Is Sweatworking the Business Dinner of the Future?

Holly Shapiro goes to Barry's Bootcamp twice a week. About a 25-minute commute from her Midtown East studio apartment, she routinely walks through the double doors, stashes her favorite black Lolë gym bag in a digital keycode locker, and then tosses her long brown hair in a messy bun. It's there, at around 7:05 a.m. every Monday, where her work week begins, and it's not because she's at Barry's to lead the hour-long interval class. Instead, she's there to lift weights in a music-filled room alongside potential work clients.

As the East Coast director of sales for Thinknear, Shapiro is a self-proclaimed fan of sweatworking, the combination of networking and—you guessed it—sweating. The phenomenon is spreading through major cities like wildfire, and Shapiro's in on the trend, typically sweatworking three days a week. The goal? To avoid the 3 Ds, as she refers to them, that have become overly popular in her line of work: Drinks, dinner, dessert.

"Instead of being a salesperson who takes clients to dinners and drinks, I come in and like to make them feel good through workout classes," says Shapiro. "I have weekly standing dates with multiple clients to hit up some of the best (and most expensive) fitness classes in New York City ... from Barry's Bootcamp to SLT. We bond over the fact that we feel great. It's productive. It's positive. They then equate feeling good to hanging out with you, and it really helps drive business."

According to CEB Iconoculture, sweatworking is more popular than ever and has corporate climbers maximizing work-life balance throughout the United States. Now, boutique exercise classes are more common than ever, and major cities are seeing countless spin-offs of big-name workouts like CrossFit or SoulCycle.

Eric Posner, CEO and founder of NYC-based SWERVE, can vouch for that. In 2013, Posner left his finance sales job to help found the team-inspired cycling studio, based on the belief that other boutique spaces weren't fully capturing the camaraderie of working out with a group.

At SWERVE, riders are divided into teams competing against each other during the 45-minute session. While employees from local businesses like Warby Parker, Rent the Runway, and Cole Haan come to SWERVE for team building activities, teams from Google and Amazon recently challenged one another to a ride with the promise of post-sweat smoothies. The goal? To sweatwork (and have some fun).

"A lot of business may not get done during the workout, but it happens afterwards," says Posner. "It's because of the relationship that you can build with someone while working out, can then in turn impact your career outside of the studio. There's a certain level of positivity and accomplishments that you feel during a ride. Those feelings are great to share with others—no matter what sort of relationship you're trying to build—whether it's a friend or a colleague."

Noah Neiman, Barry's Bootcamp master trainer and upcoming star of the new Bravo series Work Out New York, sees sweatworking constantly in his classes. "Now that there's such a focus on health, especially in the big cities, companies want to change up that stale, old boy's club way of doing business," says Neiman. "Going and sweating with someone eases the relationship a lot more than sitting down to a steak dinner and wine. People are seeing a lot of great results from that, and that's why the boutique fitness industry overall is experiencing a lot of success."

So what about the people who are nervous to drip sweat with new faces? Shapiro says that in the moment, the last thing you're thinking about is how you look in front of these potential business partners.

"Personally, I feel most beautiful [during a workout] and I hope my clients do too," she says. "Typically during the classes, we're each focused on ourselves and the bonding happens afterward, when your endorphin levels are up and you're feeling great. It's that feeling that takes [over] the 'weirdness' of being sweaty. It's also fun to talk about how hard (or easy) the class was afterwards. It gives you a common ground to build on right away."