272. What You're Getting Wrong About Sweating, the Burn, Soreness, Fat Loss, and Building Muscle

All right, I'm gonna fly through a handful of these myths, and I'm gonna break them down in detail.

The first one is that when you sweat more, you actually burn more fat or you're more likely to lose weight.

That's actually completely incorrect.

And I think oftentimes we finish a really sweaty workout and we think, "Man, we are really ticking the needle forward.

This is really working.

Look how much I've sweat.

In that workout, I sweat so much.

I have to be burning fat, or I have to be making progress." And that's actually completely incorrect.

Sweat is simply your body's cooling system.

That is it.

When your core temperature rises, your body releases sweat to cool itself down.

It is a temperature regulation response.

It is not a fat-burning response.

It doesn't mean you're building muscle.

It doesn't even necessarily mean you're working harder than someone else if they're not sweating as much.

So it's a complete fallacy that it is linked to progress or it means that you're working harder.

Yes, you can lose weight when you sweat a lot, but it's really just water weight, and the second you start drinking more water, it's gonna come right back.

So don't be tricked when you're going into a class where you sweat so much and then you've jumped on a scale and you're like, "Wow, that was so effective.

I lost weight." You didn't.

You just lost water weight.

It's gonna come back as soon as you drink more water because you were just simply dehydrated.

So more sweat does not equal more progress, more fat loss, more muscle building.

Now, can you have a really hard workout that does make you sweat a lot and it does help you burn calories, which contributes to fat loss over time? Yes, that is true.

But sweat in itself is not the indicator of that.

You can sit in a sauna for an hour and you can still sweat a lot in that, and obviously we know that's not necessarily creating fat loss.