(relaxing music)
- Welcome back to Triathlon Training Explained,
powered by TrainingPeaks.
Now then, did you know that up to 60%
of the human body is made up of water?
Up to 93% of our blood is made of water,
and our muscles are made up of up to 73% water.
Now, needless to say, hydration is pretty darn important.
In fact, as endurance athletes,
we can slow our pace by around 2%
for each percent of body weight lost through dehydration.
Now obviously, that is a very, very rough figure,
and can vary quite considerably from athlete to athlete,
but let's not get stuck into that
because one thing for sure is that
we really want to avoid dehydration,
if we want to perform at our best,
which is what brings us here today
because I want to explore dehydration,
and help you by showing you the effects
and impact of dehydration, how to identify it,
and how to avoid it altogether.
(upbeat music)
Well I think I made it fairly clear already,
but this stuff here is really quite important,
it maintains our blood volume,
helps to regular our body temperature,
and it also allows muscle contractions to take place.
Now, during exercise, it becomes increasingly more important
'cause as we exercise, we heat up,
and maintaining that optimal body temperature, we sweat.
Which, unfortunately, is something I'm really quite good at,
now this sweat is produced to get rid
of the heat from our body,
and then that is then evaporated from our skin,
but obviously that is a big contributing factor
to this potential dehydration and fluid loss,
and obviously that all increases
with a rise in ambient temperature, humidity, and intensity.
Now fluid can obviously be lost in
all sorts of different ways,
but sweat is certainly the biggie during exercise,
'cause if we're not replenishing those lost fluids
then that's where dehydration can sneak its way in,
and if we are competing as an athlete,
and that does happen to us,
then this can cause all sorts of issues,
you could suffer from cramps, muscle spasms,
or muscle soreness, which is not good,
we can have a feeling of fatigue, which, again, is not good,
or even impaired concentration which is really,
really not good during exercise, or during competition.
Now, I am actually talking from experience here
because, as I mentioned earlier, I sweat a lot,
so this is something I had to be really weary of
during competitions, and during training,
because otherwise I would suffer from cramps
if I got myself dehydrated,
and it's important to note this wasn't
just during hot races, or a hot climate,
'cause actually you can still get dehydrated
in cooler climates if you're not
replenishing and replacing those lost fluids.
So it's really important that we can identify the signs.
(urinating)
Oh, oh dear.
Oh dear, that's really not good.
It's okay, it's okay, it's not what you think,
now you can find out whether you're dehydrated or not
by the color of your urine, believe it or not,
now the darker and more concentration that colour,
the more dehydrated you are,
now I know that's rather crude,
but it's biology, and that's what happens.
Now if we take a look at these colours here,
this rather pale or clear colour towards the top
would suggest that you're well hydrated,
but as we start to move down that
and it becomes a more like pale honey colour,
well that suggests that you're on the way
to becoming slightly dehydrated,
and you should start thinking about
taking on some fluid fairly soon.
As we move down to slightly darker,
slightly more concentrated colour,
you are, well, dehydrated already,
so you should be taking on some fluid ASAP,
and as we get right down to the bottom here,
this very concentrated dark color,
you should get yourself to a doctor now.
But obviously, we can't always check our urine,
so there are other things that would suggest
that you may be dehydrated.
So one of those is that you,
basically, just feeling thirsty,
you might have a dry mouth, or a dry nose,
you might have a headache, or feel rather lightheaded,
another thing is muscle cramps,
or even you might feel irritable,
or be suffering from some sort of confusion.
(relaxing music)
Right, well that's enough about the effects
and the signs of dehydration,
it's about time that we tell you
how to prevent it altogether.
So for this I've brought in good friend of mine, Andy Blow.
Andy is a bit of a hydration expert, to say the least,
so what should you be doing as
an athlete to prevent dehydration?
- I think dehydration and hydration
has become really complicated in some people's minds,
and it's not actually that complicated,
and one of the first things that athletes
have got to learn to do is tune into
what their body's telling them,
and drink when they're thirsty,
that's fundamentally really important,
it's not the be all and end all,
but listening to your body and making sure
that you're not waiting until
you're really, really thirsty to drink,
but getting on top of it early is a good place to start.
