My workout is swimming laps in the pool at the gym. I’m getting good cardio excercise, if being out of breath quickly is any indication, and my muscles are tender and I’m losing weight!
Since I can’t wear my headphones while I swim, I must think, and one of the things that popped into my head is “Does one sweat when one swims?”
Obviously, you are expending energy, but since the water temperature is lower than your body temperature, are you sweating? Or do you not notice because you’re in the water?
If you’re hot, your sweat glands will produce sweat; you won’t notice any cooling effect from it, because there’s no difference (as far as your skin is concerned) between your sweat and all that water you’re swimming in. Sweat only cools the skin when it evaporates, which it can’t do underwater.
Of course you might not get hot enough to sweat, if it’s a really cold pool and/or you’re not moving much.
If you’re getting in a good work out then water that is above the mid 70s is too warm to swim in. Usually that means, for me, that when I first get in it’s a tad too cold, but after a minute or so it’s just fine. As for sweating I’m sure you would a bit, especially if the water is too warm. I know after a workout I steam for ten minutes or so, and that’s after I’ve had a shower, I always have to wait to wear my glasses or they fog up.
The pool is heated, but I’ve noticed it’s a bit chilly after a rainstorm (it’s an outside pool). I am finding better results than I ever did doing the stairs or the treadmill.
A few weeks back the pool where I swim at was turned up too high. I noticed after swimming a couple laps of front crawl that the bits of me that were out of the water were sweating once I’d stopped. Very odd. No idea for obvious reasons if that was still the case when I was under.
As a former competetive swimmer (in high school) my observation is that you do sweat when you swim. Here’s my reasoning: after an hour of intensive workout, even with the cooling effect of the water you’d still be quite hot. As you came to the end of the pool, and raised your head out of the water, you’d immediately start to sweat - unlike when you move from a cool room to a hot environment and it takes a second or two to start perspiring. It’s not a big difference, but it was noticable. This leads me to believe that the sweat glands were already active while I was underwater.
I think the doc had it right. You may be exhausted and “hot” and tired from swimming so hard, but the water that is at least 20 degrees below your body temperature is drawing heat away from your body. Your sweat glands, designed to produce sweat that will evaporate and cool you, do not need to function when the water, which is many times more efficient than air when it comes to removing heat from your body, is doing the same thing. I do not think that they will be functioning while you are swimming because there will be nothing to signal them that they need to remove heat from your body. Maybe they automatically kick in when we exert ourselves. But I doubt it. I swim in Lake Michigan every morning (until it gets too cold). I never feel as if I’m sweating, regardless of the outside temperature. I’d be interested in any other experts. We’re just guessing.
hijack: I have recently invented (in my mind) a device which would project images onto the bottom of a pool. The boredom of swimming is not related to what we listen to, but the fact that we don’t SEE anything interesting. I think if we could watch images - maybe a slide show of some event, maybe of last night’s ball game, maybe of the news, maybe just nature slides, it would ease the tedium. Maybe porn. Who knows. Something to keep us in the pool. I’m working on it.
I don’t think you’ll find any experts around here, or many places. Swimming, from what I’ve seen, is misunderstood by lots of people, including doctors. I’ve read some say that swimming is a good exercise, but will not help with weight loss. I’d like to know how fast you swim and if you feel hot when you swim. I know there are times when I do sweat during a hard workout, unless you know of another way to taste salt from a pool. The warmer the pool the worse it gets, even a pool that’s around 80 degrees is a pain to swim in.
Ewww, there’s nothing wrong with swimming, I’m not bored when I swim, and I’m pretty sure the others on my team are not either. Speaking of teams ivylass, you might want to look into a US Masters team, you will get a better workout and might find yourself in better shape faster.
With all due respect, you must have read that in a comic book. If you exercise, you use stored energy, and it’s often in the form of fat. If you don’t replace it with food, you lose weight. Swimming is just like any other type of physical activity - if you use more energy doing it than you take in eating, you’ll lose weight. As to the taste of salt in the water of a pool, I think you can chalk that up to people jumping into the pool without showering, something I see far too often at the Y, and to the many chlorine salts and other materials they add to keep the pool relatively clear of bacteria. And as far as experts are concerned, I see you’re a charter member - you ought to know that the SDMB has its share of very well informed members. “Expert” is a term we all should be careful of, I know, but I trust a lot of these folks to know the facts or know where to find them. FWIW,
two definitions of “expert” I’m used to hearing:
1) a guy who’s more than 50 miles from home
2) a guy who knows 47 positions for making love but doesn’t have a girlfriend
You can sweat while swimming for the same reasons you can sweat while hiking in sub-zero weather. Sweat in this context is produced as a reaction to your internal body temperature. While water is a very effective coolant, it is acting on the surface. So, if your exercise is strenuous enough, and the water isn’t surface cooling fast enough to counter the rise in internal temperature, you will sweat. Your body isn’t smart enough to know that it won’t have an effect because evaporation won’t take place.
And swimming most certainly can help in weight loss anyway. Sweating out water weight isn’t what really drives weight loss. It is the burning of calories, which means the decomposition of your body’s fuel supply, which has mass. Any activity that will burn more calories than you would have without that activity can aid in weight loss. Swimming is good. Sex is better.
further hijack: If you’ve ever seen someone swimming backstroke under open sky who strays back and forth, you’ve got a good preview of what will happen with your swim-o-vision goggles. Except they’ll be swimming into other swimmers, and lane lines, and walls, and stuff. owie.
Also: guys in speedos + watching porn = hydrodynamic issues.
There are a number of cites like that. I didn’t say I believed it since I’ve lost a lot of weight from just swimming. I still think that while not everyone sweats while swimming at least some people do.
The internet if full of idiots. I think those are words to live by. It doesn’t matter if you saw it posted by a Nobel Laureate in medicine with 5 Olympic swimming medals and a debilitating case of hyperhidrosis, it simply isn’t true given what we know about how the human body works.
The internet if full of idiots. I think those are words to live by. It doesn’t matter if you saw it posted by a Nobel Laureate in medicine with 5 Olympic swimming medals and a debilitating case of hyperhidrosis, it simply isn’t true given what we know about how the human body works.
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I never said I believed them, I’ve only said I’ve seen it said that swimming is a poor way of losing weight. I’ve seen it in health books, swimming magazines, and even had doctors tell me this.
I teach university courses. When we were discussing misconceptions, I had a student tell me that her doctor told her that blood in veins is blue and blood in arteries is red. I didn’t believe her 100% but I didn’t totally doubt her. If she is correct, she has illustrated to me that doctors not only err in their diagonoses, but in their basic understanding of the human body, a misconception that I had held for some time, myself.
Would it not be that swimming does not create weight loss because you are exchanging fat for muscle? (Walking would create weight loss because it is a common exercise and your walking muscles are already big enough.)
P.S. You sweat during a shower also (if the water is hot.)
