Dehydration is the king performance killer.

We want all our GV members to understand the importance of hydration for health and physical activity. Therefore if you complete the challenge at the end of this blog you could win a free coffee from our café! 🍵🍵

Dehydration has been successfully linked to detrimental physical and mental performance for hundreds of years. I think everyone in the world understands that if you start activities dehydrated or do not hydrate sufficiently during training your performance will eventually take a hit. What you may not have known is dehydration affects different types of activities more than others, check this out:

1. Reductions in body mass in the order of 3–4% appear to consistently attenuate strength (by ∼2%), power (by ∼3%) and high-intensity endurance (by ∼10%) suggesting that alterations in total body water do affect some aspect of muscle force generation (Judelson et al. 2007)

2. Reductions in body mass in the order of 2–3% appear to have no significant effect on sprint running performance, that is, when body mass is ‘carried’ (Judelson et al. 2007).

3. Reductions in body mass in the order of 2–7% significantly reduce endurance exercise performance, particularly in environments that are warmer than 30°C (Cheuvront et al. 2003).

I know that’s quite technical so, in short, strength and power exercises, as well as endurance events, are more negatively impacted due to dehydration than sprint events.

So all you long-distance runners or muscle heads need to pay extra attention to the following!

So what has any of that got to do with salt?

Simple answer: Because you sweat… 🤷‍♂️

When you sweat your body secrets three main things; salt, sugar and water. How much of each of these you secrete is dependant on the athlete and the type of activity, but what we do know for sure is what we sweat out we need to replace!

Salty Sweaty tests

Unfortunately to know exactly how much salt you lost you would have to get your sweat tested to check its sodium content. Luckily according to Dr. Batmanghelidj, an expert on hydration, as a general rule, you need at least 1.5g of sea salt for every quart of water (950ml) that you drink. So to make this simple we will round up to 1000ml (which just so happens to equal 1000g).

Therefore if you take The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s word for it… an adequate daily fluid intake is:

• About 15.5 cups (3.7 liters) of fluids a day for men About 11.5 cups (2.7 liters) of fluids a day for women

That means (if we round up to 4 and 3 litres) guys we need to add 6g of salt and ladies 4.5g to our water per day. As a note, a teaspoon is roughly 6g of salt. So my challenge to you today is;

Men: Drink a minimum of 4L of water/day with 1.5g of sea salt per litre for 7 days.

Women: Drink a minimum of 3L of water/day with 1.5g of sea salt per litre for 7 days.

If you can do this and tag us on Instagram each day in your journey you will win a free coffee of your choice from our café.

Oh and if you found this interesting please share this post! There will be lots and lots more challenges and prizes to be won!

Stay Fit, Stay Strong, Stay Healthy

Peace out, Ieuan

#running #marathon #hydration #salt #sweat