The Full Circle Podcast

How to Dress for Winter & Cold Weather Workouts

• Full Circle Endurance • Episode 64

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Cooler temperatures usher in a new season of apparel for endurance athletes.  When the temperatures drop, what to wear for a workout becomes a big question that athletes wrestle with.  However, deciding what garments to wear during Winter and cold weather workouts doesn’t need to be an all-day internal debate. 


Read this Coach Tip Tuesday: 

https://www.fullcircleendurance.com/blog/how-to-dress-for-winter-cold-weather-workouts 


Learn more about Full Circle Endurance: https://FullCircleEndurance.com/

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Reach out to Coach Laura Henry: Hello@FullCircleEndurance.com

(0:04 - 3:14)
Hello and welcome to the Full Circle Podcast, your source for insights into the science and art of endurance sports training and racing. I'm your host, Coach Laura Henry. Today is Coach Tip Tuesday. 

The skies are cloudy. It might snow. The wind is picking up. 

The thermometer in your car is reading 35 degrees Fahrenheit, but each of the three weather apps that you've consulted is swearing that the real feel is somewhere between 15 and 28 degrees Fahrenheit. You put on thermal leggings, wool socks, an under layer, a mid layer, a jacket, a balaclava, a hat, mittens, and you head out for your run. Within 20 minutes, you're feeling so hot that you could swear that it is July, not December. 

You peel off your jacket and your balaclava, stuff the balaclava into your jacket pocket, and tie your jacket around your waist. You run the rest of your workout with your jacket flapping around your legs, annoying you every step of the way. Does this sound even a little bit familiar? If you're like most endurance athletes, you have had this experience at least once, whether you are a cyclist, a runner, no matter what endurance sport you do. 

Improperly dressing for winter and cold weather workouts is extremely common. Athletes fret about what to wear at this time of year, and many times they overdress, which causes its own set of issues. The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. 

Dressing for winter and cold weather workouts isn't as complicated as we might envision it. With a pragmatic approach, some experience, and a little bit of trial and error, every endurance athlete can choose the appropriate gear to wear for their winter workouts. While summer and the main racing season may seem very far away now, the reality is this. 

What you do now impacts what you will be able to do later. Training and completing workouts during the winter season is important and helps you be able to reach the goals that you are seeking in the season to come. Despite these truths, winter is a season when many people choose not to exercise. 

58% of people become less active during the winter season, and while endurance athletes are generally more active than the average population, they are not immune to this decrease in activity. Reducing activity is problematic for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly for our lives as humans, a decrease in exercise can, and often does, contribute to poor mental health outcomes such as anxiety, sadness, depression, and irritability. 

Combined with a loss of daylight, spending less time outside, and a reduced exposure to sunlight, a reduction in movement and exercise leads to many people experiencing seasonal affective disorder, more commonly referred to as SAD, a type of depression that happens during the fall in the winter. Unfortunately, this becomes a bit of which came first, the chicken or the egg scenario. The season itself can make us feel depressed, which makes us feel unmotivated and or uninspired to complete workouts, or we stop exercising, which then makes us feel depressed.

(3:14 - 17:56)
Either of these situations results in the same thing, a reduction in movement and a decrease in exercise. But there's good news. Engaging in a movement or an exercise practice is the most impactful and significant behavioral intervention someone can do to help both their mental and their physical health. 

By staying active through the winter season, you can improve your mental and physical health while also helping to set yourself up for success when it comes to reaching any and all goals you set in the season to come. From a training standpoint, significantly reducing or eliminating workouts is problematic because doing so represents a departure from the consistency that is necessary to see compounded and sustained gains over time. Maintaining consistency is one of the three most significant things endurance athletes can do to help their training and performance. 

It's as simple and it's as hard as this. Without consistency, no endurance sports gains are possible. I've seen this play out many times over for the athletes who I coach. 

The athletes who don't train over the winter or who train much less over the winter than they do during the main season end up setting themselves too far back when it comes to training adaptations. As a result, they spend the majority, if not all, of the subsequent season attempting to regain enough fitness to attempt to get back close to where they were at the end of the previous season. In some cases, they do not recover that fitness and they end up with a sustained decrease in fitness over time. 

The reason for this is simple, even if it's hard to hear. We all lose strength and fitness every year once we reach the age of 35 and we lose it at a rate of about 1% per year. By consistently doing workouts and exercising, we can slow the rate of that loss by 90% to just 1 tenth of a percent per year. 

