I’ve been trying to exercise more lately. I’m now running on a machine at home for about an hour a day. I’m not really getting tired, but my big problem is that I sweat A LOT. (I’m overweight, so that probably has something to do with it.) I’ve been trying to manage it with towels to wipe off the sweat, but I would have to use an unreasonable number of towels to get through the whole thing without being drenched in sweat by the end.
So what I was wondering is: Could I cool my body down with fans, AC, drinking cold water, etc enough that I could greatly reduce the amount I sweat during exercise? I tried using a small fan I have in the house, but it wasn’t really powerful enough to make any meaningful change. If I got a big fan or more fans or whatever, could I achieve what I’m after? Or does that not remove the body heat fast enough for my body to not start sweating?
Or if anyone has any other solutions to this that would help. I think stamina-wise I could probably push my exercise longer, but I’m not really willing to do that if it means being covered in buckets of sweat for like half an hour.
There isn’t really a way to accomplish this. Fans and A/C are effective at cooling us down because we sweat. Heat is being generated within your muscles when you exercise, and you won’t be able to cool yourself by drinking cold liquid because the heat just won’t move around your body quickly enough.
The most effective way to cool your entire body is by using the surface area of your skin as a heat exchange with the outside environment through sweating and vasodilation.
AC does not require sweat to cool you down. It reduces the air temperature. If you exercise in a sufficiently cold room, which was cooled with AC, you would not sweat. You would also be extremely cold.