I have been late to acknowledge the importance of hydration. Our bodies can masterfully adapt to many stressors and I have healthy kidneys. It’s hard to feel the real benefits of adequate hydration such as improved energy, decreased hunger and improved physical performance. However, progressive dehydration from 1-4% effects timing and accuracy in basketball (Baker t al, 2007). Dragon boating certainly requires timing! Adequate hydration and hydrating during activity is obviously more important in the summer and even more so if you are heading to Sarasota. There are physical consequences with both over and under hydration, so it’s worth being a bit more analytical about hydration.

What do you need for baseline hydration? Your body is mostly water so it is more accurate to based hydration needs on weight. To maintain baseline hydration drink ½ of your body weight in pounds in oz of fluid. If someone weights 140 lbs that would be 70 oz or 8 ¾ cups. About 50% of this is water, 30% other fluids and 20% comes from food. You can count coffee and tea consumption. You cannot count the fluid in alcoholic drinks.

What you eat matters. Whole unprocessed foods provide a lot of fluid. For example, an apple is 84% water and a cucumber is 96% water. Ultra-processed foods are the opposite they contain little water and are high in salt which just makes matters worse. A Ritz cracker is 3% water. The end result is needing more baseline hydration.

What happens too much fluids (ie only water) is consumed? If you aren’t an athlete and drank only water and a lot of it, you could have blood that does not have enough sodium. This is called hyponatremia. It is pretty hard to do. But if you are an athlete, losing sodium in sweat and not replacing the electrolytes it is a lot easier to become hyponatremic. Every year athletes die of hyponatremia.

How much to drink during exercise? First of all, start euhydrated. Meaning make sure you are getting in your baseline hydration during the day. Then you can get a decent guestimate of how much to drink during exercise by using the Galpin equation. Drink your body weight in lbs / 30 = oz to every 15-20 min. That would be about 4.7 oz and a good place to start.

How much to drink after exercise? If it is a hot day and a hard workout it is highly unlikely that you have kept up with hydration needs during the workout. And for some sports it’s hard to carry water. It is rarely necessary to carry water if your activity is an hour or less. But you need to add back what is lost.

The most accurate way to do this is to weigh yourself before and after. That shouldn’t be necessary every time you exercise, just a few times to get an idea of how much you are sweating.

1. Pee, then weigh yourself without clothes
2. Keep track of the oz you drink
3. Pee, then weigh yourself with your sweaty, wet clothes removed.
4. Subtract post exercise weight from pre weight. That amount in oz is how much fluid it takes to get you back to baseline. Because 20-50% of what you drink back will be lost in urine not get into cells it’s better to drink 120-150% of that amount back. So, if you lost 1 lb (ie 16 oz) drink back 19 oz up to 24 oz.
5. If you want to know the total amount you sweated add the oz of fluid you consumed during the exercise.

The number calculated from Step 5 above will give you an idea of how much fluid to consume during and after exercise to get back to baseline. if you lose less than 2% body weight for the exercise session hydrating during exercise is less important. But you will still need to make up for that loss later. I don’t know about you but drinking a lot in the evening is generally not a good idea for me. As a result, I prefer to drink some during practice.

What kind of replacement fluid should you consume during and after exercise? To get the best absorption and distribution of the fluid you drink it should contain similar electrolyte content to the sweat you lost. The most plentiful electrolyte in sweat is sodium. One liter of sweat weighs 2.2 lbs and contains .5-2g Na and about the same Cl (So awesome, that’s what salt is NaC). It also contains some potassium (100mg-500mg) and a little magnesium and calcium.

But .5 to 2g of sodium is a wide range. Some people sweat out more sodium than others. Can you narrow it down? Think about what kind of “sweater” you are. If you notice a white residue on hats and shirts you are probably a high sodium “sweater”. If that is the case you need a little extra sodium in your replacement fluid. You can get even more precise about it and try sweat patches to measure it (Levelen or Gatorade).

A simple electrolyte replacement fluid would be a pinch or two of salt (NaCL) added to 34 oz (1 liter) with a squeeze of lemon for potassium. A good pinch of salt is between 300 and 400mg NaCL. Half a tsp is 2.5g NaCl (salt) or about 1g sodium. That is also not a crazy amount to put in a liter of fluid if you lose a lot of sodium in seat. And to put this into perspective in case you are worried about health impacts of salt, 5 ritz crackers has about 375mg NaCl.

If your rehydration fluid is too dilute it isn’t absorbed as well into cells where you really need it and you end up peeing more out. If it is too concentrated fluid is pulled in to gut it isn’t absorbed as well into the body and you may get GI upset and potentially diarrhea

Commercial electrolyte replacement options are also an easy option. A little glucose can help since glucose takes H20 into cell with it. No more than 5-9%. I use Nuun, or Endurolytes Fizz by Hammer. These have decent electrolytes and minimal glucose. Other good options are Cerelyte 70 , LMNT. Avoid commercial replacements with a lot of sugar. I highly recommend experimenting with different rehydration fluids to see what works best for you.