But if we don't remain consistent, those losses are compounded over time. It's not 2 plus 2 equals 4, it's like 2 to the third power. It's compounded. 

Practically speaking, and very heartbreakingly, what this looks like is this. The athletes who I coach who do not remain consistently active over the winter have a much higher probability of not reaching the goals they set for themselves in the season and the seasons that follow. The athletes who I coach who do consistently do workouts over the winter have a much higher success rate when it comes to goal achievement in the following season and seasons. 

Athletes who are older than 35 and who have been active since before they were 35 may remember that they could get away with inconsistency prior to when they reach that age. And since our minds often do not age at the same rate that our bodies do, we like to imagine that what was once true will always be true and that we will always get away with doing workouts when we want and not doing them when we don't necessarily want to. But unfortunately, this is not the case. 

Consistency and not taking breaks from a movement practice or from exercise becomes increasingly important each year that we live. Maintaining a consistent exercise practice over the winter is also important because it is one of the ways that we can introduce discomfort into our training. Many, many athletes fear the discomfort dragon, even if they don't say it out loud or admit it to themselves. 

Winter is a season that is uncomfortable for many athletes because of the conditions and because athletes don't necessarily have imminent goals that are looming on the horizon in the winter season. In a world that is increasingly comfortable, it is important to embrace opportunities to intentionally introduce discomfort so we can be more resilient and stronger over time. Winter being an uncomfortable season that people shy away from going out and experiencing firsthand is a very recent phenomenon when you look at the history and the evolution of the human species. 

As recently as 120 years ago, people spent a majority of their time outside, working, living, and traveling outdoors year-round regardless of conditions. Not coincidentally at all, this timing is the same as when exercise, as we currently understand it, became a thing. Our current notion that you stay indoors and don't go out when it's a little cold or when it's snowing outside is a very, very recent one, and it's one that our relatively recent ancestors would honestly probably laugh at. 

Our present-day temperature comfort zones are extremely narrow, which is thanks to the climate control that exists in every indoor space that we occupy. Whether it's your home, your office, the grocery store, the mall, or your car, we can and do control the temperature and ambient humidity, ensuring that we perpetually exist in 74 degrees Fahrenheit conditions. Combined with the fact that we spend less than an average of 7% of our time outdoors year-round, which as an average means that a majority of that percentage comes from being outdoors when it's nice out, aka in the summer, we now have an extremely difficult time tolerating the cold. 

Our ancestors were much, much more hardy than we currently are. Because our tolerance for the cold has decreased so rapidly within the last 120 years over the course of tens of thousands of years of evolution of the Homo sapien or human species, we shy away from going out in it. Make no mistake, this is a choice that we're making, no matter how much we may justify it or rationalize it in our minds. 

Part of our hesitation to go outside when it's cold is our dislike, and if we're being honest, our fear of being even just a little bit uncomfortable. But another reason is that because we have lost our hardiness and tolerance for colder conditions, we have also lost our ability to accurately determine proper gear and clothing choices for such conditions. Improperly dressing for these conditions can be uncomfortable at its best, such as the example I opened this podcast episode with, or dangerous at its worst, where underdressing can lead us to sustain frostbite or hypothermia. 

I live and work in Syracuse, New York. Due to our proximity to and our location east of the Great Lakes, our average annual snowfall totals around 125 inches, that's more than 10 feet, and we receive less than one-third of the sunlight possible during the winter season. It's usually around 23%. 

For comparisons purposes, cities at the same latitude as Syracuse west of the Great Lakes receive more than double the sunshine that we do during the winter months. After more than 15 years of being an endurance athlete and coach here, I have learned how valuable staying active through the winter season is for mental and physical health. I have also learned how to dress appropriately for these conditions so that I can stay active through this season. 

My number one tip for exercising in the winter and in cold weather is to stay dry. Think of it this way, if you wore shorts and a t-shirt outside when it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit, you'd be fine, albeit perhaps shivering a bit after a sustained amount of time and those temperatures, but if you went into water that was 50 degrees Fahrenheit wearing those same garments, you'd feel the cold much more quickly and you'd be at risk of hypothermia much more quickly. This is because water has a greater thermal capacity than air does. 

Water's convective heat transfer is 70 times greater than air. That means that water transfers heat 70 times more than air. Water is an extremely effective heat sink. 

