In certain cases, hot workouts might even be less effective than room temperature fitness sessions. Hot exercise makes you better at hot exercise, if you do it frequently and consistently enough, Craig Crandall, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, tells Popular Science. Hot exercise classes can actually strain this system. Beyond heat acclimation, other widely touted benefits of hot workouts are based on limited, often overstated research. We don’t yet have enough research to definitively say if or how hot workouts affect weight loss efforts, she says.