Evaporative Coolers for Gyms

People expect to sweat when they work out. But when the heat gets extreme, a heavy workout day can be counterproductive, damaging muscles more than building them. It can also lead to serious, acute heat-related illnesses like heat cramps, heat exhaustion, heatstroke, or heart attack. Nobody running an athletic program or a gym wants to have otherwise healthy individuals pass out or even drop dead at their facility. To help people get the best workouts, even on the warmest days, it’s important to provide cooling for athletes and participants.

Portacool can do that. These portable evaporative coolers can provide cool air on demand to fields, arenas, gyms, and other places where people are training, competing, or working out. They’re efficient and effective, and they are made in the USA. In addition, they use Kuul evaporative media, the only evaporative media made in the USA, and it’s made from 100% USA-sourced materials.

High Heat Workouts Can Be Dangerous

When people exercise in high heat conditions, they may be putting their lives at risk. The problem is that the body loses its ability to shed heat at high temperatures.

Once the temperature exceeds 75°F, most of our body’s natural heat-loss mechanisms begin to diminish in effectiveness. At 95°F, the only mechanism that is still capable of removing heat from the body is sweat, which normally accounts for less than one-quarter of our total heat loss. Even with profuse sweating, that means that the body is only able to lose a small fraction of the heat it normally would, and when you add in the extra heat that you’re generating with exercise, the body’s internal temperature begins to rise.

When people work out in high heat, they can easily develop problems like heat cramps, a painful warning that their workout is going too far. Pushing their workout further can then lead to heat exhaustion and even heatstroke or heart attack.

High Heat Workouts Can Be Counterproductive

Workouts in high heat are not just dangerous; they can be counterproductive. That’s because your high heat workouts might be damaging your muscles as much as or more than it’s building them.

It’s hard to do sustained exercise in high heat. People are more likely to work out for a short period, then need significant rest before resuming. This keeps them from building muscle or burning fat very effectively.

When your body is working out under high heat conditions, it can produce levels of calcium that are toxic to your muscle cells. This causes muscle cells to die. This is known as rhabdomyolysis (or rhabdo). As muscle cells break down, their proteins enter the bloodstream, where they must be filtered out by the kidneys. This can damage the kidneys and even cause them to fail, which can be fatal.

Although fatal rhabdomyolysis is rare, it’s common to experience some degree of muscle breakdown related to workouts. It’s one of the reasons you experience sore muscles a day or two after workouts – damaged muscle tissue is breaking down and must be repaired by your body’s natural healing processes. People who experience high levels of rhabdomyolysis can sometimes need intense therapy to return to normal levels of activity and self-sufficiency.

If you notice that your muscles are more sore after working out in high heat conditions than on normal days, it’s probably because you’re experiencing more significant rhabdomyolysis.

Evaporative Coolers Beat Air Conditioning for Many Gyms and Sports Programs

If your gym already has air conditioning installed, it’s usually reasonable to rely on that. However, if you have a gym or arena without air conditioning, an evaporative air cooler might be a better choice.

Air conditioning is highly inefficient. It uses as much as ten times as much energy to cool the same volume of air as an evaporative cooler does. This is wasteful when much of the air volume in your gym might be above the heads of people exercising. It’s especially wasteful when you’re trying to provide cool air to people working out or competing outside. An outdoor air conditioner produces only a small amount of cool air, which simply disperses outside.

On the other hand, an evaporative cooler, commonly referred to as a swamp cooler, can be highly efficient in a large gym space or even outdoors. That’s because the cooler uses the heat in the air to evaporate water and create cool air. It dramatically drops the temperature of large volumes of air and doesn’t need to recycle the air for multiple passes to achieve cooling.

The result is much cooler air when and where people need it to lower their body temperature during or after a workout. Want to see how much an evaporative cooler can benefit a gym or exercise program? Check out some of these stories from genuine Portacool users.

Why Choose Portacool

Once you’ve decided that an evaporative cooler makes the most sense for your gym, it’s time to find the right evaporative cooler.

At Portacool, we’ve been making evaporative coolers in our Center, Texas manufacturing facility since 1990. In that time, we’ve been recognized as a leader in the industry. As our business has grown, we have expanded, and now we have distributors in all 50 states in the country and 56 countries around the world.

But we still make all our evaporative coolers in the USA, and we use evaporative media from Kuul, the only evaporative media made in the USA—and made from 100% USA-sourced materials.

Beyond the quality of our products, we’ve earned a reputation for outstanding customer service by offering best-in-class:

• Warranties
• Technical Support
• Live Customer Service

In addition, we want to make sure every Portacool we sell keeps cooling for years, even decades. That’s why we design a custom service plan for you, one based on the demands specific to your business.

Have the Coolest Gym in Town

Are you concerned that people might develop heat-related illnesses when working out in your gym or athletic program? You can take steps now to head off that risk. Please visit a local retailer or contact us directly for more information.