Good hydration is critical to keep our bodies healthy, especially as the weather now is warm and muggy and our body weight in terms of water weight is on average 60% to men’s body weight and 55% for women. Keeping yourself hydrated helps our blood flow, which is also essential as our blood carries oxygen,glucose and nutrients to the cell, also it helps the kidneys get rid of the waste product our body produces and no longer requires, it also lubricates our eyes and joints and keeps the skin healthy.
Physical or cardiovascular training can be thirsty work, so it’s important to maintain your hydration, exercise can be much harder if you don’t! You will lose fluid not only by sweating but by the body breathing out, water vapour will be released. A majority of people think it’s just sweating that causes us to lose water in our bodies but when we exercise, our body produce heat. Water from our body is carried to your skin via blood capillaries and evaporates out to cool you down. The amount you sweat depends on how hard you exercise, how long, the temperature and humidity of the area and your own body chemistry, for example 45/60 minutes of exercise could make you lose up to 1 litre of fluid, so it’s important to stay hydrated.
According to some experts in the field losing up to 1.5% in your body’s fluid can cause an effect on your muscle strength and endurance, one theory is that hydration can affect muscle cells size, so the more hydrated you are the better chance your cells will be the biggest and your strength in the gym will be at the strongest.
You will need around 1.5-2 litres of fluid a day or 6 to 8 glasses. It does not matter where you get your liquid from, it could be milk, squash, soup, fruit juice ect but it’s important to pay attention to the sugar in the drinks. If this is the main source of your hydration, please make sure you check the sugar content. This sugar content is broken down into glucose, sucrose, fructose and glucose polymers, these drinks can potentially replace fluid faster than water but you should change accordingly back and forth between them.