The Importance of Hydration During Training

Hydration Needs For Training

It's very important to ensure that during training sessions you take in enough water to maintain proper hydration levels.Water is one of the most important elements for life and it helps to regulate body temperature, lubricate joints and transport nutrients throughout the body. Keeping hydration levels up is essential for performance, comfort and safety during training.

Dehydration leads to a reduction in blood volume which in turn causes the heart to work harder. This drop in blood volume may also lead to muscle cramps, dizziness and fatigue. In more serious cases it may lead to heat exhaustion or heat stroke. The most common causes of dehydration are excessive sweating, not drinking enough fluids and also failing to replace fluid being lost during and after exercise. There is no hard and fast rules for fluid intake but the length and intensity of the training should be taken into account when weighing up how much water you take on-board.

Losing Water While Training

The two main causes of  the body losing water are the temperature you are training in and excessive sweating. As the warmer summer days are coming in, a lot of the halls where we train will be very warm/hot which means we'll all sweat more. Also the duration of the session and intensity all have bearing on water loss. In these cases you'll need to ensure you have adequate water with you and please drink it, don't leave it in your bag.

You can create a personalised hydration program for yourself by weighing yourself before and after a class. Any weight loss is most likely from fluid loss so drink enough to replenish. Any weight gain could mean you are drinking too much.

What Kind of Drinks?

In most cases water is fine to keep your hydration levels up, if however you are doing high intensity training (for 60 minutes of more) then sports drinks with electrolytes can be taken. I'm one of these excessive sweating people, recently on a long cycle ride (about 2 hours or so) I only took a 500ml bottle of water with me. About 45 minutes into the run I had to stop because of bad cramping in my calves. Did get started again, but I was in serious pain for a few days afterwards. After a bit of research I found some tablets I could add to the water which had these added electrolytes. After that, no more cramps... I now use these same tablets when doing TaeKwonDo training and so far they are going a good job for me.

Some Guidelines During Training

Due to the variations on each persons specific fluid requirements its hard to give recommendations but here's some tips I picked up while researching this:

• Drink about 500 - 600 millilitres about 2 or 3 hours before training
• Drink about 250 millilitres every 15 minutes or so during training
• Weigh yourself before and after training and replace any lost fluids. Roughly drink 500ml for even 1lb lost
• If you suffer from cramps during training, consider a sports drinks of some kind as these will help to replace lost electrolytes
• Don't drink too much water either - this is rare but too much water can cause hyponatremai (water intoxication) which is when salt in the blood falls to a low level

This is quite a bit of information on basically a way of saying "drink more water as its getting warmer" but the devil is in the detail, and I like my details. With regards to sports drinks, I'm not recommending any one in particular here. From speaking to a few people in Ayr/Prestwick clubs who use these, everyone has a personal preference which works for them. If you are going down this route, try a few and see which works best for you.