Miners need a viable rehydration strategy.
Aside from being exhausting, mining is one of the most dangerous jobs. To ensure safety and effectiveness, miners need a viable rehydration strategy, and SOS is an essential part of it.
Proper hydration is important for everyone. Anyone living an active life or doing any kind of demanding work should know this. Miners are a great example.
Because of the unforgiving work environment, minimising the risk of dehydration is one of the most important tasks. Since miners usually sweat a lot, they lose water and important electrolytes rather quickly. Without an effective rehydration strategy, the miners expose themselves to many severe health conditions.
Conventional rehydration methods, such as water and sports drinks, aren’t enough to minimise this risk. For this reason, formulations such as SOS are worth considering. To explain the reasons behind this, let us show you how dehydration affects the body before going over how SOS works.
Why is Dehydration Dangerous?
Dehydration occurs when the body loses fluids, primarily through sweat. Due to extreme heat, long shifts, and high physical demands, miners tend to sweat a lot. This can affect their work, as well as their health.
A person can feel the first symptoms of dehydration after losing 1-2% of their weight in fluids. Some of these symptoms include:
- Thirst
- Lack of mental clarity
- Fatigue
- Impaired visual-motor skills
So if a miner that weighs 80kg loses around 1.6kg of weight in fluids, they will start to perform and feel worse. They become more prone to accidents, which can be dangerous in their surroundings. If they don’t deal with dehydration properly, the symptoms get worse and can even be lethal if it reaches 15-20%.
In a manual labour simulation, the average loss of sodium after an 8-12hr shift was 4800-6000mg. Replenishing this amount of lost electrolytes requires finding the right drinks.
A good indicator of dehydration level is the colour of your urine. The darker it gets, the more dehydrated you are. If you constantly notice that your urine has a dark yellow colour, it’s time to consider a new rehydration strategy.
Finding the Right Rehydration Strategy
Now that we’ve established the importance of rehydration, it’s time to take a look at the possible solutions.
Water seems to be the most obvious way to get rehydrated. However, water replenishes your reserves of fluid without significantly raising the levels of electrolytes. Relying on only water isn’t a good idea, since it doesn’t solve the main issue.
Having this in mind, many people have turned to sports drinks. Although they might do a better job that water at replacing the lost electrolytes, there are quite a few drawbacks with these drinks.
First of all, they use many artificial ingredients for flavour and colour. These ingredients aren’t always healthy, so you should stay away from them. Also, they contain a lot of sugar, which might sound good since it can give you some energy. However, you need to drink a lot of these drinks to get enough electrolytes, which leads to too much sugar intake.
In order to find the perfect balance, the World Health Organisation (WHO) created guidelines regarding the ingredients that a drink needs to have in order to effectively fight dehydration. You should know that SOS follows these guidelines faithfully, in addition to doing many other things right.
Why Is SOS Effective?
SOS is an Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS) which offers a high concentration of electrolytes that your body needs. Instead of adding salt to your diet, which can affect your health, you can easily replace the lost electrolytes with SOS.
Also, it’s hypotonic which means that its osmotic pressure is lower than that of your blood. This means that you can absorb up to 3x more water with SOS compared to drinking plain water. SOS is also very fast-acting, so you can notice the results soon after drinking.
Now you know why miners choose SOS for their rehydration strategy. SOS ensures that your body has the fluid and electrolytes that it needs, so you don’t have to be a miner to benefit from it.
Here at SOS Hydration, our goal is to give every person a chance to stay hydrated after long periods of physical activity. This is why we created this formula to help maximise your performance.
If you’d like to learn more about SOS, visit our shop for more information.