Estimating your sweat rate can be a useful exercise when you’re trying to figure out how much and what you need to drink (in terms of fluids and electrolytes) during training and events.
Sweat rate varies considerably from person-to-person and it can also vary quite a lot for any given individual because things like how hard you’re working, the ambient temperature and humidity, your clothing choices, genetics and heat acclimation status all play a role in determining how fast and how much your body perspires.
So, sweat rate measurement is something that should ideally be done on a number of occasions and in a range of conditions if you want to extrapolate the results to help use them as a guide in different contexts, like planning your likely hydration needs for an upcoming race.
The equipment you’ll need to calculate your sweat rate
- An accurate set of weighing scales
- A dry towel
- Possibly a small, accurate kitchen scale to weigh your water bottles (if you’re planning to drink during the sessions where you’re measuring your sweat rate)
How to calculate your sweat rate
This is slightly adapted from Asker Jeukendrup’s excellent mysportscience…
1. Go for a pee and then record your body weight, ideally with no clothes on. That’s A.
(If you can't weigh yourself in the buff because getting naked in public places like the local gym isn't your thing, you can always weigh your clothes and account for that weight difference - this is a method we call 'The Hovda Method').
2. Perform your session (or event) and record exactly how much you drank.
This is easy if you drink from a single bottle or two.
Weigh your bottles before (That’s X) and after (Y) and record the difference. 1 gram = 1 millilitre.* (Z)
* If you use different measurement units, e.g. fl oz, you’ll need to convert all values to litres (via Google!). Make sure all units are in kg or litres
3. After exercise, towel yourself dry and then record your weight. Again no clothes on is best, as your clothes will hold some sweat. That’s B.
4. Now subtract your post-exercise weight (B) from your pre-exercise weight (A) to get the weight you lost during the session.
Weight lost (C) = A-B
5. Also subtract the weight of the bottle(s) before (X) and after (Y) to obtain the amount you consumed (Z).
Volume consumed (Z) = X-Y
6. You can now calculate your sweat rate…
(C+Z) / time.
Note: It’s best to aim not to pee during these sessions as this can skew the results. If you do have to go, in an ideal world you’d measure urine output, although a decent estimate is to assume a fluid loss of ~0.3l (300ml / 12oz) per bathroom stop.
You then just need to subtract 300ml (0.3kg) from your estimated sweat rate at the end.
I’d generally recommend trying to limit data collection to sessions lasting ~45 minutes to 2 hours. This is because anything shorter than that can be prone to errors of multiplication in the equations. And anything longer can start to be skewed by other non-sweat related sources of body mass change, including fuel utilisation (you inevitably burn glycogen during exercise and this can affect your body weight results), and respiratory water losses (a function of the amount of air moved in and out of your lungs as you breathe).
To make the above calculations really easy, you can collect all of the data into this spreadsheet along with some relevant notes about your session (mode of exercise, duration in minutes rough intensity and temperature, whether it was outside or inside etc).
Download the sweat rate data spreadsheet
The sheet will then spit out a % bodyweight loss figure for that workout and also an estimate of your sweat rate expressed in litres per hour. Like this:
You can record numerous sessions in the sheet and this will help you to get a handle on what kind of range of sweat losses you see for different sports, in different weather conditions and at different intensities.
Though these calculations likely won’t be 100% accurate, they give you a good estimate of your sweat losses. If you do this enough, you’ll become very good at ‘guesstimating’ your sweat rate in the future; a dinner party trick of dubious value if nothing else!
Plus, if you’ve also had a Sweat Test with us, you can add your sweat sodium concentration data in and it will estimate your hourly and total sodium loss numbers too, helping you get a good idea of what you’re losing so you can more adequately replace it.
What your sweat rate numbers mean in practice - is your sweat rate low, moderate or high?
We often get asked by what constitutes a low, moderate or high sweat rate by athletes taking our Fuel & Hydration Planner and it’s a tricky question to answer as there are a lot of variables involved.
A recent paper helpfully looked at a range of sweat rate data collected in a variety of sports and the graphs below show something of the trend in the data from ~500 athletes:
The range of sweat rates in the data was about 0.5 litres per hour to just over 2.5L/h (save for a few major outliers up at 4-6L/h!) and this is very similar to the kind of numbers we’ve seen in the testing we’ve done with athletes over the years.
Another study done at the 2003 Hawaii Ironman in Kona came up with a very similar range of sweat rate figures in athletes a few days before the race.
Based on this data and experience, as a rule of thumb I’d be inclined to say that anything around 1-1.5L/h is a ‘normal’/moderate sweat rate (for a healthy adult) during prolonged exercise of a reasonable intensity.
