When I exercise I sweat a lot does this mean Im out of shape?
Common Client Training Questions Answered
How can I safely exercise?
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Is mowing the lawn or doing house chores exercise?
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I heard if you want to build muscle you should not perform aerobics?
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Cardiovascular questions
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When I exercise I sweat a lot; does this mean I'm out of shape?

Actually, it means you are in better shape than if you didn't sweat very much. To really appreciate the answer to this question, it's helpful to know a little bit about sweat glands. There are two types of sweat glands. One is found primarily around the armpits and genitalia, and these glands release a fatty secretion that gives a characteristic odor when the sweat interacts with skin bacteria. This sweat gland doesn't become fully operational until adolescence. The other sweat gland covers most of the body and secretes essentially an odorless sweat that accounts for most of the evaporative cooling.

When you exercise, your body produces a lot of metabolic heat; much of it coming from your body's core rather than the extremities. A heated muscle is typically more functional, but when the temperature gets too high serious, life threatening tissue damage may occur. In response to an elevated core temperature, the brain signals the body to dissipate the excess heat as rapidly as possible through sweat glands. Air temperature is directly related to the rate of sweating. Sweat is transported to the skin so that it can evaporate and create a cooling effect. Evaporation provides the greatest protection against over heating. Moreover, as the environmental temperature increases the body's ability to lose heat from other sources decreases, and when the environmental temperature exceeds body temperature, heat is gained. At this point the only substantial way to dissipate heat is through evaporation.

Sweat is only effective for cooling if it evaporates. Sweating alone does not cool the skin. If humidity is high, the rate of evaporation may be greatly reduced or prevented resulting in the sweat remaining in a fluid state. If the sweat remains on the skin it can further heat the body by acting as an insulator. Sweat dripping profusely off the skin may be an indicator that the humidity of the environment is so high that sweat can't evaporate. This can cause your body to get too hot. Wearing too many clothes, such as running in sweats in the summer months, can also trap sweat and overheat your body. Since cooling occurs with evaporation, it is best not to wipe off your sweat.

Effective evaporation is also limited by lack of air movement. During exercise the air surrounding the body may become saturated with water acting as a zone of insulation. If this warm air is replaced by cooler air from the wind on a breezy day or a fan heat loss is increased as the moving air takes the heat away. Air currents of 4 mph are twice as effective as air currents of 1 mph, which is the basis of the wind chill index. This explains why using fans and wearing fewer clothes or those that wick sweat are desirable on a hot day.

So to the question, men and women who are conditioned respond better to heat stress than sedentary people. Trained people sweat sooner at lower body temperatures, they sweat more, and their sweat is more diluted. Training actually changes the sweat glands and causes an increase in plasma volume that is essential in the production of sweat and for other cardiovascular and thermoregulation demands. All of this allows a trained person to store less heat and therefore have a lower core temperature than an untrained person.

My wife when exercising doesn't sweat as much as I do and her sweat seems to glisten how can that be?
Women tend to regulated their body temperatures differently compared to men. They produce smaller sweat droplets that adhere to the skin better than large droplets allowing greater absorbtion of heat and therefore more heat is dissipated when the sweat is evaporated. Men's sweat droplets are larger and tend to drop off before being evaporated limiting absorbtion of heat.