Athletes and coaches are always on the lookout for ways to increase the Return on Investment (ROI) they get from the long hours they put into training. They want an edge over competitors and improvement in the face of diminishing returns from their existing training methodologies. As a result, there’s been a lot of talk recently about heat training.
Heat acclimatisation (where you go and train in a genuinely hot environment) and heat acclimation (training in a simulated hot environment like the Precision Performance Lab) have only relatively recently been well and truly proven to improve subsequent performance in the heat. However it’s only really recently that people have started to look at heat training as a way to improve performance in temperate conditions too.
That’s despite the fact that there’s research going back to 2010 that seems to demonstrate a clear link between heat stress training and improved exercise performance in cool conditions.
More recently, new research demonstrated that prolonged (10+ exposures within 14+ days) heat training could improve your performance in both hot and cool conditions, in a similar way to altitude training...
How does heat training impact you?
Heat training is very likely to boost performance in temperate conditions through multiple mechanisms. First, as you train in the heat, your body responds to the dissociation between heart rate and running speed or cycling power (which I’m sure we’ve all experienced) and adapts, by increasing blood volume through expanding the plasma (watery bit) of the blood to reduce the impact (increase) on heart rate during exercise in hot and/or humid conditions.
A larger pool of blood helps with heat dissipation from the core to the skin and provides a larger reservoir of fluid to lose in sweat before cardiovascular performance is compromised. This is something that’s also closely linked to your hydration status and your body's sodium levels.
Heat training also re-sets your internal thermostat to run colder and you start sweating sooner. This means you have more room to play with, in terms of core body temperature rise, before that becomes a performance limiter, as can be the case in high intensity events where heat production from the working muscles can be extremely significant.
More people seem to adapt to heat training more quickly and reliably than they do to altitude training as well. Maybe that’s because we all evolved from common ancestors who came from the hot African Savannah. This, along with the relative ease of implementation compared with altitude training makes heat stress training a very attractive option.
Does heat training improve performance?
Having raced a lot in some very hot conditions over the years (including Hawaii, Thailand and Saudi Arabia), I think I always tended to see a correlation between the amount of time spent in the hot environment pre-race and how well I performed. That relationship was pretty clear cut; simply preparing in the heat makes you more likely to do well in it, and it takes up to 14 days to get fully acclimatised to a hot environment (if you’ve been living somewhere cool for a while).
We've been working with a range of athletes in the heat chamber at the Precision Performance Lab, from triathletes to racing drivers racing in the Middle East and Asia, and runners competing in the Marathon Des Sables. We always tended to see some fairly dramatic and positive adaptions in terms of lower heart rates, lower core body temperatures and lower RPEs (ratings of perceived exertion - i.e. subjective notions of how hard exercise was) in athletes undertaking just five back-to-back heat chamber sessions over the period of about a week.
We saw that even a handful of one hour heat exposures (at about 35°C / 95°F and involving low to moderate levels of aerobic exercise) are enough to kickstart the body into becoming a lot more efficient at dissipating heat and conducting exercise in tough conditions.
Anecdotally, I know that when Jonny was prepping for The Canoe Marathon World Championships he travelled out two weeks early to acclimatise and he was also training in additional kit at home in the weeks beforehand (he even wore a bin bag in between layers a few times). He said that the first few days training in Singapore felt as though he hadn’t trained all year and he remembers that being particularly hard mentally, but a few weeks later he felt in great shape. Like me, he's not 100% sure whether it made the difference, but he thinks it was significant.
I think that based on the evidence I’ve seen and the fact that researchers and elite athletes are increasingly interested in the use of heat training as a way to boost performance in cooler conditions, it’s something I would definitely consider experimenting with. If I was taking my racing and training at all seriously, I certainly would be building in some heat training into my plan.
How to start heat training
Perhaps the best thing about heat training is that you don't really need specialist kit to do it. Your body doesn’t really care how it gets hot, so you can achieve at least some of the adaptations by just training in more layers of insulating clothing, rather than having to go into a special heat acclimation chamber.
Regular saunas, hot yoga sessions and even just repeated exposure to hot baths have all been shown to exert at least some influence on heat-related adaptations in the body too, so it really is a type of ‘training’ accessible to just about anybody.
So, heat training might be something you want to try tinkering with even if your race calendar doesn’t include a trip somewhere sunny in the near future.
Heat training safety advice
Of course, one important thing to note is that seriously overheating yourself can be very, very dangerous indeed. It’s critical that you’re sensible about it and make sure you’re not putting yourself at risk by training ‘hot’. Here’s some advice to bear in mind to stay safe…
- Always let someone know what you’re doing and where you’ll be
- Back off well before the signs and symptoms of heat illness begin.
- Never put yourself in a situation where you could run out of drinks and always have a way to cool yourself down (i.e. the ability to remove clothing, or get out of the hot environment and into cool water/shade). And do so if you feel even the slightest need to. Heat stroke can creep up on you and is a killer if left untreated.
Got questions about how to approach heat training? Book a free one-to-one video consultation with one of our Sports Scientists from the Precision Performance Lab.
