We’ve broken down how heat impacts your body and added a helpful way you can actually benefit from hot temperatures.
Let’s first start the process impact heat has on the body.
While exercising in the heat, your body temperature starts to rise and your body can’t keep up in order to cool itself down. You start sweating a lot which leads to too much water loss from your body and you haven’t drank enough water. These two factors lead to dehydration. Once this starts to happen, a chain reaction occurs. Your body signals blood to circulate through the skin to help regulate the temperature, resulting in less blood flow to your muscles and organs, leading your heart rate to increase in order to keep up with the normal blood flow. Since your organs aren't getting the normal supply of blood, your stomach's ability to pass food into the small intestine slows down, which is why you may feel nauseous.
Your Environment also plays a role in this. In normal environments, your sweat gets evaporated into the air and takes some body heat with it. While in humid environments, your sweat can't evaporate as well so that body heat stays with you.
So what can we do to prevent this?
- The most obvious is Hydrate. Make sure you’re making up for all the water you’re losing.
- Run early or late - Run when it’s not as hot outside, before the sun comes up or after the sun goes down.
- Run on shaded trails and avoid blacktop roads with no trees.
- Put a cool towel on the back of your neck during or after your workout, this helps to cool your skin's temperature down.
How can we benefit from the heat?
- In the long term, exercising in hot temperatures can actually help you. If you ease yourself into these hot temperatures, your body will adapt over time. This leads us to heat acclimatization, which is when your body adapts to exercising in the heat naturally with training over time.
- Heat acclimatization results in a decrease of heart rate and body/skin temperature responses. As well as an increase in sweat rate, heart function, and blood distribution.
- Since your body can now perform better in rough circumstances, it makes it easier to perform in good circumstances. So all that summer training can pay off when it comes to fall races.
- There a great article by irunfar, that goes into great detail about heat acclimatization, if you're interested.