In the middle of summer, when the temperatures begin to rise and we continue training hard, your body loses many more fluids by sweating and even more if in the climate there is a high percentage of humidity. Therefore, it is important to know when you are dehydrated and how much your body suffers when you run in these conditions.
How to know if we are dehydrated
If you start to feel a very high heart rate with a not too intense effort or if you feel fatigued, with nausea, dizziness and headache, you may be dehydrated.
A loss of 3% of corporal liquid already affects your performance considerably, being able to imply a fall of until 20% in the same, therefore, even before such an effort, you will feel that the work is much harder if you are not well hydrated.
If the sweat leaves a mark of salts in your body, dehydration is severe and also, if at the end of training our urine does not have a clear color and is odorless but on the contrary its color is similar to that of a tea or coffee and its smell It is intense.
Another indicator of dehydration is the great weight loss after training. If you have weighed just before going out to run and at the end you weigh 1% less, you have already lost a considerable amount of fluid, but if you have lost about 3% you certainly have a high degree of dehydration that has affected your performance and It can condition your vital functions.
In these cases, dehydration is evident and it is time to replace not only liquids but also electrolytes such as sodium, chlorine and potassium.
So you are harming your body by running dehydrated
If you are running in conditions of heat and humidity, after a hectic day in which you have not drunk enough liquid and above, you wear a lot of clothes or you are training with a windbreak that does not prevent the proper evaporation of sweat, you will be eliminating a large amount of fluids and you ‘re likely to find yourself dehydrated.
If you run dehydrated your heart system will be struggling in bad conditions, so you will be over-stressed and your heart rate will rise considerably.
Your muscles and your brain as well as the whole nervous system will not respond the same and will be demanded in conditions not suitable for your effort, therefore, the response time will fall, you can suffer cramps, headache, dizziness and even tremors or muscle spasms.
On the other hand, the body will not be as efficient to regulate body temperature and is at greater risk of suffering a heat stroke that endangers the health of the body.
Running warmer with heat, losing more weight at the end of training or sweating more are not synonymous with having trained harder and having burned more fat, but are only indicators of having lost much more fluid and being harmed by physically working dehydrated.
How to avoid dehydration
If you want to avoid a large loss of fluid by sweating and prevent the risks of dehydration, the best thing you can do is to train fresh, with light clothes and drink enough water before, during and after training.
If the effort is more than two hours long, you probably need more than water and you should go to sports drinks, for example, or to water and foods with minerals such as chlorine, sodium or potassium.
Another good trick to not sweat too much and help keep body temperature at bay is to throw water on the head, legs and arms, as well as run in the shade or in wooded areas and when there is too much sun.
