Are you Drinking Enough?

It amazes me how many athletes don’t drink enough during training and racing. The excuses I hear go from the sublime to the ridiculous and with some of the early season races this year experiencing higher temperatures far above the norm It’s time to go back and take a serious look at this most important aspect of good health and performance.

Dehydration can be linked to so many things; diabetes and asthma to name just two. Dr F. Batmanghelidj wrote a best seller a few years back entitled Water & Salt. You’re Healers from within. In it he listed so many reasons why we needed water that it is hard to understand why people don’t realize why our bodies need it. Here are a just 7 extracts from his book that are relevant to us as athletes.

• It prevents DNA damage and makes its repair mechanisms more efficient.
• It increases the efficiency of the immune system including its efficiency against cancer.
• It clears toxic waste from the different part of the body for dispersal through our kidneys and liver.
• It’s the main lubricant in the joint spaces so helps prevent arthritis and back pain.
• It’s the best lubricating laxative. Need I say more?
• It’s essential to the body’s cooling and heating system.
• It’s needed for the efficient manufacture of serotonin – our feel good hormone.

So with just these 7 points (and there are loads more) we start to understand how imperative water is to our lives, even more so when we train on a daily basis. If you consider how much the body relies on water for our daily tasks, imagine the increase in energy while training when you apply yourself to increasing your water intake.

Yes I know loads of you our shouting out saying ‘my tap waters not good enough to drink and bottled water is too expensive’. Well that’s true. Water treatment these days includes a variety of measure including the much hated chlorine. Joke is Chlorine in its pure form is harmless to us. However throw it into water to clean it then it become toxic. It’s got to a point that in some countries chlorine in swimming pools is banned. Filtration systems at home are now the norm and while expensive to install, a healthier lifestyle ensues.

Anyway I digress….Water. How much do we need well the rule was 2 litres a day but that’s just a ball park figure. Dr Batmanghelidj advises using a formula of body weight in KG’s x 0.033. This is the amount of pure water that needs to be drunk over the course of the day. Sorry to burst you bubble but coffee doesn’t count. It acts as a diuretic.

Happy drinking!

This post courtesy of Jono Rumbelow – Certified Ironguides Coach

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