It's normal to sweat more after you finish exercising than you do while you exercise. Your body temperature varies throughout the day, going from around 97 degrees in the early morning to about 99 degrees in the early evening. Exercise raises body temperature considerably. When you exercise, more than 70 percent of the energy that powers your muscles is lost as heat. Less than 30 percent drives your muscles. Athletic competition can drive temperatures as high as 105 degrees without harming the athletes.

To keep your body temperature from rising too high, your heart pumps large amounts of heat in the blood from your hot muscles to your skin and you sweat. The sweat evaporates and cools your body. The amount of sweat that your body produces depends on the temperature of the blood that flows through your brain. When the temperature of the blood rises, you sweat more. During exercise, your heart beats rapidly to pump blood to bring oxygen to your muscles and to pump the hot blood from the muscles to the skin where the heat can be dissipated. When you stop exercising, your heart slows down also, pumping less blood to the skin. The heat accumulates in your muscles, causing blood temperature to rise higher, so you sweat more right after you finish exercising than during exercise.

Gabe Mirkin, M.D.

Dr. Gabe Mirkin has been a radio talk show host for 25 years and practicing physician for more than 40 years; he is board certified in Sports Medicine and three other specialties.

Dr. Mirkin's daily features on fitness have been heard on CBS Radio News stations since the 1970's. He has written 16 books including The Sportsmedicine Book, the best-selling book on the subject that has been translated into many languages. His latest book is The Healthy Heart Miracle, published by HarperCollins.

Dr. Mirkin is a graduate of Harvard University and Baylor University College of Medicine. A Boston native, Dr. Mirkin did his residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He has served as a Teaching Fellow at Johns Hopkins Medical School, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, and Associate Clinical Professor in Pediatrics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. He has run more than forty marathons and is now a serious tandem bicycle rider with his wife, nutritionist Diana Mirkin.

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