It will pull heat away from a heat source, such as your body, and it will transfer that heat away from that source. As a result, staying dry is critical in cold conditions. You need to reduce the amount of water that is taking heat away from your body for the opposite reason. 

Staying hydrated and sweating is so key in warm weather workouts. Taking heat away from the body via that heat sink is desired when it's hot and you need to keep your body from overheating. In the interest of staying dry, choosing gear items that are made from moisture wicking fabrics is essential. 

Wool and other synthetic fibers are moisture wicking. Cotton is not. Cotton is 100% hydrophilic, which means that it absorbs water. 

If you wear cotton when you are exercising in the winter, it will absorb water and then keep that water next to you versus evaporating, which means that that water will act as a heat sink, pulling heat away from you and your body. Wool and synthetic fibers, on the other hand, wick moisture away from the body, which means that the water evaporates faster, which in turn means that you stay drier and thus warmer. I have found that synthetic fibers tend to work slightly better than wool when it comes to winter gear and they also have the advantage of being slightly less expensive than wool. 

Wool does tend to be a bit warmer and it doesn't retain odors as much, but I found that it doesn't last as long and it doesn't wick moisture as effectively as its synthetic counterparts. Despite the fact that they do tend to retain odors a bit more, I generally choose gear items made from synthetic fabrics. When I say that all gear used in the winter should be either synthetic or wool, I mean it. 

And quite frankly, it's also better to have moisture wicking fabrics for all gear year-round, but it's most important in the winter. Everything from your socks, your bottoms, your tops, your headgear, your handgear, your undergarments, and your footwear should be made from wool or synthetic materials. Nothing should be cotton. 

Despite my villainization of layers, in the opening example of this episode, wearing layers can be really useful in winter. Having the option to remove and then, if necessary, add back garments is useful for long workouts and or changing conditions over the course of a workout. I've learned that most people will do fine in winter workouts if their core is sufficiently warm. 

As a result, this is the part of the body that should get attention when it comes to layering. Wearing a moisture wicking base layer and then adding a mid layer, such as a thermal shirt, and an outer layer such as a jacket, depending on conditions, is one way to approach this. Layers have the advantage of being insulating and thus trapping heat closer to your body. 

As you exercise, you produce heat due to your increased heart rate. An increased heart rate contributes to thermogenesis, which is the process by which the body produces heat. As a result, your core literally warms up. 

The temperature actually rises and having additional layers on in the area of your core or your trunk keeps that heat that you're producing closer to you. As long as all the layers you are wearing are moisture wicking, aka not cotton, they will carry moisture away from your skin and body while simultaneously keeping as much heat as possible close to you. Because you will produce more heat and get warmer as you exercise, an important tactic to deploy when dressing for winter workouts, and definitely when considering layers, is to dress like it is 10 to 15 degrees warmer than the ambient conditions actually are. 

Your workout type and your sport of choice will impact what end of this range you should consider in deploy. For example, runners should aim for the higher end, around 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the ambient conditions that are in play of this range. Cyclists should aim for the lower end, around 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the ambient conditions of this range. 

This difference has to do with the average heart rates that are sustained by athletes in each of these sports, and therefore the amount of thermogenesis that occurs during each sport, and the difference in ambient conditions. Cyclists generate their own wind as they cut through the air at a faster velocity than runners do. Yes, you might feel a little chilly for the first 10 to 15 minutes of your workout, but you'll be better off for the rest of it. 

Embrace the discomfort dragon for those 10 to 15 minutes. I promise, you'll live to tell the tale. Having the right gear really does make all the difference when it comes to workouts, and cold weather workouts are not an exception to this. 

If you don't have the right gear, you will not feel safe or comfortable doing workouts, which can be demotivating and can absolutely lead to a reduction in exercise and a break in consistency. Because they use more materials in their construction, winter gear items are generally more expensive than their warmer weather counterparts. That being said, it is very worth it to invest in quality gear items so that you can remain consistent through this season. 

You don't need to have a lot of the same types of items, such as multiple jackets, gloves, bottoms, tops, etc., but you should have at least one of each category of item, and I encourage you to make the investment into higher quality, which almost always is going to mean higher priced items. Quality gear items are an investment that can pay dividends for years to come. Because you use them for a limited time during the cold weather season each year, they can last many years. 

For instance, I've had my cold weather cycling and running jackets each for more than 10 years now. Here are the high quality cold weather gear items that I personally have acquired and found valuable over the years. The single most common mistake I observe athletes making when it comes to dressing for winter and cold weather workouts is that they overthink their gear choices. 

