Dehydration is one of athletes’ worst enemies. In order to maximise your performance, you need to find the right way to avoid it.
Maintaining an active lifestyle requires a lot of effort. It also requires knowledge about how your body works, and all the ways of making sure you can improve your performance. Among the many ways to do this, developing a good rehydration strategy is one of the most important.
If you’re a runner, you already know how much sweat every exercise session creates. This is a good thing, since it prevents your body from overheating. On the other hand, it makes you lose water and electrolytes, which your body needs to keep functioning at its peak during long exercises.
If you fail to replenish the lost water and electrolytes, you put yourself at risk of dehydration. This can cause you to experience fatigue and a severe drop in your performance. Let’s take a look at some of the common symptoms of dehydration, and then we’ll show you what to do to avoid it.
6 Signs your body is telling you: you’re dehydrated.
Recognising the signs of dehydration is the first step to overcoming it and making sure it doesn’t happen again. Here are some signs to look for:
- Mental Fatigue – Although dehydration isn’t the only thing that can cause mental fatigue, it’s the most common one, especially in athletes.
- Dizziness – Often comes with dehydration-related mental fatigue. You might feel lightheaded, which can prevent you from exercising.
- Thirst –Feeling thirsty is an obvious sign of dehydration. It often comes with dry mouth or eyes, which indicate that your body needs more water.
- Sweating on cold days – If you’re sweating excessively on a cold day and you haven’t exercised much, this can indicate that you’re not hydrated enough.
- Sudden changes in sweating – If you stop sweating completely after periods of normal sweating, this is a sign that your body is lacking water.
- Lack of motivation – Aside from mental fatigue, you might feel unmotivated to exercise, and you tend to quit more easily.
If you notice any of these signs, it’s time to consider finding better ways of rehydrating your body. To help you with this, here are some tips to use.
1. Choose the Right Drink
Contrary to popular belief, sports drinks aren’t the best way to rehydrate your body. They contain artificial ingredients, sugar, and not enough electrolytes. This is why ORS (Oral Rehydration Solutions), such as the SOS, are a better option.
They have high concentrations of electrolytes and don’t contain artificial sweeteners. For example, the flavours of SOS come from stevia, which is a natural, healthy plant extract. ORS can help your body reach the levels of electrolytes it needs quickly and make sure you maximise your performance.
2. Track Your Sweating
Since every athlete has a different sweat rate and sweat sodium concentration, you need to know yours. When you do, you’ll be able to know how much water and electrolytes you need to keep your body going.
You can think about getting a professional analysis, or you can simply track your own sweat rate. The way to do this is to weigh yourself before and after an exercise. The difference is approximately how much water you’ve lost, so you know how much you need to replace.
3. Develop a Strategy
It’s very important that you hydrate yourself before, during, and after an exercise. This means that you need to create a routine and stick to it for as long as you exercise.
Remembering to drink fluids while running can be hard at first, not to mention drinking while you’re running at full bore. This is why you need to practise this regularly. Make sure that you don’t suffer from poor performance for not having a good refuelling strategy.
If you manage to do all of this, you’ll be able to hydrate yourself properly and ensure that your performance doesn’t drop with time.
SOS Hydration wants to provide athletes with everything they need to stay hydrated. That’s why we formulated the SOS, which contains a high concentration of electrolytes to keep your body healthy and ready for any exercise.
If you want to learn more about SOS and how it can help you to maximise your performance, visit our shop for more details.
