I took advantage of my long New Year weekend by visiting my yoga studio twice a day instead of just the once. I’ve been a member there for a few weeks, and have a pretty solid schedule for working out.
On the second session of the second day, I noticed a gawdawful ammonia smell. Like seriously… cat pee strength ammonia. It took me several minutes to realize:
:eek:OMG~ It’s coming from me!! I’m sweating ammonia! :eek:
I looked around on the intertoobs when I got home and showered. It seems it’s not so uncommon for some folk with protein heavy diets and is a natural result of the rapid breakdown of proteins during extreme workouts.
I’m pretty confident that I’m eating enough calories to build muscle, which makes the odor incidental to my diet if I don’t make changes in that area. An apple an hour before the final workout seemed to make quite a difference but I could still smell the fumes. Is there anything else I should consider? I stay very well hydrated; I don’t have any symptoms of kidney issues.
Any personal trainer or fitness buffs want to weigh in?
You may be generating ketones if there isn’t adequate carb in your diet (an effect that may be heightened during intense exercise). Perhaps that’s why the apple seemed to help.
ETA: To be explicit, ketones may be what you’re smelling (they are said to smell like rotten apples or Juicy Fruit gum, but I’m not sure I agree)
Mr. Athena gets this occasionally. I don’t know that it’s ketones - they take a while to build up, don’t they KarlGuass? - and he’s definitely not eating low carb enough that he should be ketoney. We do low-carb, but just moderately low-carb. Definitely not low enough that I would think ketosis was happening.
He says it seems to happen more often when he doesn’t eat a lot of carbs, though. Like if he goes out for a workout after eating nothing but eggs & bacon for breakfast. So maybe somehow connected to not having carbs in your body but not actually in ketosis?
I’m familiar with the cloying sort of sweet keytone smell from adventures with the Atkins diet well over a decade ago. It kind of reminded me of baby poo and seemed to be more of a BO than sweat related.
This was serious ammonia and specifically in the hard sweating.
Maybe it’s an issue of the concentration level? It was seriously disturbing at the time. Now it’s more of a curiousity.