Quite honestly, this has only gotten worse as weather forecasts, specifically available through apps on our smartphones, have become longer term and more prevalent. Even as recently as 30 years ago, I remember this, you could only get weather forecasts two to four times per day, and you had to get those via media sources such as a newspaper or the local news broadcast. Now, we can check the forecast anytime and, in my opinion, most harmfully, as many times as we want. 

Knowing this, the makers of these apps often change forecasts, thereby keeping us more engaged with their platforms and therefore their advertisers. They're monetizing your time and attention. They're not necessarily providing a more accurate forecast. 

Maintaining a good workout log is an excellent idea for so many reasons. But in the context of this conversation that we're having today, it's an excellent way to track what you wear in different conditions and how those choices worked out for you. Over time, you can dial in on exactly what gear items work for you in certain conditions. 

Using that information, you can make informed and confident choices in future workouts based on the conditions that will be in play for those workouts. Using myself as an example, here are some of the gear rules that I implement for various ambient conditions when I am running. If it is above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, actual temperature, not real feel, I wear shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, and running socks.

(17:56 - 22:03)
If it is between 40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, actual temperature, not real feel, I wear shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, running socks, and light gloves. If it is between 35 and 39 degrees Fahrenheit, actual temperature, not real feel, I wear capri running tights, running socks, a long-sleeved running shirt, running socks, a thermal headband, and light gloves. If it is between 21 and 34 degrees Fahrenheit, actual temperature, not real feel, I wear thermal running tights, a long-sleeved shirt, crew running socks, a thermal headband, and heated gloves. 

If it is between 5 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit, actual temperature, not real feel, I wear thermal running tights, a long-sleeved shirt, a jacket, crew running socks, a thermal headband, and heated gloves. If it is below 5 degrees Fahrenheit, actual temperature, not real feel. I wear thermal running tights, a long sleeve shirt, a jacket, crew running socks, a balaclava, ski goggles, toe warmers, and heated gloves. 

I wear regular running shoes in all circumstances unless it is actively snowing or the surface is snow covered. If it is actively snowing and or the running surface is snow covered, I wear waterproof trail running shoes. At this stage of my endurance sports athletic career, I never deviate from these rules. 

I know from loads, years of trial and error, that this is definitely what works for me in the conditions that I specified. I do not second guess this and I do not let other people's comments, opinions, or choices influence what I know works for me. I look at the ambient conditions at the time that I will be going out to run and I deploy the appropriate gear choices based on what I know works for me. 

But this is where I see a lot of athletes go astray. Other athletes comment on what they're wearing or that athlete will see that other athletes are dressed differently from them and this makes athletes second guess themselves. They compulsively over check the weather. 

You know who you are. And athletes convince themselves that they are going to be too cold or in my experience, much less frequently too hot and they change their gear selections accordingly. Here's the truth of it. 

What works for you might very well be extremely different from what works for someone else in those very same conditions. A group of friends that I train with weekly always dresses more warmly than I do. They comment on my choices very regularly, but I know that I tend to get very warm, to put it mildly, once I start a workout and I have learned to make my gear choices accordingly. 

As a result, because I stick to what I know works for me, I cannot remember the last winter workout I did where I was too cold. Sticking to what you know works for you, not what works for someone else or what someone who doesn't know what it's like to exist in your body thinks will work for you is the best practice. Staying active through the winter has enormous mental and physical benefits and may very well make the difference between you reaching or missing your goals in the coming season. 

Ensuring that you stay active through the season is key and dressing appropriately for workouts this time of year is perhaps the most significant thing you can do to help motivate you to do so. Invest in quality pieces, note what works and what doesn't work for you over time, and develop your own personal gear system for winter workouts. By embracing the discomfort dragon and not letting the cold bother you anyway, you will be mentally and physically stronger both through this season and in the season to come. 

That was another episode of the Full Circle Podcast. Subscribe to the Full Circle Podcast wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. If you like what you listen to, please be sure to leave us a rating and review as this goes a long way in helping us reach others. 

The thoughts and opinions expressed on the Full Circle Podcast are those of the individual. As always, we'd love to hear from you and we value your feedback. Please send us an email at podcast at fullcircleendurance.com or visit us at fullcircleendurance.com backslash podcast to find training plans, see what other coaching services we offer, or to join our community, please visit fullcircleendurance.com. I'm Coach Laura Henry. 

Thanks for listening.

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