There's one thing MUCH worse than dehydration

Every athlete who trains in summer needs to know this!

If you are an athlete who; sweats a lot, exercises in hot and/or humid environments, and trains or competes for multiple hours at a time then you need to understand this common misconception. 

Dehydration does not kill your performance, it is what dehydration does to the body that does. Let me explain. 

Firstly, dehydration is the loss of water from the body. When we talk about athletic performance, this occurs mostly due to sweat. When we exercise our body temperature rises and as a coping mechanism, our body activates our sweat glands to move fluid from the body to evaporate into the air causing a net cooling effect on the body. 

If we lose more sweat than what we can drink from fluids then we will progressively become dehydrated. At which point this becomes dangerous to our performance is still unclear but some literature suggests that at just 2% body weight loss our performance can decrease by up to 20%. However, and this is a big however, this depends on the conditions in which we are exercising. 

That is because the thing that stresses our body is not necessarily dehydration per se, it is what dehydration does to other body systems. For example, when we cut weight with fighters who lose 10% of their body weight it is not the loss of fluid that is concerning to their health, it is the heat that they are exposed to during the potentially life-threatening weight cut. 

The heat that is supplied by a sauna or bathtub causes their body temperature to rise to dangerous levels where they are at risk of heat stroke and even heat exhaustion if the process is not done correctly. This is because dehydration causes their body to be less efficient at dealing with heat. How does that happen?

Because when we sweat profusely we lose fluid from our blood, and this causes our blood to become thicker. This thickness makes it harder for our heart to pump around our body, causes a drop in our blood pressure, and makes it more difficult to get blood to our skin to sweat. This makes us much more susceptible to heat as the system that deals with getting rid of that heat is only operating at a diminished capacity. 

It is this phenomenon that explains why weight cutting is so dangerous for fighters who spend extended periods in saunas when they are dehydrated. They are just at a much greater risk of overheating compared to a hydrated person spending the same amount of time in the heat. 

It also explains how elite marathon runners can finish a race breaking a world record but lose 10% of their body weight in sweat when crossing the finish line. Every marathon world record is set in a city where the temperature is cool and there is not any significant heat stress to the athlete running outside what is produced by their muscles (minuscule compared to the harsh hot sun in hot humid cities). 

So does that mean you don’t have to worry about dehydration? No not at all, but what it does mean is that;

• If you compete/train in a cool dry environment then your hydration is important but you have a higher tolerance to dehydration than if you were in a hot environment
• If you compete/train in a hot environment you have to stay on top of your hydration as a means to prevent overheating which will have a huge negative effect on your performance
• Cooling methods combined with an effective hydration and electrolyte strategy is hugely beneficial for anyone training/competing in hot/humid environments

If you are feeling the effects of the heat this summer, then you will feel much better by taking your hydration much more seriously, an easy way to do that is by starting your session adequately hydrated by having 2 scoops of Trainade Hydration with every 500ml of fluid you consume.