You can feel the difference but how does it work exactly?
In: Biology
But drinking water before running is not advised? It makes stomach pain while running.
A large part of it is that you need your cooling system to work by having water in you to sweat. Sweat helps rid your body of bad stuff that is carried out by the water. Without enough water, your organs can’t work properly because the water helps your blood pump more freely.
At least that’s my most high level explanation.
There is much confusion over dehydration.
your body contains three types of water. Your body maintains a careful balance between these three types. Dehydration affects ALL three types.
the three are: blood plasma, intramuscular fluid, cellular fluid.
Consider. When you eat something it enters your digestive system. In your small intestine the food is liquefied – using water from those three sources.
it is suggested that a 5% dehydration level can affect cognitive functions. For a 80kg person approx 40% (a half) will be bone. So a 5% loss of fluid equates to 2 litres. Which is a LOT. Something you WILL notice.
for general running dehydration has NO effect on you whatsoever. Just take a drink at the end.
One thing many people aren’t aware of is the dangers of drinking *too much* water. Your body relies on a delicate balance of chemicals to be able to function properly. When you sweat, you are not only losing water but also some of these chemicals, specifically ones called electrolytes. If you drink only water, you aren’t replenishing those electrolytes and your body’s chemistry gets thrown out of whack. This is known as water intoxication ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication)) and can be fatal.
That’s why sports drinks exist. They provide your body with a proper balance of both water and electrolytes so that it can keep functioning properly during periods of exertion. Water intoxication can also happen without exercise by simply drinking too much water in a short period of time. But it generally takes massive amounts of water. Most people who have died from it when not exercising had consumed between 7 and 8 liters within a span of several hours. If sweating a lot, the lethal amount of water is probably less.
I had actually initially thought that the primary danger of water poisoning was that the lack of electrolytes prevented your brain from being able to generate electrical signals to communicate with the rest of your body. And while I believe this is indeed partly the case, there’s actually more to it than that.
When electrolyte levels get low enough, the fluid outside the brain cells starts moving into the cells in an effort to balance the concentrations between the inside and outside of the cells. This balance is critical in allowing the cells to generate the electrical signals your brain uses to communicate so the fluid moving in is your brain’s way of adapting to the situation to allow it to keep working instead of just giving up like I had originally thought.
But this also causes the cells to swell up, taking up more space and causing your brain to start pressing up against the skull, which it doesn’t like. This makes the brain unable to work as efficiently as normal, which leads to things like headaches, not being able to think clearly and feeling super tired. And if it gets bad enough, it can actually pinch the brain stem, which cuts off the signals between your brain and the rest of your body, which means your heart is no longer being told to beat, your lungs aren’t being told to breathe, etc., which is how it ends up killing you.
So how do you avoid this? Simple. Just be sure to eat or drink something that has sugars and salts in it. Sports drinks are great for this. Fruits are also good, as are most trail mixes and granola bars. For example, when I played football in high school, we had a huge pail of orange slices for us to munch on during games.
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