Why the Hell Did We Stop Wearing Sweat Bands?
The sweat bandages that were popular in the 80s now exist only as a symbol. Just like a floppy disk lives like a save icon, and an old-school handset is the image we click when we want to call our smartphone, so a set of sweat bandages is a crappy way to indicate that someone is exercising (see (see figure above). Gerald the elephant showed some of them in a picture book that my daughter recently read to me (he was learning to dance). Nobody wears them anymore , right?
Well, except me, nobody. I recently bought myself a rainbow striped set, but not for a suit or a joke, but for real sports purposes. (The fact that they come in fun colors is a bonus.) And when I trained in them, I couldn’t help but wonder: why did they go out of style at all?
I mean, in a way, the strips of terry cloth around your wrists and forehead can make you feel sweaty. Technically, they trap sweat and heat in a specific area of the skin. I feel a little cooler when I take them off at the end of a workout.
But that’s a small price to pay for their ultimate goal: to remove some of your sweat from your face and give you an easy way to wipe off any accumulated sweat.
I don’t wear them for every workout. They’re not really needed for weightlifting or running in cool weather where you might shine a little, but you won’t actually be dripping. But they are absolutely perfect for exercise when it is uncomfortable to stop and grab a towel.
For example, I recently took part in a kettlebell competition for 30 minutes. If I place the call, my session will end; The point was to see who would be able to do more pushing and pushing (lifting the bell to the shoulder and then raising it overhead) in the allotted time. So if you want to win, you have to keep moving.
When I started training this exercise, I ran into several moisture management problems. First, my face was always sweaty and it was not easy to grab a towel without letting go of the bell. Second, if I reflexively wiped my face with my free hand, that hand would become sweaty and it would be difficult for me to hold the bell while brushing. My choice was to threaten my performance in competitions or just keep going while the sweat was dripping off my nose. That was until I remembered a long-forgotten technology – a sweat bandage.
Let me tell you that this was all game changer. While I always felt like my upper lip was the sweatiest part of my face, some of that roughness must have come from above. With the sweat bandage on my forehead, my face was much drier. And with a fresh, dry sweat bandage on each wrist, I could easily wipe my face between reps. Best of all, the bracelets kept my hand from dripping sweat onto my hands – a problem I didn’t even know I had until it suddenly disappeared.
I went through a 30 minute competition with 392 reps won. And now I am so fascinated by the concept of sweat bands that I started wearing them on my stationary bike and other sweat-inducing workouts. I even ordered a few more kits in different colors. These things are great and they should never have disappeared at all.