Understanding what you're losing in your sweat can help you unlock potentially massive performance gains...
"}},"slug":"sweat-tests-explained","blogTags":"Hydration","featuredPost":false,"author":{"name":"Andy Blow","slug":"andy-blow","facebookHandle":"https://www.facebook.com/andy.blow.3","twitterHandle":"https://twitter.com/andybl0w?lang=en","instagramHandle":"https://www.instagram.com/andyblow","linkedInProfile":"https://uk.linkedin.com/in/andy-blow-47b90133","stravaProfile":"https://www.strava.com/athletes/6999012","bio":{"childMarkdownRemark":{"html":"Andy Blow is a Sports Scientist with a BSc Honours degree in Sports and Exercise Science from the University of Bath. An expert in hydration, he has co-authored a number of scientific studies and books.
\nHe was once the Team Sports Scientist for the Benetton and Renault Formula 1 teams and remains an adviser to the Porsche Human Performance Centre at Silverstone.
\nAndy has finished in the top 10 of IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 races, as well as winning an XTERRA Age Group World title. It was his own struggles with cramp that led to him specialising in hydration and founding Precision Fuel & Hydration.
"}},"title":"PF&H Founder and Sports Scientist","headshot":{"file":{"url":"//images.ctfassets.net/428xzyjdw7rf/2LTns8O1ZGOHSfDQGv2jZz/f6470d62f0c1f14e7239432f60a0b765/Andy.png"}}},"scientificallyReviewed":null,"image":{"resize":{"src":"//images.ctfassets.net/428xzyjdw7rf/x87i7U2JrsFWIpkIYvTIT/7625aa70ff08e5f47637fd82cdda8296/Sweat_test_machine.jpg?w=1200&h=630&q=70&fit=fill","width":1200,"height":630}},"socialMediaImage":null,"body":{"childMarkdownRemark":{"excerpt":"Here’s a pub-quiz-worthy fact for you, humans sweat considerably more than any other animal on earth. Our sweat rate can be up to 2x higher than camels and we…","html":"Here’s a pub-quiz-worthy fact for you, humans sweat considerably more than any other animal on earth.
\nOur sweat rate can be up to 2x higher than camels and we can be as much as 5x sweatier than horses (in terms of sweat produced per hour relative to total body surface area).
\nIt’s widely believed that the ability to sweat developed under evolutionary pressures when our ancestors were hunting and gathering on the hot, dry African Savannah.
\nSweating allows us to offload excess heat to the environment more easily than panting (the method used by many other animals) does. So, early humans with higher sweat rates could move around during the hottest part of the day without overheating and they exploited this competitive advantage when it came to hunting and gathering.
\nAs a result, heavy sweating was promoted in the gene pool and we became better and better sweaters as time went on.
\nAlthough most of us no longer need to hunt and gather on the Savannah for survival, modern humans have retained the ability to sweat profusely for cooling purposes and this is one of the physical traits that makes us good at doing endurance exercise in the heat.
\nThe downside to all that sweating is that it leads to relatively rapid fluid and electrolyte losses.
\nIf these losses go uncorrected for long enough, a dip in performance naturally follows. That’s largely because your blood volume is reduced and cardiovascular strain increases when you’re significantly dehydrated.
\nSo we need to consume fluids - and often electrolytes - in relatively large quantities (compared with other animals) when we’re perspiring a lot in order to replace what we’re losing.
\nIn the last 50 years or so there’s been a lot of interest in finding out how much - and what - athletes need to drink in order to maximise performance, especially in hot and humid environments.
\nSweat testing has been at the core of much of the research into the hydration requirements of athletes and it’s increasingly becoming something that athletes are turning to when looking for performance gains.
\nSweat testing is usually used by athletes to answer two key questions…
\nThe second question largely focuses on the electrolyte composition of your sweat and, from a hydration point of view at least, the most important electrolyte found in your sweat is sodium because it helps you absorb and retain fluid in your blood.
\nSodium is also the one that’s lost in vastly different quantities from person to person, from as little as 200mg of sodium per litre of sweat to as much as 2,000+mg/l!
\nGetting the answers to these two questions enables you to personalise your hydration strategy and this can help you maximise your performance, especially in hot/humid conditions.
\nOne recent study found athletes who replaced an adequate proportion of what they’d lost in their sweat finished a 70.3 Ironman 26 minutes faster than those who didn’t!
\nWhilst there’s no guarantee that everyone will see similarly massive performance gains from taking in more sodium in races, it does point to the fact that sodium replenishment can be very important, particularly in longer and hotter races.
\nThere are a few different methods commonly used to collect and analyse an athlete’s sweat…
\nThis is generally considered the ‘gold standard’ in exercise sweat collection and analysis.
\nAs the name suggests, this method involves completely washing an athlete in de-ionised water and then getting them to exercise (presumably naked) in an entirely enclosed plastic environment. Every drop of sweat produced can then be painstakingly collected and analysed for very accurate analysis in a lab.
