If you are someone who engages in vigorous exercise, you know how hard it can be to stay hydrated during your hardest workouts. Drinking enough water is a vital part of living a healthy life, for both your mental and physical well-being.
Obviously, you are supposed to drink water throughout any exercise routine, regardless of how physically demanding it is. Usually, doctors recommend drinking more water than normal both before and after your routine, in addition to the recommended daily amount. If you don’t drink enough water you will become dehydrated, which can affect your health in a variety of ways, none of which being positive. Dehydration can cause fatigue, weight gain, and depression, to name a few examples.
Unfortunately, becoming dehydrated during an intense workout is pretty easy, especially if you are just starting out with a new workout regime. Thankfully, we have a few tips to help you stay hydrated during your most intense workouts.
How to Hydrate Before Your Workout
The first step to staying hydrated during an intense workout is to start drinking water before you exercise. Before you take part in any kind of exercise regime, it is recommended that you drink as much as 17-20oz of water around 2-3 hours before you begin the workout.
Naturally, this gives your body time to process all of that water. If you were to try and drink all of this shortly before your workout, then you will feel full, bloated, and unable to perform to the best of your ability.
It is also recommended to drink 8oz of water immediately before starting your routine. This will help your body prepare for the rapid loss of water it will experience during the workout.
However, it’s important to remember that these are merely suggestions. Everyone will find their own plans for hydration, and you should look to match it to your body as best you can in terms of weight and height.
How to Hydrate During Your Workout
During the workout, you need to make sure that you stay committed to being properly hydrated. One of the easiest ways to kill your workout performance is to stop drinking water. If you stop hydrating, then your body is going to have a hard time keeping up with the physical demands that you place on your body as you work it off.
We recommend that you spend some more time looking to drink minimal amounts of water during the workout in hopes to stay hydrated. Too many people take huge gulps of water and then find themselves spewing it back up as soon as they hit the high intensity part of the workout. Instead, you should try to drink about 7-10oz of water for every 20 minutes of exercise.
If you do that, then you are much more likely to get through the process and enjoy the experience. More importantly, you will be able to manage how you feel during the workout. This avoids taking in too much water and making you feel dull and bloated, but it also helps you to avoid not taking in enough water.
Related: How to Stay Hydrated During Summers
How to Hydrate After a Workout
As you come to the end of that workout, you will probably feel pretty wiped out. The body has just gone through a fair amount of physical punishment so you will feel the impact and the stress on your bones and joints as you go.
However, you don’t want to drink too much water right after you exercise. Many of us go for a big bottle of water and guzzle it all down, but this is not the right approach. Instead, you will often get much more from the experience if you just drink around 8oz of water in the first half hour after you finish up.
If you do this, you are much more likely to enjoy the whole experience. As such, it will make it much easier for you to change up how you feel post-workout. If you are sick of feeling wiped out, a few ounces of water will solve that.
How to Know If You’re Hydrated
Basically, if you want to know if you are well hydrated enough, then go for a pee. If you go to the bathroom and you find that your urine is light in color – but not clear – then you are on the right track. Dark gold or yellow urine means that you are dehydrated and need to up your water intake. Meanwhile, if it is extremely light in color to the point where your urine looks like water, then you have gone too far in the other direction.
Another good example of being well hydrated is seeing a lot of sweat. If you are seeing a lot of sweat as you work out, then your body is well hydrated. If you find that your body is not producing much sweat, though, then you might not have enough water in your system to make up for the loss of hydration.
So, with this in mind, you can now have two clear examples of how to know if you are well hydrated. Alongside feeling fresher and more capable of doing a workout, staying hydrated is very important for keeping all of your body working right and adapting to your workout experience. So, if you are someone who suffers from dehydration, don’t let it defeat you: change up the process and you will soon see some very impressive results indeed.
