How to Interpret Your Sweat Score

When you do Sprint 8 on Matrix equipment, you get a Sweat Score after every sprint. Your Sweat Score tells you how much power you generated while working out. In other words, it tells you how hard you worked. The bigger the number, the more effort you put into the sprint.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Your Sweat Score is determined by five factors:

• Time
• Speed
• Resistance
• Incline
• User Weight

The Sprint 8 program uses these variables to figure out how much energy you generated during your sprint. This energy, measured in joules, is converted to a Sweat Score. We don’t want to bore you with mathematical formulas, so here’s the bottom line: the more energy you generate, the higher your Sweat Score will be.

So if my friend’s Sweat Score is higher than mine, does that mean they worked harder than me?

Not necessarily. Your friend generated more energy than you, but there are plenty of factors that affect the amount of energy you generate. For example, if your friend did Sprint 8 on an elliptical, and you did Sprint 8 on a treadmill, their Sweat Score would probably be a little higher than yours, even if you worked equally hard. Why? Because treadmills and ellipticals absorb energy in different ways.

First of all, a treadmill can’t tell how hard you’re working. It only knows your speed, incline and the duration of your sprint. You can’t change any of these factors by working harder. That’s why you always get the same Sweat Score when you do Sprint 8 on a treadmill. The only way to change your Sweat Score is by selecting a harder level.

Ellipticals are different. When you work harder, the machine can tell, because the pedals are moving more quickly. Even if treadmills could somehow tell how hard you worked, the elliptical would still have an advantage, because it absorbs energy during the “push” AND “pull” phases of the exercise. The treadmill only absorbs energy during the “push” phase, when your feet make contact with the machine.

What if we were both using ellipticals? If my friend’s Sweat Score is still higher than mine, does that mean they worked harder than me?

Well, that depends. Is your friend heavier than you? If so, they’ll naturally generate more energy during the “push” phase of the exercise, allowing them to get a higher Sweat Score. But if you both switch to the treadmill, where speed and incline are the only things that matter, you’ll be the one with an advantage. Because you’re not as heavy as your friend, you don’t need to work as hard to maintain the speeds required by Sprint 8.

Of course, even if you were both the same weight, it wouldn’t matter. There are plenty of other factors that affect the amount of energy you generate during a workout, none of which are related to effort.

So is there any point in comparing my Sweat Score to my friend’s?

Nope! Sweat Scores are a personal benchmark, not a competition. They measure your progress as an athlete during individual workouts and over time. That means the only Sweat Score you should care about is your own. As long as your Sweat Score goes up a little bit each week, you’re doing a good job.