Speed Workouts in the Heat

Audio Transcript

Jeff: Today’s question is from Dan.

Dan asks, “It’s about to be summer here and I have a question about training in the heat. Is it advisable to do speed workouts when the weather gets in the 80s or 90s, or should one continue only with the aerobic workouts?”

Jeff: Dan, that’s a great question. Everybody’s going to start to deal with this if you’re in the northern hemisphere, pretty soon in the next couple of months. And if you’ve been in the summer hemisphere, you’re probably dealing with this right now or had to.

Training in the summer heat can be very difficult.

Before I get into some of the tips and tricks for training in the heat, I want to get into why training in the heat is so difficult.

I think sometimes understanding the science really helps you understand what exactly is happening in your body and how you can combat it.

So, the reason that training in the heat is so difficult is that your body starts diverting resources, from running to resources that need to keep you alive.

For example, in this specific case, your body is taking blood that would normally go to your legs, heart, and lungs and it’s diverting it to the skin.

And what it does by diverting it to the skin, is it allows that blood to cool off and it helps make sure that your body temperature stays cool.

When you have less working blood in the muscles and in the heart, that means you’re ability to run fast is going to decrease.

That’s one of the reasons that it is so difficult for you to run in the heat.

And the other thing that I find with training in the heat is that it not only affects your performance for that one specific run, but it also affects your recovery throughout the week.

I like to think of it like a traffic backlog, because what ends up happening is that usually, when it’s hot out, it’s obviously not just hot during your run.

What ends up happening is throughout the day, you’re getting dehydrated and your body is working hard to keep itself cool.

In the winter or normal temperatures, you may be sitting around a room, and it’s 50, 60, 70 degrees, and your body doesn’t have to work hard or provide any energy, in order to keep your body at a comfortable temperature.

However, when it’s 80, 90 degrees outside all day, your body has to work consistently, constantly throughout the day, just to keep you comfortable.

That’s something that also hampers your recovery.

Getting back to Dan’s question, say you do interval workouts when it’s 80 or 90 degrees. Now, if It’s blazing hot, maybe 90 degrees humid and the sun’s blazing down, you can get out in the morning or when the temperature calms down, you can just switch an easy run day with your workout day, so that you can get the workout in, in better temperatures.

But in terms of whether it’s dangerous or not, as long as you’re careful, you’re listening to your body, you’re hydrating, et cetera, there’s no reason that you can’t do your interval workout in the heat.

Now, some tips that you can use to make sure that the interval workout goes better.

The first thing that is going to be really paramount is that you’ll want to slow down your paces.

And there’s a calculation that you can use, that uses the temperature as well as the humidity or the dew point, to predict how much you have to slow down your training paces, in order to compensate for the heat.

You can find that calculator at runnersconnect.net/temperature-calculator, or you can just google, runnersconnect.net/temperature-calculator.

All you do is plug in your times and it’ll actually automatically adjust those for you.

And the cool thing is, for those of you who are using our training plans, when you log into your dashboard, there’s a little button under each day of your training plan.

All you have to do is click that button, enter the temperature and the dew point, and it will automatically change all your training paces, for that specific day.

It’s a pretty cool little feature, if you are using one of our training plans.

So, the first thing I recommend, is make sure that your training paces are correlated with how difficult it is going to be to run.

That way you can make sure that you’re maintaining the right effort level.

The other thing that works really well is if you’re able to do, especially with interval workouts where maybe it’s 400 meters, 800 meters mile workouts, is you typically do those in a place like a track or somewhere where you’re returning to the same starting point every time when you finish an interval.

What I like to do is, the night before, I will take a couple of beach towels or big hand towels, soak them in water and put them in the freezer. They basically become frozen towels.

I’ll pack those in the cooler and then I’ll take those to the track with me.

After every interval that I finish, I’ll throw one of those ice cold towels over my head. It feels amazing.

But more important than just feeling good, it allows your body temperature to cool down. And so, I’ll keep on that towel for as long as I can.

I’ll also do it in the warm up.

So, I will warm up and then while I’m stretching and while I’m kind of getting ready to go for my workout, I will keep that cold ice towel on me.

I usually take three, four or five of them, depending on how long the workouts going to be. That makes an amazing difference. It allows you to keep your core body temperature down, even when you’re doing hard workouts.

And there’s a lot of science to back that recommendation up.

It’s called pre-cooling, and you’d notice it in the Rio Olympics or the Olympics in China, where athletes wear cooling vests.

Basically, these are vests that have gel packets in them. And, obviously, this is a less technologically cool way to do it, but it allows you to get the same benefits as pre-cooling without having to buy an expensive pre-cooling vest.

So, that’s a great way to stay cool this summer and keep your core body temperature down as you’re doing your workouts.

The other factor is obviously going to be hydration.

Hydration is important, obviously, because as you get hotter and hotter, you need to make sure that your body temperature stays down, and you want to make sure that you keep it down.

One thing that I always noticed as well with water, is that water on you is better than water in you.

You want to pour water on yourself between interval workouts. That’s going to help a lot. You can do your workouts in the heat but if it’s possible to switch them around, like I said, if the day looks better tomorrow, then go ahead and switch that workout.

It’s nicer to have it in a cooler temperature.

But as long as you’re listening to your body, you’re adjusting your training places, and you’re taking steps to make sure that you keep your core body temperature is down, you’re going to be okay.

Dan, I hope you enjoyed that answer.

Finally, I want to thank our sponsor Aftershokz Headphones. I think they’re a great fit for this podcast, because one of the things that I like to do when listening to podcasts is using them when I run.

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Thanks again for listening to the podcast and have a great day.