Why Towels Don’t Really Solve Post-Swim Recovery

Anyone who spends time around swimming pools will recognise the moment.

The session finishes, swimmers climb out of the water and the energy that carried them through the set starts to fade. Goggles come off, hair is dripping, and everyone reaches for the same thing; a towel.

For a few minutes it feels fine. You dry off, wrap it around your shoulders and start chatting with teammates or packing your kit bag. But then it happens. The cold creeps in.

Swimmers know this feeling well. The body that was working hard just minutes ago suddenly feels chilled, even if the pool itself didn’t feel particularly cold.

It’s not just imagination. When you leave the water, the body continues to lose heat for a while afterwards. Even once you’ve dried off, cooling can still continue as the body adjusts and circulation returns to normal. In open water swimming this is sometimes referred to as “afterdrop”, where the body temperature can continue to fall for a period after exiting the water.

That’s why swimmers often feel colder ten minutes after getting out than they did immediately after the session finished. Towels help with one part of the problem because they absorb water. But they don’t really solve the other part, which is warmth.

Once a towel becomes damp, it stops insulating very well. Air moves through it easily, and if you’re standing on poolside or walking outside to the car park the body loses heat quickly. At the same time, you’ve stopped moving, so the internal heat your muscles were generating during the session disappears as well.

It’s a familiar routine for swimmers, especially during winter training blocks or long competition days. Between races or sets, athletes often end up standing around wrapped in a towel, trying to stay warm while waiting for the next swim.

Over time most swimmers develop their own ways of dealing with it. Some pull on joggers over damp legs. Others throw on oversized hoodies. Many sit in the car with the heater on, hoping to warm up before the next event.

The common thread is that everyone is trying to do the same thing: hold onto the warmth the body generated during training.

That moment, the transition between finishing the session and properly warming up again, is where recovery quietly begins.

When muscles stay warm, circulation continues to move more freely and the body can start resetting after the effort of the session. When the body cools too quickly, everything tends to stiffen up. Anyone who has walked out of a pool into cold air knows how quickly that feeling can arrive.

That small window after training might only last twenty minutes, but it has a surprisingly big impact on how the body feels later in the day.

Over the past year we’ve had a lot of conversations with swimmers and parents about this exact moment. The stories are remarkably similar: long training sessions, damp kit bags, waiting between races, and the constant battle with staying warm once the swimming stops.

That’s really where the idea behind DRYRZ sits.

While this moment is most obvious in swimming, it exists across many sports. Finishing a training session, stepping off a pitch, leaving the water or standing around between efforts, it’s the same transition where the body begins to cool.

Rather than replacing towels entirely, the goal is simply to give athletes something better for that transition period. Bamboo towelling next to the skin absorbs moisture, while the outer layer helps retain warmth when the body would otherwise start cooling down too quickly.

It’s a small change to the routine, but one that fits naturally into the rhythm of training days. Stepping out of the water, drying off, and putting on a layer designed for that exact moment.

Recovery doesn’t always start hours later with stretching or nutrition. Quite often it starts much earlier than that. Sometimes it begins the moment you leave the pool.

Designed for swimmers. Built for all sport.
Stay warm. Dress dry.

If you’re looking for a layer designed specifically for the transition after swimming, you can explore the DRYRZ recovery range here.