- So how could it potential differ from athlete to athlete?
- I think one of the classic ways in which it differs
is that elite athletes are a lot
more in tune with their body's often,
than more novice athletes, when you're a novice,
and you're on the bike in a long-distance Ironman,
for example, you've got loads of different things
and sensations that you're thinking about,
your pace, and it's all new,
and you aren't necessarily focusing inwardly
on what your body's feeling like,
so sometimes novice athletes find it harder
to realise that they're thirsty until it's too late,
and then they've not drunk enough,
and then their performance goes down hill.
Whenever we work with and talk to elite athletes though,
they're incredibly in tune with their bodies,
and they're listening to them all the time,
and therefore keeping on top of it a bit better.
- Okay, and we've spoken a lot already
about the fluid, but very generically,
there's more to fluid though, isn't there?
- Yeah, when you sweat, and in your body,
there's a lot of electrolytes in your fluid as well,
particularly there's a lot of sodium
which is the same as the sodium chloride,
it's the same as the sodium you find in salt,
so that's why you sometimes see
salt marks on your skin and clothing
when you're racing in hot conditions,
and you can lose quite a lot of that
especially if you sweat a lot, if it's really hot,
or if you're going for a long period of time.
So making sure that you're getting some electrolytes
in with fluids when you're sweating a lot
is really, really important.
- Okay, so now let's talk about an event,
so you've got a big Ironman race coming up, for instance,
what would you do in the lead-up to that event?
- In the buildup, one of the big mistakes people can make,
is drinking way too much water.
So we see that a lot, people think,
I'm going to be more well-hydrated,
like I'm going to eat more pasta
and have my carbohydrates on board,
so they just start nailing water,
I know the first time when I raced out in Hawaii,
it wasn't actually for Ironman,
it was for XTERRA, for the worlds out there,
and I thought, in the days before,
I'm not going to get dehydrated so I was chugging water,
and going to the toilet every five minutes
thinking I'm really well hydrated
but actually all I'm doing is washing
electrolytes and fluid through my body.
So the first thing is I don't drink too much,
so drink maybe a little bit more than you would,
an extra bottle of water or so a day, but not too much,
in the final 24 hours, what you can also do,
is drink some very strong electrolyte drinks
that are much, much stronger than a standard one,
and that will help your body
retain a little bit of extra fluid for race day.
- Okay, so essentially like pre-loading the body?
- Yeah, but it's just in the last few hours,
it's not something which you start three days before.
- Okay, race day then, what are we doing then
with our hydration, on the bike, and everything?
- Well I think if you start, and aiming to start hydrated,
so having a bottle of strong electrolytes
with your breakfast, not loads,
but maybe half a liter or so,
instead of a bottle of water, is a good idea.
Then, what we advise most athletes
in a long-distance race to do, is start on the bike with
whatever drink you prefer there,
'cause you can't control what you can pick up on the course
but you can control what you start with,
so you start with some drink there,
and for most athletes, even at the high level,
we would say start with a bit of a plan
for roughly how much you think you're going to drink each hour,
and try and stick with that for the first hour or two
because even, I was talking to pro athlete Tim Reed
about this very recently, and I was saying,
do you drink when you're thirsty or do you drink to a plan?
And he said, I always drink to a plan
in the first portion of the race because the fight or flight
response is so strong, you're sort of nervous,
and you just want to stick with your plan,
and then maybe later on, as you get further into it,
you become a bit more dynamic,
so I'd say start off with a plan,
know roughly how much you're going to drink,
but then be prepared to modify that as the day wears on,
and as you start listen to your body a bit more,
and as you start to relax.
- Okay, and, obviously, the bit that a lot of people
forget about is post-event, post-race,
or even big training session,
I think everyone's just happy to get it over and done with,
but actually it's a big, big part to think about, isn't it?
