Performance Nutrition Part II - Hydration

INTRODUCTION -

I moved away from social media as a platform to share information because I feel that some topics require a more thorough treatment, so to speak. Easy to hold concepts like eating real food, doing hard workouts, not skipping sessions, are perfect for that medium. Topics like performance hydration are nuanced by nature, and require more time to adequately discuss. Its intellectually offensive to make blanket statements about a topic like this and hope nobody takes you to task on it. This blog will allow me to fully examine complex topics like this and provide a resource that professionals can actually use to coach.

Now, hydration is something that humans evolved to use as a predatory advantage over large ungulates. We can use water in tandem with our hairless skin to regulate our core temperature, which makes our mobility the best in the animal kingdom. Nothing can outrun a group of humans for distance. Through hydration, we evolved to run down any creature on earth. Let that sink in.... we are hydration machines. For the most part, the only thing you need to do is make sure you dont run out of water in the machine, and your evolutionary physiology will take care of the rest. This article is going to examine what we can do to gain an edge on evolution, and maximize our performance. Often, I think there is quite a bit of confusion and if we can strip that back, it will help us be a better resource to our athletes.

FUELING, ELECTROLYTES, AND WATER

Hydration questions come up when there are problems with performance. Usually there is a lack of impetus that begs explanation. Athletes will say things like, my legs feel heavy, or I dont have any pop. In situations like these, we can easily reach for a bottle of water or electrolyte powders. That might be a mistake. Consider the dynamics of how skeletal muscle contractions take place:

ATP fuels the shortening cycle of actin-myosin complexes as they do the work of contraction. Without the ATP there can be no contraction, this will result in a feeling of weakness and even in cramps! You might have guessed, but we are talking about carbohydrates here. Long before you ever run out of electrolytes like sodium, magnesium, potassium, in the cell - you will run short of carboyhdrates. In my experience, very lean athletes will often experience temporary cramping in muscles like the forearm, or the quads, which abate but never fully relax. We are often able to resolve the issue completely using a carbohydrate drink - we will talk product reccomendations later.

Now, if glycogen is readily available in the cell, electrolytes are required to inform the muscle to move. Magnesium and sodium work in the depolarizing action of muscles contracting. Potassium and sodium work together to repolarize the cell and allow it to relax, which is important if you want to continue to contract that muscle and not get stuck in a cramp.

We come back to the question of fueling the muscle - if there is no fuel there is no motion: enter Creatine. This acts in the cell to reconstitute ATP from ADP - which is the process of rapid recycling that keeps muscles fueled during short time periods when you do not have time to shuttle extra glycogen in and out.

At the cellular level - water is required to constitute the medium of the cell where everything lives and moves. You cant have great mobility of nutrients through the main pipeline of the body (blood vessels) without enough water to lube things up. That is so important in fact, that your small intestine will literally absorb every drop as fast as possible, even to your own detriment! The kidneys help solve this problem, but not very efficiently. What we have is a bit of a pardox in fueling exercise. In contrast to being dehydrated, drinking too much water too fast will make the pipes overflow, and decrease the amount of electrolyte material absorbed by the muscles. The kindeys work overtime to get the flow rate back to normal but in the process you lose much of the other good stuff in your blood stream to urine. This is also a bad thing. However, fear not! We can find an optimal performance strategy for hydrating and it really isnt too complicated, especially in the high speed environment of professional sport.

PRE, INRA, AND POST TRAINING HYDRATION

We can keep this part straight forward. Start off hydrating by not getting low on water. Drink water when you wake up, drink it all day, and avoid taking hours of the day when you do not drink. If you drink 1 gallon per day that is a good baseline. Before you begin exercising, eat a meal that contains a plate constituted of foods as explained in the FOOD post. This contains all of the electrolytes you will need, and more. That is your pre routine.

Know what kind of training is going to take place. In a weight lifting session lasting less than an hour, you dont need anything more than good old water. For high intensity training, the strategy requires more preparation. Intra workout, your priority is going to be carbohydrates. Have some type of intra workout carbs in your water during any high intensity training that sustains your heart rate above zone 3. Those intensitites plow through glycogen at an accelrated rate. You also find this to be the case for zone 2 work over 2 hours. At these intensities and volumes, it is wise to start off the session putting the carbs in your system during the first 30 minutes so they are available at crunch time. Now, if you feel it is neccesary to use electrolytes during a workout or training session - dont neglect sodium. Drinking a canned electrolyte mix will not usually fill this bucket. It is extremely rare for a person to slam through all of their serum potassium, for example. Especially if you eat for performance by eating real food. Much more likely to run low on sodium. This is due in part to the fact that humans lose a significant amount of sodium to sweat.

After you finish your training session, go and check your body weight. If you have lost weight, it was almost exclusively water weight. How do you know if you lost weight? Because you checked it before the workout, like an adult. Knowing how much you lost allows you to know how much you need to put back - a good idea to add some salt to that water as you re-hydrate.

Here are a few product reccomendations for you:

Carb Mix - UCAN, Cytomax

Electrolyte - Designs for Sport Electro powder

Salt - LMNT salt packets