Do I wash my hair every time I exercise? It's an emphatic no from me. Imagine! I'd have to wake up at 5AM every morning to fit in a workout, a hair wash and my morning commute or slog away exercising, showering and drying (and drying and drying and drying) for at least two hours until I even got a whiff of my dinner or a Netflix session in the evening. No thank you.
My hair is long, admittedly, and it takes an age to wash. It takes me ten minutes just to flush the conditioner out of it. And though each strand is fine, there's lots of it - it holds water like a sponge and refuses to dry of its own accord. If I went to bed with wet hair, it would be just as soggy by the time I woke up. Even blasting it with my beloved Dyson Supersonic Hairdryer takes twenty minutes out of my evening. So clutch your pearls you may, but I'm never going to commit to a full on hair wash every time I work up a sweat.
An Ode To The Body Shower
So what do I do instead? I embrace a good old body shower. I twist my sweaty hair up into a topknot and let that hot stream of water pummel me clean. I wash my face, I shower gel my body, wash my feet, the lot. And then I stand there and enjoy a moment of calm, head tipped back so only the stray strands at the nape of my neck get wet. I'm in and out in ten minutes - squeaky clean and poached pink. The dream.
As for my hair, yes it gets sweaty, but that's the key here - sweaty, not greasy. Sweat is mostly sterile, 99% of it is water. The only time that sweat is likely to make you hair look lank is if there was a good amount of grease sitting on your roots before you started exercising - your sweat can displace that grease and move it further down the hair shaft, making your hair look dull and lifeless.
If my hair is clean to start with, all I need to do is blast my roots with a hairdryer and I'm done.
Now everyone's hair is different. If your scalp reacts to residual sweat, you don't think simply drying off your roots is going to cut it or you just prefer a full hair-and-body shower over dodging the shower head for minutes - you do you. But if you're wasting those precious post-workout endorphins on near-daily hair washes out of a sense of hygiene-related duty, let it go. Try my way just once, and see if you don't free yourself up some valuable me-time.