Body Temperature after Activity

Is it common to have low body temperature after activity? I have been temping myself and after resting my temp is in the 98.2 - 98.4 range.

The strange thing is if I do any activity (walking around the house, the stairs, making dinner) my temperature drops with the activity, down into the 96.6 range. If I sit and rest for 10 minutes it goes back up to normal. I don't feel any different with the drop.

Just curious if anyone is experiencing this?

Haley,

I'm curious if you've taken/trended your waking body temperature over time?

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As for your original question, I found the following. Perhaps it will be helpful.

Q: Why Do I Get Cold After Working Out?

I always get the post-workout chills, even when it’s warm outside. What causes them, and is there anything I can do to avoid it in future?

A: The short answer: Skip to the paragraph marked with an *.

The long answer:

We posed your question to Dr. Ollie Jay, founder of the Thermal Ergonomics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa, who gave us a quick lesson on sweat and why your gender may have something to do with your shivers.

“When you go for a run, your metabolic rate goes up quickly because you need to deliver oxygen to your tissues to fuel muscle contractions,” Jay says. “The transfer of energy in the cellular process needed to create these muscle contractions is very inefficient, so a lot of this energy is liberated as heat—80 to 95 percent of it.”

That heat needs to dissipate to the environment in order to keep your core temperature from rising too high, and your body sheds the heat by increasing blood flow to the skin and sweating. “But we don’t start dissipating enough heat to balance the elevated metabolic heat production until about 30 or 45 minutes of exercise,” Jay says. So your body temperature will rise for about half an hour until it plateaus when you’re losing enough heat through your skin to keep your body from baking.

*When you finish exercising, your metabolic heat production immediately drops. But you’ll keep sweating for a while and continue to lose heat to the environment through the evaporation of that sweat. “How this affects your core temperature depends on your body’s shape and surface area to mass ratio,” Jay says. Women often have a high surface area to mass ratio, so they tend to lose more heat more quickly after a workout than men do, making them cold. (Taller, thinner men, Jay points out, also tend to experience the post-workout freezies more often than bigger guys.)

The idea of low basal temperature was something I first heard from Matt Stone (Eat for Heat, and others). He got some of his information from Broda Barnes, M.D. Later, I heard about it from an Integrative/Functional Medicine Doctor (an M.D.) and then Lawrence Wilson, M.D. Finally, more from David Jernigan, D.C. Dr. Jernigan believes that the low basal temperature can be corrected, by resetting your body's "thermostat." It's interesting to me that body temperature tends to decline with age, as disease also seems to increase in many. Granted, that's correlation and not causation. But, there may be something to it.