04/07/10
Hydration: Water is Essential to Good Health & Performance
It amazes me how many athletes don’t drink enough during training and racing. The excuses I hear go from the sublime to the ridiculous. With some of the early season races this year experiencing higher temperatures far above the norm, it’s time to take a serious look at this most important aspect of good health and performance.
Category: Training
Posted by: editor
Dehydration can be linked to so many things--diabetes and asthma to name just two.
Dr. F. Batmanghelidj wrote a bestseller a few years back entitled Water & Salt: Your Healers From Within. In it, he lists so many reasons we need water that it is hard to understand why people don’t realize our body needs it.
Here are just 7 extracts from his book that are relevant to us as athletes:
It prevents DNA damage and makes its repair mechanisms more efficient.
It increases the efficiency of the immune system including its efficiency against cancer.
It clears toxic waste from the different parts of the body for dispersal through our kidneys and liver.
It’s the main lubricant in the joint spaces so helps prevent arthritis and back pain.
It’s the best lubricating laxative. Need I say more?
It’s essential to the body’s cooling and heating system.
It’s needed for the efficient manufacture of serotonin--our feel-good hormone.
So with these 7 points (and there are many more) we start to understand how imperative water is to our lives, even more so when we train on a daily basis. If you consider how much the body relies on water for our daily tasks, imagine the increase in energy during training when you apply yourself to increasing your water intake.
Yes I know loads of you are saying, ‘My tap water’s not good enough to drink and bottled water is too expensive’. Well that’s true. Water treatment these days includes a variety of measures including the much-hated chlorine. Joke is chlorine in its pure form is harmless to us. However throw it into water to clean it and then it becomes toxic. (In some countries chlorine in swimming pools is now banned.) Filtration systems at home are now the norm and, while expensive to install, a healthier lifestyle ensues.
Anyway I digress. Water. How much do we need? The rule of thumb was 2 litres a day but that’s just a ballpark figure. Dr Batmanghelidj advises using a formula of body weight in kilograms x 0.033. This is the amount of pure water that needs to be drunk over the course of the day. Sorry to burst you bubble but coffee doesn’t count. It acts as a diuretic.
Happy drinking!
Jono Rumbelo, Certified ironguides Method Coach – South Africa
http://www.ironguides.net
* * * Your best is our business.™ * * *
Dr. F. Batmanghelidj wrote a bestseller a few years back entitled Water & Salt: Your Healers From Within. In it, he lists so many reasons we need water that it is hard to understand why people don’t realize our body needs it.
Here are just 7 extracts from his book that are relevant to us as athletes:
It prevents DNA damage and makes its repair mechanisms more efficient.
It increases the efficiency of the immune system including its efficiency against cancer.
It clears toxic waste from the different parts of the body for dispersal through our kidneys and liver.
It’s the main lubricant in the joint spaces so helps prevent arthritis and back pain.
It’s the best lubricating laxative. Need I say more?
It’s essential to the body’s cooling and heating system.
It’s needed for the efficient manufacture of serotonin--our feel-good hormone.
So with these 7 points (and there are many more) we start to understand how imperative water is to our lives, even more so when we train on a daily basis. If you consider how much the body relies on water for our daily tasks, imagine the increase in energy during training when you apply yourself to increasing your water intake.
Yes I know loads of you are saying, ‘My tap water’s not good enough to drink and bottled water is too expensive’. Well that’s true. Water treatment these days includes a variety of measures including the much-hated chlorine. Joke is chlorine in its pure form is harmless to us. However throw it into water to clean it and then it becomes toxic. (In some countries chlorine in swimming pools is now banned.) Filtration systems at home are now the norm and, while expensive to install, a healthier lifestyle ensues.
Anyway I digress. Water. How much do we need? The rule of thumb was 2 litres a day but that’s just a ballpark figure. Dr Batmanghelidj advises using a formula of body weight in kilograms x 0.033. This is the amount of pure water that needs to be drunk over the course of the day. Sorry to burst you bubble but coffee doesn’t count. It acts as a diuretic.
Happy drinking!
Jono Rumbelo, Certified ironguides Method Coach – South Africahttp://www.ironguides.net
* * * Your best is our business.™ * * *