Training through a UAE summer

From about May to October, outdoor training here stops being a choice. What most people do about that is nothing — the habit lapses in May and restarts in November, and five months of a six-month plan quietly disappear.

The useful part is not "it is hot, go indoors". It is that almost all the advice written about exercising in heat is written for the wrong kind of heat, and following it on this coast will mislead you.

The problem is humidity, not temperature

You cool yourself by evaporating sweat off your skin. That is the mechanism, and it depends on the air being able to accept more water. As humidity rises, evaporation slows; at 80–90% the sweat largely sits there and you are running the cooling system without getting the cooling.

Which produces the thing that surprises people who move here:

A humid August afternoon in Dubai, Sharjah or Abu Dhabi clears that last figure without much effort. Inland and in the desert it is hotter and often genuinely easier, because the air can still take your sweat.

Why "train early" is only half right here

The standard advice is to avoid the middle of the day and train early or late. The first half is right — roughly 10am to 4pm is the worst of it and there is no reason to be out in it.

But "early morning" needs a local footnote. Humidity tends to be at its highest in the hours around dawn, because as the air cools overnight it moves closer to the point at which it is saturated. So the coolest part of a coastal summer day is frequently also the stickiest. You go out at 5:30am for the temperature and find the air feels like a wet towel.

In practice:

• Late evening — after about 9pm — is usually the better outdoor slot on the coast in high summer. Warmer than dawn, but drier.
• Early morning is the better slot inland, and in the shoulder months at either end of the summer.
• Check the humidity, not just the temperature, before deciding. Every weather app shows both and almost nobody looks at the second one.

What to change from May to October

Nothing about the plan needs to change. Where it happens does.

This is also the season to lean into resistance training, because it happens in an air-conditioned room and does not care what the weather is doing. If outdoor cardio is what usually keeps your movement up, summer is the argument for adding the weights you have been putting off — the gym downstairs is enough.

The hidden cost: your step count

This is the part of a UAE summer that actually shows up on the scale, and it has nothing to do with training.

In winter you walk to places. In summer you drive to the door, park underground, and take the lift. Somebody whose daily movement drops by a few thousand steps has quietly removed a meaningful slice of their daily energy expenditure — and unlike a missed gym session, it happens every single day for five months without ever feeling like a decision.

It is also why the scale can stall through the summer on an unchanged diet, which is one of the causes worth checking in why the scale is not moving. Two fixes, both indoors:

• Walk the mall, or your own corridor, deliberately. Twenty minutes counts whether or not it feels like exercise.
• Take the stairs in your building. It is air-conditioned, it is free, and six floors twice a day adds up over a month.

Water, salt, and the sweating myth

Drink before you are thirsty — thirst lags behind what you have already lost. For a session under an hour, water is generally enough. For longer, or outdoors in high summer, something containing sodium helps replace what heavy sweating removes.

A practical check that beats any litre target: weigh yourself before and after a hard session. A large drop is fluid, not progress, and it tells you how much you need to drink back. Day to day, pale urine is a better signal than a number.

And the myth worth killing: sweating more does not burn more fat. Sweat is water and it returns with your next drink. Training in extra layers or a sauna suit does nothing for fat loss and adds real risk, because it prevents the evaporation that is the whole purpose of sweating. The calorie gap is what loses fat, and it is made in the kitchen — the arithmetic is here.

When to stop, and what to watch for

Heat illness is worth taking seriously rather than pushing through, because it escalates.

The signs that need help rather than a sit-down: skin that has gone hot and dry when you were sweating a moment ago, confusion, slurred speech, fainting, or a body that feels genuinely overheated and is no longer sweating. That is a medical emergency and the right response is to call for help, not to drive yourself home.

Two things that raise the risk and are easy to overlook: some medications affect how you handle heat and how much you sweat, and arriving from a cold country takes 1–2 weeks of gradual exposure before your body handles this climate well. If you are new here, or on regular medication, the first summer is the one to be conservative in — and worth a question to your doctor if you plan to train hard outdoors.

The one advantage of the season

Five months indoors is five months in which nothing about the weather can be an excuse, the gyms are quieter, the courts are bookable, and the variable you can actually control — what you eat — is unaffected by any of it.

People who use the summer to build the food habit and the lifting habit arrive in November stronger than they left in May, which is the opposite of what most people do. The plan does not need to pause; it needs a roof.

And if the lifting habit is the one you have been putting off, the beginner programme is three sessions a week in an air-conditioned room, which is the one thing this season cannot interfere with.