, that makes a way to allow them to still exercise quite important.

There are a number of solutions to this that we cover in the second half of this post that work.

A.  But first we have significant news in this area in this post today.

You may not realize it; but your hands get good circulation. And your body already uses them as air cooling devices somewhat just like the radiator in a car.

Apparently this is so much the case that cooling your hands in cool or cold water is a super way to cool all of you if these overheating problems happen to you.

This can be a great tool to use if you workout at home.

You can wash your hands in cold water only and dry them in your kitchen or bathroom in between sets of interval cardio or strength training if your tap water is cooler.

Or in hotter weather or when your “cold” water is only lukewarm, you can put some water and ice into a tub or your bathroom sink for easy access.

It seems that professional athletes have already tried this and found they can work out more, recover faster, and get better results with their training.

In warmer weather, this is even more effective.

Thanks to the RealAge email I get, I found out that some work was done at Stanford with fatter people who simply overheated too much to get enough exercise to get results.

It worked.  By using this technique, they were able to get effective fat loss results from their exercise when they did not without it.

This…”finding comes from a new study in the journal Circulation by Stacy T. Sims, PhD, a research scientist and exercise physiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. She recruited a group of 24 obese, yet healthy, women ages 30 to 45 to test the idea that cooling their hands might help them exercise longer -- a practice already used by some professional athletes. Dr. Sims enlisted obese women since they tend to give up exercise easily due to sweating, fatigue, exhaustion, and overheating. Fat acts as an insulator, which is why overweight people tend to overheat when they exert themselves.

Sims divided the women into two groups.

One held a device that ran cool water (60.8 degrees F) through it, while the second group's device had water at body temperature (98.6 F) running through it.

The women then attended three exercise sessions a week for 12 weeks. The workouts included a mix of strength training and aerobic exercise.

At the end of 3 months the results were impressive. The women with cooled hands burned 2 inches of belly fat off their waists, lowered their blood pressure from 139/84 to 124/70, and shaved an average of 5 minutes off their time for a treadmill test. The women with body-temperature water showed no significant differences in any of the measures -- likely, Sims notes, because many of them dropped out early and skipped a lot of sessions.”

Even though it sounds like they held the device continuously while walking on a treadmill, in some ways it can both be safer and burn more fat to work out harder for much shorter periods of time by doing sets of interval cardio or strength training. 

And that would give you the breaks needed to cool your hands in between the sets at home.  That way you need no special device.  AND, you will build up less heat in the shorter sessions even though you work harder while doing them.  So that might even work better!

The key news is that cooling their hands enabled good results in people who tried to lose fat without it and didn’t before.

B.  There are also other things you can do to make exercising in hot weather safer.

Some are simple but effective and some cost money to do but work great if you are a position to do them.

The simple things are:

Get up or get up a bit early and do your exercises first thing in the morning before you start the rest of your day.  That’s often the best time to exercise anyway; AND it also tends to be coolest in the morning in hot weather.

Drink some water before you exercise and some every half hour or less after that depending on how warm you feel.  This makes you MUCH safer than if you don’t just like it does when you have a fever.

If you have air conditioning and your house is warm when you first get up, run the AC while you get your tea or coffee and maybe while you exercise.  Usually your electricity will be cheapest then and your AC will cool your house faster with less energy since it’s less hot then.

If you work out outside, try to only do it in the shade if you can. Or wear a brimmed hat.

Wearing a headband can keep the sweat out of eyes.  The sweat can be quite a distraction otherwise.

In the hottest weather, exercise but do fewer sets or shorter sets or both.

If you feel like you’ve overdone it or are way too hot or began to feel odd too, stop exercising and drink some water and cool your hands immediately.  That might save you a trip to the emergency room or worse.  Hopefully you’ll have done that sooner and won’t overdo.  The idea is to do more exercise safely.  But make sure to stay safe too!

If you take the supplement creatine before your workouts as some do, skip it or take less on the hottest days because it has some drying effect.

If you take diuretics, work with your doctor or pharmacist to take less in hot weather if you can.

And, wait until after you workout and recover before taking a diuretic dose.  Taking it before might be risky.

The three more powerful techniques are energy efficient but do cost money.

1.  Many homes have dreadful insulation and heat proofing. Worse, they have no way for solar heat that builds up under their roof to escape.  That way they stay hot until far past midnight from the trapped solar heat radiating down all night.  And they stay hotter all day long too!

But if you add well screened ways for outside air to get under the roof and either convection powered turbines that the heat itself powers to exhaust the hot air through the roof or powered fans with a thermostat, you get a wonderful effect.

The heat stops getting into your house to begin with.  Then you are dramatically more comfortable; your house is cooler; you may no longer need AC to cool it or you will need something like 10 % as much as before.  (The savings from that can pay you to do this!)

To make it work even better add to the insulation between the roof and your ceiling.

These steps also make it so as soon as it cools off outside, your house cools down too.  That is a HUGE difference compared with a house that stays too hot to sleep in very well.

2.  Install ceiling fans in the room where you sleep, the room where you exercise, and the other rooms where you spend the most time.

It makes the effective temperature about 10 degrees cooler even on a low or medium speed and uses very little electricity.

My wife and I were once able to do the convection powered turbines and a ceiling fan in our house.

It was in the nineties when we finished the two jobs.   The day before, it was hotter inside than out and was in the nineties all night long inside.  The day after it was finished was just as hot.

BUT, it never got hotter than 75 outside and cooled off from there after dark once we got this done.

And we still had no air conditioning! Nor did we add much to our electric bill.

3.  If you do the other two things first and in your area it’s still too hot, you may want to get an air conditioner or a better or larger one.