Original Strength Class with Coach HeeHee

Hot and Bothered

August 07, 2026•6 min read

Weekly Wisdom #55

August 7, 2026

Last year I almost died. It was our last day in Tokyo. Every day of the past two weeks had been uncomfortably hot and humid but the heat this day went beyond discomfort to distress.

If we’d checked the forecast, we might have known about the humidity alert, which explained why the usually crowded streets were relatively empty. But we weren’t paying attention to that intent as we were on enjoying our final day in Japan.

When I first began feeling symptoms of heat distress, I didn’t immediately connect it to the temperature. After all, my wife and son were just fine. Of course, they were. Yes, my Nordic roots may make me less tolerant of hot, humid climates, which are foreign to me, unlike my wife, who spent her first thirty years surviving Asian summers. But when it comes to heat tolerance, size matters.

Moving mass requires physical effort. And that effort creates heat. The bigger you are, the more heat you generate just to move that mass around. At 200 lbs, I am 10% larger than our son and 40% larger than my wife. My size also means a lower surface-to-mass ratio. A larger person possesses less skin surface area proportional to mass compared to a smaller one. Since we diffuse heat through the skin, a larger person cannot shed heat as easily as a smaller one. This is a great advantage in a colder climate, but can prove deadly in the heat.

When My Body Started to Fail

I felt it in my legs first. They felt dead. Not muscular fatigue like in a workout, just unresponsive, like the muscles wouldn’t work. I began to worry that they might collapse under me. I soldiered on. Next came the lightheadedness. I’ve never fainted before, but began wondering if I might. Not wanting to ruin the day for everyone, I kept it to myself. But when I began having trouble regulating my heart rate, I knew I needed to reconsider pushing through the discomfort.

Though we stopped to rest, my symptoms stubbornly refused to abate. My body’s thermoregulator felt broken. I just couldn’t cool off. There we were on our last day of vacation, and I thought I might be having a heart attack or stroke.

“Not here,” I kept thinking to myself. “Let’s make it home first.”

Due to our son’s military deployment to Latvia, this was our first time together in nine months. We’d been looking forward to it the whole time he was away. I didn’t want to end it on a sour note. Because nothing quite diminishes the joy of a wonderful family adventure like one of the participants not surviving.

We retreated to air-conditioned shops and drank iced beverages–I had no appetite. Still not certain that my symptoms were heat-related, I performed the standard stroke tests in the washroom mirror out of sight of my family in order not to panic them. It wasn’t a stroke.

After some time inside with rest and cool air, my symptoms eventually abated, and we were able to make it through the day. But the damage had been done. For two months after my heat incident, I struggled with persistent vertigo ranging from mild to alarming, eventually requiring medical intervention.

The Aftermath

My personal encounter with heat distress sparked my interest in the subject. Especially because I developed an intolerance to heat after the experience.

When the vertigo at last resolved, I thought I was in the clear. Until this summer’s hot weather hit and I began having distress symptoms during high-intensity training that felt like flashbacks to the day in Tokyo, my body unable to shed heat quickly enough. Was it just me? Yes. My training partners were fine. Meanwhile, I was having dizzy spells, and my heart was pumping double time. This is how I came to discover that people who have suffered heat injury can develop persistent heat intolerance.

We all know that the young and the elderly are most susceptible during heatwaves. While better fitness levels and frequent heat exposure, such as sauna use, can help increase your tolerance to heat, it seems that everyone’s heat tolerance decreases with age as our bodies grow less efficient at dissipating heat.

Why is this important to know? Most of you reading this are probably physically active, relatively fit individuals. And like me, you may be dedicated to your health and fitness. You probably don’t (and shouldn’t) take summers off from training. But it is important to realize that as you age, your tolerance for heat will diminish despite your fitness level. You will want to adjust your training accordingly.

Train Smart, Not Stubborn

This may mean working out at cooler times of the day. And it certainly means you should listen to your body. Do not try pushing through it like I did that final day in Tokyo. If something feels off, if it is a hot day and you find yourself struggling with a workout that you usually wouldn’t have trouble with, take a break to reassess. Is it a fitness thing or a heat thing?

The point of all this exercise is, after all, to get healthy, not to kill yourself. Heat injury can happen to any of us. No matter how fit we imagine we are. And the older you get, the more susceptible you are. Here in Vancouver, we are lucky to live in a moderate climate that rarely exposes us to extremes. But that also means our bodies have not developed a tolerance for high temperatures.

Please take this into account when you go outside to play.

Why Heat Gets Harder with Age

https://www.physiologicallyspeaking.com/p/physiology-friday-328-why-heat-gets

Heat illness can affect healthy, fit people, not just the elderly or medically vulnerable.

Health Risks and Interventions in Exertional Heat Stress (Leyk et al., Sports Medicine, 2019)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6783627/

Comprehensive peer-reviewed review describing how exertional heat illness occurs even in healthy athletes, soldiers, and physically active individuals. It emphasizes that fitness reduces risk but does not eliminate it, particularly when heat, humidity, workload, or body size become limiting factors.

A heat injury can have lasting consequences.

Heat Intolerance: The Challenge of Returning to Duty Post-Heat Injury (Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2026)

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sports-and-active-living/articles/10.3389/fspor.2026.1860120/full

A review specifically focused on persistent heat intolerance after heat injury. It summarizes evidence that some individuals continue to exhibit impaired heat tolerance months or even years after an exertional heat illness and discusses the underlying physiology.

Training should adapt to age and environmental conditions, not ego.

Heat Tolerance in Older Adults: A Systematic Review of Thermoregulatory Alterations (2025)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12609229/

A review on aging and heat concluding that aging reduces sweating, skin blood flow, and cardiovascular responses to heat, increasing susceptibility to overheating even in active adults. It supports modifying exercise timing, intensity, and environmental exposure as we age.