- It is if you want to recover faster, if that's a priority,
so often, for a lot of people,
I would say if it's a major race
and they're having loads of days off
afterwards and all the rest of it,
you want to think about optimizing recovery a bit,
but mostly you want to think about relaxing
and having a good time, if, where's it's more important,
I think is rehydrating effectively
after a big training session,
where you do want to get up and back it up
with another solid session the next day,
and again, you want to think about the electrolyte content
of what you drink because the more sodium you can put in it,
the more well you can retain it in the body,
and there's lost of scientific studies that show,
basically, a direct relationship
between the amount of sodium in a drink,
and the amount that you retain,
so you can rehydrate a lot faster,
if you take an electrolyte drink afterwards.
- Okay, and also you touched earlier
on your XTERRA experience of drinking a bit too much,
this is actually quite a big topic in itself,
of almost like over-hydrating.
- Yeah, it happens all the time,
and what's really interesting is that
there's no recording deaths, not that I'm aware of anyway,
of anyone dying of dehydration in an event
because people's urge to drink is so powerful,
if you get thirsty enough to be very, very dehydrated,
you can find water on a course, or a race, and drink it.
Where people have got it wrong,
and this happens reasonably frequently,
is people over consume water,
or fluids that are low in electrolytes,
and actually dilute their bodies
and get a condition called hyponatremia.
So in, I think it was about 2013,
they did a study at IRONMAN Frankfurt, in the heat,
and found that 10% of finishers,
it looked like they'd drunk too much
because they were hyponatremic at the finish line,
and then, in 2015, a guy actually died there
from hyponatremia after the race.
So although dehydrate is going to be bad for your performance,
at the other side of the coin is also pretty bad as well.
- [Mark] Okay, we spoke a little bit
just before about the individual needs,
what about in terms of how much fluid, electrolytes,
obviously that differs from person to person, right?
- Yeah, the whole thing differs quite a lot,
and I would say it is hard to generalize,
but we see, when we test people in the lab,
we see anything up to about five
or six times difference in sweat rates,
and up to a 10 times difference in salt loss in sweat,
so two people's hydration plan is never going to look the same,
we might see very small athletes
in cool conditions with low sweat rates
who might get away with drinking only
a few hundred milliliters an hour,
even in a really long race,
and they might not need to take
much in the way of electrolyte supplementation at all,
because they're just not losing it at a big rate.
Right at the other end, we've worked with athletes,
particularly actually cyclists in long pro tour events,
'cause they're out there five,
six hours a day, back to back,
and they'll drink, some of them will drink,
in hotter stages, up to one and 1/2 liters per hour,
and they might take one and 1/2 to two grams of sodium
with that just for relatively constrained periods of time,
to replace what they're losing, so that range is massive,
and each individual can fall anywhere in between that.
- I think one of the big misconceptions
I've been learning, from yourself, quite recently,
is actually just because you think you sweat loads,
doesn't mean you're necessarily losing lots of salt,
in my case, it means I am doing both, unfortunately,
but some people, you could just say, oh look,
I sweat loads, I must be losing a lot of salt
so I need a lot of electrolytes,
but actually it's not quite as simple as that, right?
- No, not always, Those two things can be independent.
I mean, ultimately, if you're doing a long event,
and you've got a high sweat rate,
the amount of salt you lose over
a period of time could be really high,
so people who sweat more tend
to benefit more from supplementation than those that don't,
but yeah, that said you could have a high sweat rate
but a very low level of salt loss,
or you could be like me, and like you,
and have a high sweat rate and a high salt loss,
and then it's kind of the worst of both worlds then.
- As mentioned already, dehydration can seriously
hamper at our performance,
and hopefully today's video has been helpful for you,
and it's been fantastic getting Andy in today,
and getting some advice from him on that matter.
Now if you liked today's video,
please do hit that thumbs up button,
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just hit that globe and you subscribe to the channel.
If you'd like to see our previous video we did with Andy,
which looked into sweat rates,
and the amount of salt that we lose,
where Heather and myself actually went
into the lab at Silverstone with Andy,
and you can see that by clicking just down here.