Running / exercising wearing a plastic bin liner! Good or Bad.

oldscoil

Hi Folks.

A friend of mine says he occassionally exercises on his exercise bike with a plastic bin liner on over his t-shirt.

He maintains you sweat a lot more and thus loose weight.

However is this true?!?!?

I was thinking about doing this whilst running on my tread mill.

Do you loose much wait, or tone up more…..or is it just plain dangerous.:eek:

Any advice or experience on the subject would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance Folks,

Brian

Zamboni

You want to lose fat not weight.

Run in silly bag for hour, drop a kilo in sweat.
Drink a litre of water afterwards from being thirsty, back to original weight.
Whats the point?

amacachi

Any extra sweat will be almost all water, so the weight you lose will go back on almost instantly. It's only of benefit if you have to get a few pounds off for a couple of hours and outside of competitive sport with weight divisions that's not very likely.

brianblaze

Em.... No

All you're doing is sweating, not dropping weight. You're just losing water weight. 2/3 of your body is water, and all you're doing is temporarily losing a bit of that, but more importantly, you're losing electrolytes.

RMD

The amount of sweat lost doesn't equal the amount of fat loss. Trapping extra heat around your body wont assist you in losing weight (fat) and will only dehydrate you which will have a detrimental effect on your workout resulting in less weight lost.

--amadeus--

Loads of boxers and martial artists do this to make weight. I've also heard of people training in wetsuits.

The responses above are right - you will lose weight instantly through dehydration but it'll go back on as soon as you drink.

What would be interesting though is if there have been any studies to find out if you work harder if you are in a binbag. The binbag will artificially increase your temperature so your body will be working harder to cool itself down, I wonder if that has an impact on the intensity of teh exercise? The opposite is certainly true - athletes cannot perform to maximum capacity in hot conditions, so in theory an artificially hot condition would lower the point of maximal effort, no?

The only other time you might want to deliberately overheat is to acclimatise - when training through the depths of an Irish winter for a spring European marathon I used to wear more layers than needed to that I would be slightly too hot when training, in case the race day was warm - you need to replicate event conditions as closely as possible in training. You need to be very careful though as you dehydrate much faster than normal and raising your core body temperature beyond the point it can cool itself is very dangerous (Hyperthermia)

Mellor

Its a very simple idea and I really don't know whay it took 5 or 6 posts before somebody posted something accurate/decent.

OP
The bin bag is a cheap sweat suit. It's designed to make you drop weight temporarily and quickly. To be put back on in a few hours.

The only reason for this (that I am aware of) is makign weight for boxing or MMA. Fighters do this the day before a fight to make weight, and put it back on but drinking water/isotonics etc. They also cut food and take fibre etc and this food is put back on too. It's not uncommon for a fighter to enter the ring 10-20 lbs above his weigh-in weight.

Unless you friend is a fighter of some sort, or in a sport that has weight limits, he is likely at risk of doing damage to himself