Anything much less than 1L/h would be on the low side and anything above 2L/h should be considered high. If you’re losing over 2.5L/h then you definitely have a very high sweat rate.
Whilst we’ve seen those very high sweat rates of upwards of 3L/h in a handful of athletes, it tends to be in very, very big guys (men do tend to have higher sweat rates than women), and/or those working incredibly hard in oppressively hot and humid conditions.
Do bear in mind that body weight and size factors into all this to a degree, so if you’re a very, very tiny female distance runner but you’re sweating at 1.5L/h, that might be considered a high or even very high sweat rate for you personally. On the flip side the exact same absolute number might be deemed quite low for a 6ft 11in (210cm), 150kg (330 lbs) Offensive Lineman in the NFL. But, I’m sure you get the general idea.
What to do (and not do) with the data
Once you’ve collected a reasonable amount of sweat rate data, the obvious question is what can you do with the numbers? And unfortunately the answer is not as straight forward as many athletes would like it to be.
Often you’ll see athletes performing these kind of sweat rate tests and then proceeding to work out that based on, for example, a rate of 1L/h when running hard that they obviously need to drink 1L/h when running (i.e. to replace 100% of their losses).
There’s a nice simplicity to the concept of ‘1 out = 1 in’ and for a long time it was assumed that 100% sweat loss replacement during exercise was likely to deliver an optimal performance.
But time and research has shown that this logic is fundamentally flawed (the maintenance of performance in an exercising body is way to complex) and few, if any, credible sports scientists or nutritionists would advocate ‘like for like’ replacement of sweat losses during activity these days.
In fact, as 100% replacement often requires drinking beyond the body’s natural thirst instincts, it can be very dangerous. It carries the risk of hyponatremia (low blood sodium levels resulting in some nasty symptoms) if taken too far and this alone is enough to strongly discourage 100% fluid replacement as something to shoot for.
What percentage of your sweat losses should you aim to replace?
You can actually tolerate quite a bit of dehydration (as defined by body weight loss) during training and competition - assuming you start well hydrated. The exact amount you need to replace at any given time is unclear though; it’s probably highly individual and most likely varies a bit day to day too.
This blog on how much dehydration you can tolerate is well worth a read as it gives some pointers on how much sweat you can probably lose before your performance is compromised and should help get your head around how much fluid you might want to be replacing.
It’s not productive to try to use sweat rate data to try to create a pre-determined, inflexible strategy for fluid and electrolyte replacement.
Measuring your sweat rate should be about getting to a pretty decent ‘ballpark’ figure for how much sweat (and sodium if you know your sweat composition) you’ll likely lose over a period of time, at a certain intensity and in a particular set of environmental conditions.
If you do enough of this testing in and around the type of scenarios you encounter in training and competing, it can be very helpful in guiding you in setting the approximate levels of fluid and sodium intake that you’ll then go on to experiment with in order to optimise your performance.
It's worth noting that calculating sweat rate should be used as a GUIDE, and you should always defer to your body's signals in the moment to make adjustments. It's unrealistic to strictly follow a plan all the time, because racing is dynamic (with fluctuations in speed, race temperatures, and physical conditions affecting metabolic rate and sweating rate/fluid loss in real time).
If you need some help with putting a hydration plan together to test in training, take our free Fuel & Hydration Planner. If you do that after getting some sweat rate data you’ll be able to answer our question on sweat rate with more confidence/accuracy.
Measuring sweat rate in practice
Let’s say you’re losing ~0.5L of sweat per hour. It’s unlikely that you’re going to benefit from doing much more than drinking to thirst as, even over several hours, your total fluid and sodium losses are unlikely to get especially high.
But, if you’re losing more than 1.5L per hour then, during prolonged exercise, you’re likely to benefit from getting in front of the dehydration/sodium depletion curve with a pretty aggressive approach to hydration.
Taking proactive action during the early stages of big sessions and long events will help mitigate your inevitably high losses over the long haul. That’s especially the case if you also have a high sweat sodium concentration.
By measuring your sweat rate (and sweat concentration) and using this as a guide with differing levels of intake, you’re much more likely to iterate your way to the kind of hydration plan that will serve you well when it matters most.
This is just one part of the hydration equation...
As I’ve alluded to a few times, when it comes to understanding how to hydrate properly you really need to consider two things, how much you’re sweating (your sweat rate, which we’ve covered off here) and how much salt you’re losing in that sweat (your sweat concentration. i.e. how salty your sweat is).
If you’d like help gauging how salty your sweat is, read this post on how to estimate how much sodium you’re losing in your sweat.
