No Stupid Questions

The trick is not to wait until the end of the week to do it all during laundry day.

If your nice dress shirt got sweat on it during the day, best to wash it immediately when you get home.

Why not exercise in a vest/tank top and let your armpits breath?

Is the issue the stains, or smell? If it’s the former, it’s likely your antiperspirant. Switching to non-aluminum deodorant avoids stains, but won’t prevent you from sweating. There are also “non-staining” antiperspirants, but I don’t know how effective they are.

If it’s lingering smells, probably try changing laundry detergents. You can maybe also try dabbing a little baking soda on the pits of your shirts before throwing them in the wash.

Wash stinky, sweaty, greasy clothes in hot, it helps dissolve those things. Add at least 1/2 cup baking soda to the drum (front or top loading), this cuts grease and smells. It also helps boost the detergent and does not ruin clothes. Wash super dirty clothes on a heavy cycle. If they still stink after that, you need to replace those clothes. Plastic clothes will eventually get nasty.

I don't know but im now going to read to see if anyone has good tips.

I'm going to second the undershirts. They also prevent the wet spots on your good shirt.

Also, Old Spice, the blue gel stick not the powdery stuff, has been the only thing that actually keeps the sweating down.

My top tips:

Wash or at least rinse the garments as soon after getting them sweaty as you can.

Wash them with actually dirty clothes if possible. The dirt particles will absorb smell and act as an abrasive on the stains. If your clothes are generally too clean for this, use an oxy powder additive which will achieve the same effect.

Also: consider going without deodorant and antiperspirant and just use some isopropyl alcohol or similar to kill the bacteria in your armpits as needed; this results in less smell and less junk in your sweat to clean out of your shirts.

Lastly: wearing a technical shirt when working out will mean less sweat actually adhering to the fabric, making cleaning easier.

I also, despite being in good shape, sweat a ton. I honestly hate it, but there are much worse things to live with.

Anyways, I had the same pit stain problem as you. I found that it was my antiperspirant causing the problem. I switched away from an antiperspirant (which honestly wasn't really helping me sweat any less anyway) to a straight deodorant (Old Spice) and the problem went away.

What are your current laundry methods, i.e., what sort of detergents do you use? Do you wash on warm or cold? Do you know the hardness of your water?

Most of the time when it comes to odor sticking on clothing related to exercise it's strongly related to the fibers of those cloths. The geometry of polyester fibers often used in athletic wear is known to hold on to oils and other body junk.

Generally, there are three factors that go into successfully washing clothing experiencing these problems.

1. Adequate detergents. You want something with good surfactants to capture and lift away soils, and enzymes of the right types that will help break down difficult soils into smaller molecules that the surfactants can better manage.
2. Temperature. Just as cold water will have a hard time washing away butter and oils from your dishes, cold water in your laundry is gonna have a more difficult time to wash away oils in your clothing. It's a common misconception that warm in your laundry is bad for clothes. In reality, in the US anyway, most warm settings on washing machines are only around 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot settings are usually barely reaching the 100 degree mark, so both of these are in line with your own body temperature as you're wearing the things. If the care tags on your garments say they can handle warm or hot washes, definitely do so. Things that may say cold can probably tolerate warm, too, given the temperature is really not that hot at all.
3. Time. Surfactants and enzymes need time to work. If your wash time is brief, or you're using a speed wash setting on your washer, you may not be giving enough time to let the chemicals do their work.

In regards to detergents, in the US, probably the best thing you can get is powdered Tide or Gain. These products includes a good surfactant system, a complete enzyme package, and oxygen bleach all in one. You don't really need anything more than that.

If you're using liquids, there are more options but also limitations. Again, Tide is probably the best as far as surfactants go but all liquids are going to be missing the other components. Certain enzymes don't like to live in a solution with water so they are missing from almost all formulations. Oxygen bleach is activated by water so by definition it can't be in a liquid product. In these cases you can use a booster product. OxiClean is a common one for just the oxygen bleach but it lacks enzymes. There's another product called Biz that you can find at Walmart and Meijer stores for very cheap. It's like seven bucks and has all of the oxygen bleach and enzymes you need.

TL;DR: wash in warm water for a longer time, and add Biz booster powder to your liquid detergent.

My advise is to wear undershirts. Even the tank top ones will make a big difference in keeping your shirts clean.

I could solve this issue for myself by dampening the shirts pre wash and massaging in hard soap (That's what wikipedia claims "Kernseife" is called in English. I hope it's righ lol) Then you let your clothes sit for 20 minutes or so, before putting them in the washing machine. I don't think I rinse it out. The mashine will do it anyways.

The Hyper Fixed podcast has an episode about this called "The Pits."

TL;DL (iirc) don't let stains set by letting dirty laundry sit for a long time is probably the most important. Don't use a dryer. Try different solutions to pre-treat (vinegar/baking soda+water/dish soap).

Don't wear shirts with anything other than 100% cotton.

I can't get a shirt with even a little bit of polyester to not stink after washing multiple times.

Soak every once in a while in oxyclean/generic oxyclean you can also use a laundry sanitizer, Lysol makes one now I use it because we have well water that’s kinda stinky and it works great for that. Between these two things stains and smell have no chance. Air drying workout wear can also help with smell and color as well as longevity of the clothes.

Some of the other tips are covered (aluminum in deodorant is a big cause of stains) so I'd recommend clothing made of natural fibres like cotton, bamboo and wool. They have natural antibacterial properties and are easier to strip stains out of with basic detergents and vinegar.

How does your washing machine work? A standard cycle with mine takes 3 1/2 hours, and after so much soaking at 30C, even my workout t-shirts smell fine. The detergent is standard aldi powder.

Once I started making my own deodorant, which is surprisingly easy, my shirts stopped getting pitted out. There are a bunch of recipes on YouTube and you can buy empty deodorant twist up containers. Bit of a pain but it works.

Im so glad I grew up and can work shirtless remotely… high school was hell for me.

Sorry that doesn’t directly answer – but I found that aluminum antiperspirants didn’t help the clothing pits situation.

Also, wear black.

If they are white shirts: then use Dish Soap and Bleach. I am assuming your dish soap is alkaline, careful not to add to much or it could build pressure and overflow. Use a soak cycle.

If they are not white shirts: then just do a quick cycle with dish soap or other degreaser, then a regular wash, and you can treat especially bad cases by applying liquid laundry detergent directly to the stain and letting sit half hour before washing.

If you're conscientious of your impact on the environment and you only wear these specific shirts when you work out: then it doesn't really matter if they are stained, no?

If you're some kind of trendy hippy who believes weird diy hacks on the internet: wash with the contents of a can of cola.

You may need a different detergent or a detergent booster that works harder on stains. Usually they're peroxide based, but contain other agents as well. Some come in powder form and others in sprays.

One powder I grabbed does brighten better than detergent alone and makes things smell like an honest-to-goodness laundry. (Which I'm not going to name because this already sounds like a sales pitch. It isn't. It's just something that was on special offer on my supermarket's website and I added it to my virtual basket because I have a few blood-spotted items of clothing that regular washing wasn't getting out.)

It worked wonders on some very greyed white t-shirts, but not so great on the blood spots on coloured clothing. I may need to soak them for longer or use more additive, risking the colour, which I may have been too cautious about up to the present.

Quit all that working out nonsense