Yeah, I disagree. During the pandemic I did a year of heavy cycling, including a 525-mile trip over 7 days. While cycling got a lot easier, I didn't stop sweating.
My family is full of heavy sweaters, and I live in states where it gets into the 80s-90s in the summer. My girlfriend however seems to never sweat, even when pushing herself.
Admittedly, I struggle to maintain a "casual speed."
Cycling economy increases naturally with increased fitness. As with virtually all forms of fitness training. It along with many other factors is why someone can quadruple their possible power output with training. All without melting. Look up cycling economy.
Also how much you sweat is a trained response. This is why athletes do heat training before hot events. There is more to it than some oversimplified physics based equation. It’s a biological system.
All these things are much more significant when going from someone who basically never cycles or exercises, to someone who does. It is less significant in pros, so keep that in mind if you are looking at studies of “trained cyclists”. Law of diminishing returns.
I’ve always been an athlete from when I was a competitive athlete in my college days (cross-country running) but I’ve always sweated a lot more than average and it’s not correlated with my fitness. I’ve always been slim and fit and I’ve often noticed that I sweat a lot more than people whom I’m beating in races! That is, I can be fitter and faster than someone and still sweat more.
On the flip side, I am extremely cold resistant and when others are chilly and need to wear a sweater or coat, I don’t need it. My body just seems to run hotter than others, for better or worse.
Adaptations include decreases in HR, internal body temperature, skin temperature, rating of perceived exertion (RPE), and sweat sodium and chloride concentrations, as well as increases in plasma volume and sweat rate.
Sweat rate. Sweat rate is a training adaptation. Thus we would say sweating is a trained response.
Yes, I have no doubt you are very sweaty. That doesn’t mean that sweatiness isn’t a trained response though.
> All these things are much more significant when going from someone who basically never cycles or exercises, to someone who does.
You could say that I do that every season(well, I walk all year round at least) and my observation is that there's maybe a short period of increased unnecessary movements that I do which produce more sweat, but after two weeks, when I relearn the right movements, it plateaus and sweating is just proportional to energy used - it's lower, but still there.
In any case I noticed that I would need to go frustratingly slow to be appropriately fresh for an office. Even at my leisurely pace of 15km/h I change my shirt when I get back from a ride, because it's simply uncomfortable otherwise.
After a few months of regular training, your fitness will invariably improve, even if that "training" is just cycling to/from work each day. The higher your fitness level, the less heat you generate for the same physical output. Lower heat generation requires lower heat dissipation, which requires less sweating.
People that exercise regularly sweat less for the same amount of effort than when they weren't exercising. I have no idea what the biological / thermodynamics explanation is, but it's a quite basic fact.
