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Hydration 🔓

The old Soviet manuals are adamant about not drinking water during practice. This idea makes a lot of sense to me as well as being supported by the science.

Hear me out, the short version: You are about to jump around, do crunches, and possibly get playfully punched in the stomach, a lot. This is not the best time to drink tons of water. Come to practice well hydrated well in advance and hydrate immediately after. That’s it.

Hear me out, the slightly more complicated version: Hydrating wrongly during exercise may actually deplete your body of electrolytes essential for strenuous muscle activity. Besides water, sweating makes you lose salts, which in turn help regulate muscle activity. That cramp you feel in your calf may be a sign not so much of dehydration (lack of water), but more specifically of electrolyte depletion— this is according to cranky Soviet coaches, as confirmed by research published recently in Sports Medicine Reports.1 And here’s the kicker: “Water intake after dehydration makes muscles more susceptible to cramp.” 2 So what does that mean? Drinking fresh water will further leech salts from your body, causing more cramps. Here’s another reason then not to drink water during exercise. If you must rehydrate, use an electrolyte mix consisting of Sodium, Potassium, and Magnesium.2 And unless you are doing long sessions (more than 1-2hr), you are still better off hydrating well before and after practice.

  1. Schwellnus MP. “Cause of Exercise Associated Muscle Cramps (EAMC) — altered neuromuscular control, dehydration or electrolyte depletion?” British Journal of Sports Medicine 2009-43:401-408.

  2. Lau WY, Kato H, Nosaka K. “Water intake after dehydration makes muscles more susceptible to cramp but electrolytes reverse that effect.” BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine 2019.

Hear me out, the long version: The first thing to understand about hydration is dehydration. What is dehydration? According to the Mayo Clinic: “Dehydration occurs when you use or lose more fluid than you take in, and your body doesn’t have enough water and other fluids to carry out its normal functions. If you don’t replace lost fluids, you will get dehydrated.”

Signs of dehydration are not mysterious: they include dry mouth and lips and viscous, yellow urine. Alternatively, the presence of saliva and clear urine, usually means you are hydrated!

But that’s only half the story. The other half of “hydration” has to do with electrolyte depletion. Common electrolyte include Sodium, Potassium, and Magnesium: also commonly found in table salt, bananas, and dark-green, leafy vegetables. Your nervous system needs these salts to effectively signal to your muscles. The signal passes through, you guessed it, water. Too much or too little salt begins to change the conductivity of the water-logged cells that carry electrical signals, impairing their function. Hence, cramps.1

  1. Horswill CA, Stofan JR, Lacambra M, Toriscelli TA, Eichner ER, Murray R. “Sodium balance during U.S. football training in the heat: cramp-prone vs. reference players.” International Journal of Sports Medicine 2009-30:789–794.

Salts are a funny thing though, in that they seek what’s called a “salt balance” or osmoregulation. When mixing two fluids of different salinity, the salt concretion will naturally balance out. And it will do so across cell membranes!

So what happens when you drink fresh water? The body salinity sits normally at around 0.9%, and less so after strenuous sweating. When drinking plain water, I am restoring some of the fluids lost to sweat, which is good. But I am also reducing the average salinity of the remaining water, due to some regulation. The second half of hydration actually gets worse with fresh water.

Therefore, I reiterate the conclusions summarized above: There is almost never a need to hydrate during practice, unless your sessions are lasting significantly more than a few hours. You are almost always better served in hydrating well before and after exercise. And especially after, your goal is to not only restore the liquids lost to sweat, but the salts that come with it: both essential for the balanced functioning of your muscles and nervous system. Unless you are an elite athlete, there’s no need to drink any special pre- or post- workout supplement. The water will take of the first part and your normal foods are salt enough to restore your body’s balance of electrolytes.

A few questions remain for me, however: How long can I go without water? And what about sugar?

Let’s take these one at a time. The amount of water I lose during session depends strongly on my body mass, the type of exercise, and ambient temperature. I will get dehydrated quicker if I exercise hard when it’s hot out. A study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine in Sports gives the following rule of thumb, concluding that “in temperate conditions, dehydration by 1–2% of body mass had no effect on endurance exercise performance when the exercise duration was less than 90 min.“1 To repeat, you can lose up to 1 to 2% of your body mass in water, without an effect on endurance. For me at 160lb or 73kg that’s almost four cups or a liter of water! And none of it is relevant if the exercise session is shorter than 90 minutes.

  1. Maughan, R.J. and Shirreffs, S.M. “Dehydration and rehydration in competitive sport.” Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 2010-20: 40-47. Conversely, if you are losing more than that amount or if you are exercising for longer than 90 minutes, you may start to think about taking your first water break, with a carefully formulated hydration solution.

What makes for a good hydrating solution? We already discussed the importance (and the danger) of salts, or “electrolytes.” You may also note that many “post-exercise” drinks also contain sugar, which can be a powerful tool in delivering a quick burst of energy to your muscles. But understand also that recent research shows the absolute dangers of excessive sugar consumption. Most so-called rehydration drinks contain way too much sugar (some as high as 20-40g per serving), as do most diets. Ten times less that amount, 2-3 grams per serving should be plenty to provide energy after an average 90 minute workout.

To avoid these problems, I make a large pot of herbal tea (usually Turmeric) with a tea-spoon of honey and dash of Lite Salt, which contains both Sodium and Potassium. The tea goes into a sports bottle, which I bring with me to practice to drink after a session to rehydrate. This aluminum bottle gets cleaned and replenished daily in preparation for my next training session.

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