Is Hydration Really That Important?

Eat, train, eat, sleep, eat, repeat – it is a pattern that feels on loop most days, but make sure you aren’t forgetting another foundation to recovery and performance: hydration.

Keeping up the fluids will mean easier decision making, better focus, sessions feeling easier and a lower risk of gut upset.

What causes dehydration?

When we’re smashing out a training session or getting through a match, we sweat! Sweat is our body keeping itself cool, but this does mean we lose both fluid and electrolytes.

How much sweat we lose depends on so many factors, and the amount we lose actually changes over time. For example, as the weather gets hot and humid, we lose plenty of fluid and electrolytes, however as we get more acclimatised to that temperature, we get more efficient at sweating – we actually keep sweating more, but lose less electrolytes!

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Why hydration matters to you

When we mismatch our fluid and losses, we find ourselves in a state of dehydration. You may likely have felt it before – flat, fatigued and everything simply feels harder! That is because our hydration levels influence lots of different areas of performance:

 

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How to know if you’re dehydrated

There are fancy ways we can assess hydration, but we would love for you to be able to monitor it yourself. The easiest way is to chat toilet talk for a bit (#sorrynotsorry), and that is by knowing your wee colour over the day!

Disclaimer: Some medications or supplements will change your urine colour so just be aware.

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If you find yourself with yellow to burnt orange urine over the day, it is time to pay more attention to your fluids.

 

We will cover what this looks like in the article How to Optimise Your Hydration