When it comes to washing your workout clothes, you probably throw your sweaty sports bras and leggings into your washing machine along with the rest of your laundry without a second thought. We’re willing to bet you’re not making an “activewear stew” in your bathtub, like TikTok creator Brigitte Hunnicutt.
In Hunnicutt’s video, she can be seen soaking her activewear in her bathtub filled with water and pouring scoops of powdered detergent in. In the comments, she shares her “recipe”: She uses four scoops of Rockin’ Green Laundry Detergent ($26, Amazon) and soaks her workout clothes in warm water for hours. Then, she does a normal wash cycle in the washing machine without detergent.
Naturally, we were curious about Hunnicutt’s “activewear stew,” as she calls it, so we turned to Patric Richardson, host of “The Laundry Guy” on Discovery+ and author of “House Love” and “Laundry Love,” to find out more about this method – and if that’s actually how you’re supposed to wash your workout clothes.
Experts in This Article
Patric Richardson is the host of “The Laundry Guy” on Discovery+ and author of “House Love” and “Laundry Love.”
How to Wash Your Activewear the Right Way
What Hunnicutt is doing is called laundry stripping, Richardson explains. Laundry stripping is a deep cleaning method that involves letting your clothes soak for hours in order to remove residue caused by your natural body oils, among other things.
“Basically the whole point of laundry stripping was the idea that commercial detergent wasn’t getting everything out of your clothes, so you did stripping to sort of clarify them, like clarifying shampoo,” Richardson says.
Most activewear is made from polyester, which is a material that hates water and loves oil, Richardson explains. “It loves the oil from your skin, but more importantly, it loves the sweat that’s in the oil that’s in your skin,” he says. “Sweat is building up in the fabric, and the detergent just in the regular laundry cycle isn’t enough to wash that out.”
“[Laundry stripping] legitimately works, but who has that kind of time?” Richardson says. If you don’t want to wait around for hours (we don’t blame you!), Richardson suggests putting your dirty workout clothes into your washing machine, adding a small amount of detergent (like Tide, for instance) and oxygen bleach (like OxiClean), and running the express cycle, which should take about 30 minutes. Don’t use fabric softener, as it coats the fabric so you’re not really maintaining the stretch of the activewear.
“Oxygen bleach is color safe, and it breaks down oil, so it breaks down that sweat,” Richardson says. Using it in an express cycle is achieving the same result as Hunnicutt’s “activewear stew,” but just significantly faster.
It’s OK to wash your activewear along with your other clothes, as long as nothing is made from wool or silk, according to Richardson. “You cannot use oxygen bleach with wool or silk. So if you have smart wool socks, Merino undershirts, a sweater, you just can’t use it,” he says. “But if you’re just washing cotton, and you only use the express cycle, you can put your other stuff in there.”
Once your express wash cycle is done, Richardson cautions against putting your activewear in the dryer. “Just leave them out to dry because they have Spandex or some kind of Lycra, and you should never put Lycra in the dryer,” he says. That’s because these fabrics are susceptible to shrinking and can break down over time with high heat.
How Often Should You Wash Your Activewear?
You should never re-wear anything you’ve sweat in, according to Richardson. That’s because your sweaty clothes have oil and salt in them, so wearing them again can cause skin rashes and infections, he says.
You can re-wear a pair of yoga pants you wore on a quick errands run, Richardson says, because you likely didn’t sweat a ton in them. But anything you’ve worn during a run, cycling class, HIIT session, yoga or Pilates workout, to name a few, should be tossed in the laundry when you’re done.
Danielle Zickl is a freelance writer who has 10 years of experience covering fitness, health, and nutrition. You can find her work here on PS and in many other publications, including Self, Well+Good, Runner’s World, Outside Run, Peloton, Women’s Health, and Men’s Fitness.
