Every summer, the same conversation happens on our floor. Someone’s numbers drop, their heart rate sits higher than usual on the same work, and they assume they’ve lost fitness in three weeks.

They haven’t. They’re training on the coast in August.

Why humidity makes the same session harder

Your body cools itself mainly by evaporating sweat off your skin. Evaporation is what removes heat — not the sweating itself.

When the air is already carrying a lot of moisture, that evaporation slows down. So you sweat more and cool less. The sweat runs off you instead of doing its job.

Your body compensates by pushing more blood toward the skin to dump heat. That’s blood not available to your working muscles, so your heart rate climbs to keep up. Same weight, same pace, higher effort — and it feels exactly as hard as your heart rate says it is.

Alexandria doesn’t get the extreme temperatures of inland Egypt. It gets something that affects training more: sustained coastal humidity through a long summer. Dry 38° and humid 32° are not the same session.

What to change — five things

1. Stop using last month’s numbers as the target.
If your usual working weight feels heavy in July, that’s not a failure of discipline. Train to effort, not to the number you hit in March. The number comes back in autumn.

2. Drink before you’re thirsty.
Thirst lags behind actual fluid loss. If you only drink when you notice you’re thirsty, you started late. Steady intake through the day beats a large amount right before training.

3. Water alone isn’t always enough.
A heavy sweat session loses electrolytes, not just fluid. Long or very sweaty sessions — an hour-plus of hard conditioning — are where replacing sodium matters. For a normal session, water is fine.

4. Extend the warm-up, cut the rest short-changing.
Warm weather means you warm up faster, which tempts people to skip it. Don’t — but do the opposite with rest: in the heat you need more recovery between hard sets, not less. Cutting rest to “keep intensity up” in humidity mostly just degrades the quality of every set that follows.

5. Move the session.
Early morning and later evening are meaningfully easier than mid-afternoon. Use the ends of the day if summer conditioning is destroying you — check the schedule and pick your slot.

Know the line

There’s a difference between a hard session and a warning sign. Stop and get cool if you get dizzy, get a headache, stop sweating despite the effort, or feel nauseous or confused. That is not toughness territory. It’s the point where you sit down, get out of the heat, and rehydrate — and if it doesn’t resolve quickly, get medical help.

This is general training guidance, not medical advice. If you have a heart condition, blood pressure issues, or you’re on medication, talk to your doctor about training in heat.

The upside nobody mentions

Train through a coastal summer and you acclimatise. Plasma volume increases, you start sweating earlier and more efficiently, and you lose fewer electrolytes doing it.

The practical result is that October feels absurd. The same session you were grinding through in August becomes easy — not because you got fitter that week, but because you spent three months paying for it.

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