Summary: Start the day with a glass of water. Drink your fluids by choosing whole foods and avoiding processed food. Start your workout euhydrated. Make drinking easy, keep it the temperature you like, select something that tastes good (or at least isn’t repulsive) and have your water bottle in site as a reminder. Strongly consider drinking some fluids with electrolytes during sweaty workouts that allow it. Milk is a good replacement after a workout. If you are eating after a workout, you probably don’t need to worry about the electrolytes because you will get them in food. After a workout consume slightly more fluids than the sweat you lost.

1. Quality Quality Quality: The highest priority for sports nutrition at least until race day is to focus on high quality, whole food veggies and fruit, complex carbohydrates and quality protein. Ultraprocessed foods don’t support your health or sports performance. Focusing on sports nutrition without a high-quality diet is like painting a house that is falling down.
2. Train: Our bodies use two main sources of energy. If we are metabolically efficient, we use fat most of the time. The other energy source is glucose. Hopefully we aren’t breaking down too much protein for energy. We get most of our energy by using mitochondria to extract the most ATP (energy) from fat and glucose (lactate and few other compounds too). Most of your mitochondria is in muscle. Strength train to preserve and gain muscle so you have more mitochondria. Do long duration training to improve mitochondria function and numbers. Then in practice or race day your slow twitch muscle fibers can use fatty acids sparing glucose for the anerobic high intensity efforts your Type 2 muscle fibers are doing.
3. Hydration – Especially for anyone going to Sarasota how we hydrate and with what will be critical. See my last way to long blog about hydration. You need to replace sweat. Sweat has electrolytes make sure you have a plan for replacing electrolytes that you lose in sweat. Don’t drink just plain water unless you add electrolytes in another way.
4. 3-4 hrs prior to a race, in our case this tends to be the morning, top off your glycogen stores with carbohydrates that you know you tolerate well. Also, include 20-25 g protein and a healthy fat.
5. During the event: Fueling during an event is more important for an endurance event than having several races spread through the day. But we should still consider how we are going to eat.
   1. First of all, eat something! Skipping food all day long will decrease your performance for short events since you will be struggling to find the glucose you need to do short high intensity exercise. We need to keep adding some glucose. Plan to eat something every 3 hrs or so.
   2. Second, don’t overeat on highly processed, simple sugar foods. You will end up having yo-yoing glucose and insulin which can harm performance and you end up overeating on more simple carbohydrates.
   3. If it is 2 hrs prior to a race you could eat an easily digested carbohydrate and a bit of protein. A lunch break could be similar to breakfast but a little less. If it is an hour before a race go with carbs primarily. For sure avoid fat.
   4. What carbohydrates to eat:
      1. Easy to digest not crazy high in fiber.
      2. You can generally tolerate 40-60g of CHO per hour. Beyond that you are more likely to get GI upset. To put this in perspective two bananas is close to 60g.
      3. Most gels/bars are primarily simple carbohydrates which can result in peaks and valleys of glucose. Maltodextrins may be a little better.
      4. New on the market – SuperStarch a hydrothermally modified waxy maize. There are fewer spikes in glucose in small studies but also a class action suit about claims. The company is UCAN. They don’t taste as good
      5. Fuel for Fire uses real food for carbohydrate source and contains whey protein. They are my favorite. The protein helps with satiety and slows absorption so the glucose peaks are attenuated. Fuel for Fire is available at Healthy Living if you want to try it out.
      6. Palate fatigue is a thing.  If all I’ve had are sweet tasting bars by the end of the race day I don’t want to look at another one for weeks.
   5. Avoid fatty foods because it decreases gastric emptying and gastric distress
      1. But a small amount of healthy fat like a nut butter slows absorption and provides satiety
   6. Do you have to have processed commercial “sport” foods for fuel during activity?  Of course not.  Other options:
      1. PBJ sandwich – But I’d at least go with whole grain bread. This combo can spike your glucose.
      2. Hummus pretzels, hummus cucumbers.  Cucumbers contribute to hydration too!
      3. Recipes for gels – One I like is a date expresso recipe I got online.
      4. Kevin’s Post workout protein bar which is pretty good before a workout too. It has 15 g of carbohydrate, 10g of protein and 5g of fat per bar. If you want the recipe let me know.
   7. Have a plan and practice it. The most important thing is to avoid gastric upset since that will for sure impair performance.  If you are planning on trying something new on race day consume it an hour before a practice and see how you do.   Having a plan also helps you avoid the food trucks on race day too.
6. Post – Repair, Replenish, Rehydrate
   1. Definitely include high quality protein to help with repair. There may be a role for Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAA). This is leucine, isoleucine and valine, three essential amino acids. There is decent evidence that protein and BCAA in particular can reduce muscle soreness and mixed data on whether it helps people perform better the next day. BCAA can be obtained from high quality protein food but can also be added to hydration fluids. Consume at least 25 grams of protein, preferably more if you didn’t have much protein during the day.
   2. For dinner have complex carbohydrates to replenish liver and muscle glycogen. Include a healthy fat.
   3. Rehydrate but not with alcohol.
7. Finally, get a good night’s sleep!