Is your exercise class 'sweat slop'?
I taught them. I'll tell you.
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I’m an exercise enthusiast1, but I try not to be a snob about it. I write things like this, and mean it:
However people arrive at exercise is cool with me (the “best” kind is the one you’ll do, etc.) so long as whatever they’re doing is sane, safe, sustainable, and in line with their personal values.
But I also taught group exercise classes for six years after going through a lengthy education and certification process2, so I have some authority to be a snob about them—not to elevate my own status or position, but because I want you to have the best version of the thing you’re interested in, like this guy said:
Given that, my snob stance: Too many group exercise classes in 2026 overpromise total-body transformation but do little beyond completely exhaust participants via junk volume, heated rooms, and frantic intervals that create the illusion of a better workout through intensity, not effectiveness.
I’m calling such classes “sweat slop.”
Everyone deserves better, and I’m outlining here how to identify sweat slop and incorporate better options into your life.
Before anyone accuses me of needless hateration and holleration, I go to group exercise classes myself all the time as a supplement to my solo strength training routine. I’m well-practiced in the art of critiquing something I participate in because I care enough about the thing to want it to be better. I’ve done this before:
I’ve also written for The Atlantic about one of the elements of group fitness classes that’s a net-positive for individuals and society at large: They’re a fantastic way to make friends. Plus, they’re worthwhile even if they’re not maximally effective for certain goals because doing any movement at all is incredibly good for you. Many of them are great cardio, which is why I do them in addition to strength training because the human body needs cardio, too (tragically! I just want to lift things up and put them down).
So if that’s why you go to class—if those are your values and you’re happy with all of it—great! But if you go to class because you want to build significant strength, lose fat and gain muscle, or develop familiarity and skill with functional movement patterns, there are a lot of classes out there that say they’ll do this for you but will not. Instead they’ll offer you slop at a premium price and keep you coming back for months or years because you’re frustrated it’s not working and you’re blaming yourself, thinking you just need to work harder.
No. Not on my watch. I’m your snobby sentinel against sweat slop. Walk with me.
What are the signs of sweat slop?
I love how instructor Kara Lennon breaks this down:
Sweat slop classes deploy methods like spiking the hell out of your heart rate over and over, cranking the heat to “Finnish sauna,” blasting your head off your neck with the music volume, having you run around holding dumbbells for no real reason, or throwing burpees (a most controversial exercise) into the mix because they’re insanely exhausting.
Is some of this potentially good? Sure: Getting your heart rate up is what makes your cardiovascular system adapt, heat can temporarily increase your range of motion (and there’s a sort of “push-through” mental effect of working against heat that can increase exercise resilience), and if you’ve never touched a dumbbell before and a class helps you do that in a less scary environment than the weights area then hey, great. Much of this is really endurance training against fatigue, and that can be good stuff.
But let me give you an example of sweat slop grounded in my experience as an indoor cycling instructor. I went to a class the other night that did the thing it seems every goddamn indoor cycling class does now, which I was explicitly told not to do when I was in instructor training with the Spinning brand:3 “Arm songs.”
These newfangled bikes are equipped with a little cage for little dumbbells on the back of the seat, and halfway through the class—after you’re already exhausted from sprints and climbs—you do a bunch of breakneck-speed curls and pumps and presses that are too fast and light to make any real difference over time.
Please, enough. If you want big or “toned” (less body fat, more muscle) arms, you need to progressively overload the muscles in your arms during dedicated upper-body training days, not rob yourself of the overall benefits of an indoor cycling class (training the endurance of your posterior chain and your cardiovascular mechanisms) because a class has convinced you that just because you moved more of your body parts you got a better workout.4
So when it comes to classes that have you doing a lot of discordant, exhausting stuff in the space of 45 minutes, I wrote this in my Pilates piece and I’ll echo it here:
These classes are great for various things but do not offer the opportunity for serious strength progression. You’re running around doing too much shit too quickly within the space of an hour. As the linked article states, it’s “essentially cardio with weights.” With one hand on my American Council on Exercise Group Fitness Instructor certification, I declare: A lot of group fitness classes are worth a wet fart in hell when it comes to getting you the body composition (more muscle, less fat) results you may be seeking.
I’ll put it to you this way: If every workout you do (because you only or mostly do sweat-sloppy classes) feels relentless, breathless, rapid-fire, and filled to the brim with constantly changing movements, and you’re not seeing the results you want, start additionally doing workouts that feel a little more boring and slow.
You can do the more frantic stuff for your cardio, but the big-change results come from doing mostly the same things, while increasing the demand on your muscles, for long periods of time. Lifting can be kind of tedious; you do a set of eight or five or even three controlled and slower reps, you stand around resting for a little bit, and you might not even sweat that much. I get why people might try this and feel like they didn’t “do anything.”
But dumping buckets of sweat onto the floor and feeling like your lungs are going to fall out of your ass from the exertion isn’t necessarily a good measure of a good workout. Those measures can be things like steadily increasing strength over time, training during any one set to near-failure (so you’re pushing up against your edges, recovering, and then seeing how you can keep pushing those edges as you get stronger), and of course, from seeing in the mirror that your body looks different.
Why sweat slop is fine to do, sometimes
As explained, if you’re doing these sort of classes for cardio or for any of the other effects I mentioned, I don’t necessarily see a problem (besides cost, I guess) with them5 so long as they’re not the only thing you do.
Another example from my own experience: I worked out at a CrossFit affiliate gym in my neighborhood for around four years. As I’m sure you’re aware, CrossFit can be quite likely to injure participants because a lot of what’s going on there is sweat-sloppy as hell (another thing I can critique while doing it). You know how it is: They’ll have you sprinting in the streets with a weighted vest on before coming back inside for 50 potentially shin-shattering box jumps and 30 snatches at your most exhausted. This is incredibly stupid, and we all know it.
Good CrossFit gyms, though—which I believe mine was because the programming was much safer, saner, and more sustainable than this and was developed by people with a long history of coaching and competing in not only the CrossFit modality but in various other fundamentals—dial back the slop a bit and offer intelligently structured strength training programing in the first half of class.
I looked like this at the peak of my CrossFit powers not because I was doing 50 burpees and then 50 box jumps and then 50 rope climbs and then barfing in the middle of the room. I looked like that because the coach would program the same basic strength stuff over a period of weeks to progressively overload whatever we were doing. I looked lean because I was doing a lot of cardio, yes (and of course, I also had to eat in a certain way), but that gym also had us testing our one-rep maxes every couple of months and I was deadlifting close to 350 because we trained low, heavy reps of deadlifts and other compound movements every week for a long time.
Point being: If classes are promising a total body composition overhaul, or maximum strength, or etched abs, or earth-shattering glutes, but they’re not doing the more boring, slow, heavier strength stuff in addition to the slop, they’re ripping you off.
That said, continue reading for my take on:
The top-three kinds of classes that are the most sweat sloppy, and three that are better
Maybe you’ll see a class here that you do and love, and you’ll be mad at me. Please, I beg: Understand that I’m not criticizing you or the entirety of the class or modality. I’m only explaining that these are the class styles I feel have the greatest potential to overpromise—because pretty much every fitness brand has a profit-driven interest to promise you the body of your dreams—because they have you believing that sweat equals substance.
