Eight ways to stop your workout clothes stinking, and why they smell so bad

Experts offer tips on how to prevent the awful odour that comes with repeated exercising

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Simply washing workout clothes may not be enough to get rid of the its stench for frequent exercisers.

Published: 12:02pm, 24 Jul 2016Updated: 5:43pm, 25 Jul 2016

If there’s one thing that really kills me during a workout, it’s not the burpees or hill sprints, but the stench emanating from my sportswear.

Technical fabrics, which most sportswear brands use, do a great job of wicking moisture and keeping the body cool. However, the synthetic materials – such as Lycra, Tactel, Supplex, Dri-Fit, Coolmax and Climacool – are stink magnets too. After a few wears, my exercise clothing tend to get progressively smellier, no matter how much detergent I use.

Freshly secreted sweat has little odour, according to Chris Callewaert, a postdoctoral researcher and PhD in applied biological sciences at Ghent University in Belgium. Known as Dr Armpit (drarmpit.com), his research focuses on odour-generating bacteria in the armpits, skin, clothes and washing machines and how to counteract them.

The long-chain fatty acids the armpits secrete are too big to be volatile, Callewaert explains. The stink happens when sweat meets bacteria. Bacteria break down the long-chain fatty acids and hormones and sulfur compounds, resulting in odoriferous molecules.

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In one of his studies published in 2014 in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, he and co-investigators collected T-shirts from 26 healthy people following an intensive, hour-long bicycle spinning session, and incubated the shirts for 28 hours before inspecting them. The taxonomy of the bacteria on the shirts and in the armpits was also examined.