\nThe main reason that this method is held in such high regard from a scientific standpoint is that it’s the only way to actually collect 100% of the sweat from an athlete’s entire body for analysis and therefore get a truly unambiguous assessment of their total body sweat and electrolyte losses.
\nThe obvious downsides are largely practical; it’s time-consuming and complex. So WBW is very rarely used in practice with athletes and is more often reserved for use during specific research studies with small numbers of subjects when collecting 100% of sweat losses is a priority.
\nExercise testing using adhesive, absorbent patches stuck to various sites on the body is probably the most common type of sweat testing used with athletes.
\nSmall patches are stuck to the skin and left on during exercise, with sweat soaking into the material as the athlete perspires. These patches are then removed and the sweat extracted (usually using a syringe to ‘squeeze’ them out, or in a centrifuge) and the sweat composition analysed in the lab.
\nAs 100% of the athlete’s sweat is not collected, total sweat volume or sweat rate is usually estimated using body weight changes (corrected for any fluid consumed) instead.
\nOne advantage of this method is that sweat can potentially be collected during a wide range of highly sport-specific conditions. This means that results ought to be very representative of those that would occur during real world sporting scenarios, although it’s normally still done in a lab environment.
\nA disadvantage of patch testing is that evaporative loss of sweat from patches (or contamination of patches that are not handled correctly) can skew the results significantly.
\nWhilst this can be minimised by experienced practitioners in controlled conditions, it’s a tricky job to get right all of the time.
\nPatch testing is also still a relatively time consuming process, so the number of athletes that can be tested in a given period of time is limited and access to specialist facilities is still needed.
\nCystic Fibrosis sufferers lose an extremely high amount of salt (sodium chloride) in their sweat, so sweat electrolyte levels are used as part of the diagnostic criteria for the disease.
\nBecause the diagnosis of very young children is often required, sweat tests have been developed that don’t require the subject to exercise to produce sweat.
\nThese methods use chemicals applied to the skin to mimic the effect of certain neurotransmitters that stimulate the sweat glands and allow sweat samples to be collected ‘at rest’.
\nIn recent years this type of testing has been used increasingly frequently with athletes (including by us here at Precision Fuel & Hydration) because of the many advantages that at-rest testing offers over exercise-based methods.
\nNon-exercise sweat testing has the advantage of being less time consuming and it doesn't require significant exertion. Also, as the collection and analysis process are very controlled and simple, the results are extremely reliable and reproducible with a low risk of ‘user error’ in administering the test.
\nResults are also usually available immediately in most cases, getting actionable data to athletes faster.
\nIf you're interested in learning more about taking this type of Sweat Test, you can find your nearest Sweat Test Center here.
\nAs this type of testing doesn’t specifically allow for sweat rate calculation at the same time as sweat composition analysis, further testing is needed to quantify sweat rate. This can be done quite easily, with no more than a decent set of bathroom scales before or after an at-rest sweat test to give a more complete picture of an athlete’s likely net fluid and electrolyte losses.
\nIf taking one of these sweat tests is not feasible for you, then this free online Fuel & Hydration Planner has been designed to help you get an idea of your fluid/electrolyte requirements during training and racing so you can start refining your hydration plan through some trial and error. This blog highlights the signs to look out for that might indicate that you’re losing a lot of salt in your sweat.
\nProfessor Raj Jutley is a consultant heart surgeon who co-founded Precision Fuel & Hydration with Andy Blow. He trained in Scotland and worked as a consultant in Nottingham, UK.
\nHe now spends the bulk of his time in Nairobi where he's worked as the Director of Cardiac Surgery at the Aga Khan University Hospital and he's currently setting up affordable healthcare systems in Kenya.
\nIn the UK, Raj was the medical consultant to the Porsche Human Performance Centre, as well as to the highly successful Racing Steps Foundation (www.racingsteps.co.uk).
\nRaj - who drives classic rally cars and won the South African National Championship Classic Class in 2019 - continues to be involved in a scientific capacity with Precision Fuel & Hydration and provides valuable input, specifically in response to medical-based queries.
\nProfessor Raj Jutley earned the following qualifications during his time in Scotland:
\nQualifications: BMedSci (Hon), MB ChB, DM, FCS ECSA, FRCS Eng, FRCS CTh\nEducational Bios:
\n- Pan Africa Heart Foundation Bio
\n- The Open Science Research Network Bio
Raj has over 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles to his name, with the aim to add more on the topic of customised hydration, and you can find examples of his published work below:
\nBooks
\nPublications
\nNormative data on regional sweat sodium concentrations of professional male team sport athletes (Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition)
\nPhD Supervision
\nPhD Thesis: The effect of individualised electrolyte supplementation on physical and cognitive performance in elite motorsport drivers (Justin Holland, University of Queensland, Australia, 2019)
\nPresentations/Abstracts
\n