Plus, Caring for Your Performance Wear!

When we work out, we SWEAT. Often so much you can squeeze a puddle out of your clothes. We know it can be hard on the environment, your wallet, and on your fave workout threads to wash and dry them so often, so is it safe to re-wear clothes you worked out in? Cat Kom and resident laundry expert Bethany have some great tips on re-wearing your workout threads AND on the best ways to care for those performance fabrics.

Can you re-wear that workout ‘fit?  

Sports bras, leggings, and socks have the most touch-points to higher bacteria-prone areas on your body, so those are the items you most likely will need to wash with each use. But for whatever threads you do re-wear, here are some great tips!

Tips on how you can best take advantage of wear-overs:  

1) Take it off as soon as you’re finished exercising and hang it out to dry, preferably somewhere sunny. This will reduce the growth of bacteria. But if you’ve tried to air-dry your clothes and they’re still damp, from sweat or high humidity, it’s time to wash.

2) Opt for natural fabrics like cotton, or performance fabrics that wick away moisture.

3) Go for looser-fitting clothes such as baggy tops and jogger shorts rather than tight-fitting leggings, lycra shorts, and singlets. Cat even wears tops with ventilating holes that help her stay drier. These will allow more airflow and reduce bacteria.

4) If your sweaty clothes were left in a bag where bacteria can thrive for a long time after your workout, hey, it happens to the best of us, but eew, time to wash them.

5) If your clothes smell after exercise, wash them. They will still smell even if you hang them out to dry!

How to extend the life of our (often expensive) performance fabrics?

1) Rotate your detergent periodically. And try a natural soaking or rinsing helper like baking soda or vinegar. Bethany loves to add distilled white vinegar but warns us that when the clothes come out of the washer, they’ll still carry a vinegar scent. That does disappear when the clothes dry. 

2) There are detergents specially formulated for sweaty threads. One of our team swears they even work on sweaty teenager sports uniforms. Some we like:

a. Molly’s Suds All Sport Laundry Wash
b. Rockin’ Green Platinum Active Wear
c. Seventh Generation Concentrated Laundry Detergent
d. The Laundress Sport Detergent

3) Go easy on the detergent. Using too much detergent can cause buildup on your clothes, shortening the lifespan of our fave threads.

4) Wash in cold water. Save your clothes, save some energy.

5) Put your clothes in the sun to dry. Not only are you saving energy, but that beautiful sun is really good for performance fabrics. Cat and Bethany rarely use the dryer for any of their workout clothes.

Now that you have all the intel on caring for your workout clothes, get them sweaty with some body sculpting, fat-torching workouts on Studio SWEAT onDemand! Download the app, or if you happen to live in southern California, visit us in our San Diego studio.