How To Avoid Dehydration in Summer Heat

BY CHARLIE ROZANSKI

NC State Director of Sports Medicine

 

RALEIGH, N.C. NC State’s student-athletes are spending their off-season days working out in the heat and humidity of the North Carolina summer. As the Sports Medicine staff councils them, it is a great time for us to share information the dangers of dehydration and heat exposure with all Wolfpack fans. Whether you are a little leaguer, a high school student-athlete, or a “weekend warrior”, heat and humidity can cause problems.  At its worst, heat illness can be a life-threatening condition, but far more often dehydration leads to poor athletic performance. So whether the motivation is to prevent a medical condition or to maintain your athletic performance, paying attention to your state of hydration during the hot summer months is important.

Research tells us that as little as a two percent drop in body weight, due to water loss through sweat, can have a dramatic impact on the performance of an athlete. For a 130-pound athlete, that is just two and a half pounds during a workout. You can see that making fluid intake a priority will not only protect your health in the hot humid weather, but will also maintain your performance levels. Do not let all the hard work of a summer conditioning program go to waste because you forgot to properly hydrate.

So how does fluid loss affect performance? When you work out, your body generates heat as a byproduct. Under normal environmental conditions, your body dissipates

heat out through the skin and sweat. The water on the surface of your skin (sweat) cools the body and is evaporated into the air. In effect, your body throws the heat to the environment. When the weather becomes very hot and the air becomes saturated with moisture, like the North Carolina summers, the environment gets hotter and more saturated than the body. Because the body cannot dissipate heat effectively to the environment, it releases more water out of the body in an attempt to make up for its inability to cool itself. If you continue to exert yourself in this environment, you will lose a large amount of water through sweat than you would in dryer, less humid conditions of the fall or spring. As we said in the beginning, as little as two percent decrease in your body weight can have a dramatic impact on your performance, and obviously greater losses of fluid can result in the medical conditions of heat exhaustion and potentially stroke.

How do you know when your are getting dehydrated? Monitoring your body weight and urine color can help limit your dehydration. Active individuals should weigh in and out before and after each workout.  A loss of more than two percent of your body weight during these workouts would constitute dehydration. For most of us, the goal while working out in hot, humid weather should be to maintain our body weight throughout the workout. This can be accomplished by drinking plenty of water as you participate. In severe heat and intense workouts, that may not be attainable. A good rule of thumb is to drink 24 ounces of water for every pound of weight lost during a workout.

Another simple step to avoid dehydration is to watch the color of your urine. The more dehydrated you are, the more water your body will remove from the urine and the darker it will get. You want your urine to be a light yellow “lemonade” type color and not a dark yellow “ apple juice” type color. If your urine remains light, you are keeping your body adequately hydrated.

So when should you start worrying about being dehydrated? All individuals who participate in rigorous physical activity need to be concerned about fluid intake. Add the hot humid weather to the equation, and you can be sure that dehydration can become a problem. While thirst is an obvious indicator of fluid need, remember that as we age thirst becomes a less reliable indicator of our fluid needs. Some other signs and symptoms of dehydration are:

Irritability
Decreased Performance
Fatigue
Weakness
Nausea
Headaches
Muscle Cramping

The Sports Medicine staff at North Carolina State University takes dehydration and the problems associated with it quite seriously. We work hard to educate our student-athletes about the importance of remaining properly hydrated.  Please take this seriously, especially as we enter the hottest days of summer. Your health and your performance depend on it.

North Carolina State University Athletics

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