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Comment by Schnitz | Hacker News Reader

If you wash your clothes after working out the study seems moot, they let the clothes ripen for 28h unwashed before testing.

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go on a long hike or bike ride in fully synthetic garb—you will absolutely reek by the time you get to your car.

if you’re talking a 1 hour workout, then i agree.

the bummer is that synthetic materials are so comfortable to wear during exercise compared to cotton and so easy to care for compared to merino wool.

i just accept it and smell like my body has been turned inside out after long exertions.

> go on a long hike or bike ride in fully synthetic garb—you will absolutely reek by the time you get to your car.

That's not universal and it hasn't been my experience at all (up to, let's say, 8-10 hour hikes).

I'm a nearly scentless freak (confirmed by friends, acquaintances, lovers) and will, at the end of a 10 hour hike, smell less than my old housemate did fresh out of the shower. It's body chemistry I reckon.

Are you East Asian by chance?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_odor#ABCC11

I don't know anyone who does laundry every day, so this seems like a reasonable thing to try to figure out.

My workout clothes go in the washer as I get into the shower, I find it too gross to accumulate sweated through workout clothes.

If my workout clothes are sweaty, they come into the shower with me. A rinse is good enough until washing day, and uses no extra water/power.

Oh. Do you know anyone with kids? We do multiple loads a day!

Yes, I know people with kids. They did do multiple loads daily for the first few months but stopped doing laundry every day once each baby was ~6mo. (Though neither parent found time to make workout clothes sweaty during those months.)

When I was a kid, our three-kid family did laundry once a week and there were fewer than 7 loads.

Put clothes in a laundry bin after use and leave it out of the way.

Do laundry weekly. Years old gym clothes will smell just fine.

I would certainly hope that nobody throws wet sweaty balled up clothes into a hamper. Got to let them dry out first. Cotton or synthetic, that is an absolute mold/odor recipe.

Oh, yeah, the methods section says they put the wet clothes in a sealed plastic bag.

Yeah, and I think that's a pretty poor method. It seems like more of a simulation of "what happens if you accidentally leave wet gym clothes in your gym bag in your car" or "you wear a sweaty shirt for three weeks straight, possibly because you are fighting in a war" instead of what happens during typical use.

Exactly. I wear all-synthetic when I run or hike, because cotton will get damp and heavy and uncomfortable (potentially unsafe when hiking). I throw it in a hamper with a lid - separate from my regular one - when I'm done, and I do laundry a couple of times a week. I have shirts and smalls that I've been using nine years without a problem under this regime. One key, I think, is that I use a "color booster" (bleach alternative) specifically to eliminate the poly funk.

Doing a load of laundry for a single set of workout clothes is horrible environmentally. Even when our kid was young, it was every other day at most, and I was running more than that at the time.

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