Hydration is incredibly important, especially for athletes. Staying hydrated while playing sports helps you perform better, reduces your risk of injury, and makes it easier to recover when injuries do occur.
Sports hydration is something that coaches, parents, and athletes should prioritize. The human body is approximately 60 percent water. Anyone who knows this knows how important it is to stay hydrated.
This is always true, but it’s especially important when you’re exerting your body and losing water.
The average person can stay hydrated by drinking several glasses of water daily. Combined with a healthy diet, that is enough to hydrate their bodies.
But for athletes or anyone who engages in moderate to extensive exercise, you’re going to need to do more to replenish the fluid you lose during activity. Not to mention, you need to replenish the electrolytes you lose through sweat loss.
It’s also essential for athletes to replenish their hydration as quickly as possible. To perform optimally, they need to stay hydrated throughout intense exercise and physical activity.
Causes of Dehydration
Dehydration occurs when your body loses liquid and you do not replenish it. This can occur due to urine loss, but it’s most often caused by sweating when talking about athletics.
Sweat is necessary to keep your body healthy and able to perform during high rates of respiration during exercise or a workout. However, it also causes you to lose water and electrolytes that are necessary for health.
Sweat loss contains more than just water. It also contains sodium, potassium, sugar, urea, and small amounts of other elements.
Dehydration might not seem like a big deal, but it can significantly impact athletic performance and health.
After just a two percent loss of body water, a person’s cardiovascular/aerobic performance is affected.
They can feel fatigued, suffer heat intolerance, have flushed skin, and might experience burning in their stomach. Greater levels of dehydration can lead to more serious symptoms, including:
- Balance issues
- Problems swallowing
- Sunken eyes
- Muscle cramping
- Delirium
- Vision changes
- Problems with and painful urination
As dehydration worsens, it can affect muscle control and strength. It affects the nervous system and can lead to serious health problems if hydration is not restored.
Even mild levels of dehydration can affect mental performance. Dehydration can make you feel lethargic and affect your ability to focus.
It exacerbates attention deficits and reduces your ability to focus at a high level – something that is essential for peak athletic performance.
Mental function affects your ability to avoid injury when performing athletic activities. Dehydration creates multiple risks of injuries by affecting both your physical and mental performance.
How to Know If You Are Dehydrated
It’s best to assume that dehydration is a problem for anyone engaging in exercise or physical activity. Just how dehydrated you are depends on how much water you lose during the activity.
For example, someone taking a brisk walk on a cool day will lose much less water than someone running sprints on a 90-degree humid day.
So, first and foremost, just assume you’re at risk of dehydration when participating in sports or exercising.
You can do a few things to determine your hydration status or to test your hydration levels. The first is observing the amount and colour of the urine you excrete.
The darker the urine, the less hydrated you are. And the less urine output you have, the more likely you’re dehydrated. Some athletes even go so far as to weigh themselves before and after activity.
It’s common for athletes performing under certain conditions to lose several pounds of weight, which equates to two to three cups of fluid per pound.
Anyone can be affected by dehydration. Athletes are especially susceptible, and athletes in certain sports face an even higher risk.
An endurance athlete, like a hiker, cyclist, distance runner, and cross-country skier, has some of the highest risk because they engage in long periods of moderate to intense activity.
Swimmers and athletes who perform in water also have a high risk because it’s so difficult to tell how much water the body loses when you’re in the water.
How Can You Maximize Sports Hydration?
Personalized hydration and fluid replacement is an essential part of optimizing athletic performance, safety, and health of athletes.
Coaches and other people supervising sports should know the many factors determining fluid needs. How should you address these needs?
Often, they are specific to the environment, the event, and the individual athlete. Understanding these factors is essential to maximizing sports hydration and keeping athletes healthy and safe.
Quench Buggy offers access to water for proper hydration for athletes at sporting events, including during practices.
This includes trailers with spigots that allow conveniently refilling water bottles anytime. It’s also possible to rig these systems as water fountains if no reusable water bottles are available.
All of our units feature filtration, so athletes get the cleanest drinking water possible at all times, without the added sugar from a sports drink or energy drink.
The units are constructed to ensure function and cleanliness. The units can supply unlimited water when connected to a municipal water supply, but it’s also possible to use onboard water storage if an event is in a remote location.
Each unit comes with skilled staff to help you understand how the water stations work and train those in charge on how to use the units.
Quench Buggy mobile stations feature stainless steel fixtures, skirting, and hot-dipped galvanized frames, making them sturdy and easy to transport.
We aim to ensure everyone on site can access clean, potable drinking water without purchasing endless plastic water bottles.
Book a quick call if you’d like to learn more or are interested in renting or buying one of our mobile water stations.