Hydration for Athletes - Kelsey Poulter

Welcome back to the Next Level Athletes Podcast. I'm your host, Kelsey Poulter. Super excited to be back with you guys. Today we are talking about hydration and electrolytes, so let's just jump right into it. When I was in high school, I did not go to very many football games. I was not a Friday Night Lights goer. I kind of regret that now, but that's not the point of the story. But when I did go, every single time there was this lineman who always ended up on the sidelines cramping and drinking pickle juice and having mustard being squirted into his mouth. That image is probably forever burned into my memory because I thought it was so gross. And then he would have to go back and play with the taste of mustard and pickle juice in his mouth. And, and at the time, my 16-year-old self was completely disgusted by that. By the end of this podcast, you guys will learn actionable steps and a great hydration plan for you so that you never have to be that lineman shooting mustard and drinking pickle juice in the middle of the game instead of playing. I know that was kind of a funny imagery with the pickle juice and the mustard, but the point is, is it was preventable. This athlete, he probably didn't know it at the time, but he was severely dehydrated even going into the game. And then with football, especially in the beginning of the season when it's hot, when you're sweating a lot, you're full pads, you can get dehydrated very quickly because of how much water you lose with the pads on, because of how hot it is. And so that can breed the perfect storm to end up being very dehydrated. So it is preventable. And you're able to actually treat it before it ever even happens. And that's what I'm here today to talk to you guys about. So hydration is crucial. I know it's something that everyone always talks about. They say, drink, drink, drink, drink your water, have electrolytes, here's some Gatorade. And everyone has heard the term electrolytes flying around and everyone knows that they should be drinking water, but they're not sure why. And athletes, like, it's just kind of one of those annoying things that their coach always tells them to drink more water, to have a water break. And, and they don't, I don't think most athletes Well, I know that most athletes don't know why it is so important, and I believe, we believe our philosophy at Next Level Athletes is that education and awareness drive compliance. So if an athlete always gets told to drink water, to hydrate more, to drink their electrolytes, but they don't even know what that's gonna do for their body, they don't know what it's doing to go against their performance, they don't know exactly what electrolytes are, it's just gonna be empty words that coach keeps yelling in their face. But if you can make the athlete aware of how it will help their performance, then they're going to comply with what I'm gonna be talking about. So athletes, listen up, and I'm gonna tell you exactly why you need hydration and why you need electrolytes to perform at your best. If an athlete loses even 1 to 2% of body weight during practice, and this is through sweat, this is water. A lot of athletes come and they're super hyped, or people come and say, I lost 4 pounds during my exercise. Like, that's not a good I promise that's not fat. Fat loss comes over a long period of time. If you're losing a lot of weight in the sauna or in a hot tub or even at practice, it's all through sweat. It's all through water loss. That can put you very susceptible to being very dehydrated and to having poor health problems and poor performance. That's even 1 to 2%. If you are 150 pounds and you have one— and you lose 1.5 to about 3 pounds during practice, that will be a huge red flag that you are dehydrated and that you are not hydrating enough during practice and before practice to help your performance and to help you stay as healthy as possible. With that dehydration comes a plethora of stuff that you guys do not want. It comes with increased heart rate, which is basically just gonna make you feel like you're not as in shape. To when you should be. It's gonna come with increased core body temperature, which is gonna make your body work harder and put you at risk for heat exhaustion, heat fatigue. And then the third thing is it can increase your glycogen storage use. If you remember from the Sports Nutrition 101 pro— podcast, we talked a lot about glycogen. Just a little review. It is your muscle's energy tanks. Just like a car gas tank has gas in it for fuel. Your body, your muscles have glycogen tanks that store glycogen, which is also carbs for fuel. And if you are dehydrated, your body's going to use more of that. So not only are you dehydrated at that time, but you're also going to run out of your energy faster, which is something that you guys don't want. With that will come decreased power, decreased focus, and a faster time to exhaustion. So you're gonna get tired a lot faster. So. As you guys can see, decreased power, decreased reaction time, decreased focus, increased time to exhaustion. All of these things. Have I sold you on how hydration is so freaking important for your performance and for your game? If not, I'll just keep going. Okay. There was a study done by the International Society of Sports Nutrition. They took a big group of athletes and split 'em in half. One group of athletes, they gave a prescribed hydration plan, which just basically means a very individualized hydration plan for how much they were sweating, for how many electrolytes they need, and then they're And then they, they, this other group of athletes, Group B, they just let them do their normal hydration habits. They did that for about a week or so, and then they were able to come back to the results and they saw that this Group A had far better results. They had better body power, which just basically means that they were able to run and jump faster and harder. They had quicker reaction time and their heart rate recovery was faster. So they, it just indicated that it almost looked like they were in better shape than Group B, even though their conditioning was the same, just because Group A was hydrating well and Group B was not. So that just goes to show that hydration is very individualized. It is not a one-size-fits-all. And so during this podcast, I will lay out a great way that you can individualize it towards you, towards your position, towards your sport, towards your sweat rate, and so on. The way that we lose water and electrolytes are through th— 3 different ways: sweat, pee, Poop. And you guys do all of 'em, especially as athletes. Okay. Especially the sweating part. I've already discussed this pretty deeply in the sense of how it can affect your performance. But when you have a lack of electrolytes, cramping sets in, you have a slower recovery, you have de— a decreased reaction time, you have cognitive issues, you're not able to focus. Just a review of what we've talked about. So if we were to apply this to kind of a real world situation, say that you're a baseball player. If you have a slower reaction time, that could be the difference of hitting the ball and getting on base and striking out. If you're a football player and you have decreased power, that could be the difference of making a killer block versus getting put on your butt. If you have decreased focus, that could be the difference between hitting a game-winning shot or missing it. Do you see what I'm saying? You guys are working so hard in practice, you're working so hard in the weight room, you're working so hard on your skills. To leave it up to chance by not hydrating yourself enough, like, that's not worth it, guys. I'm selling you guys on this. I hope you're following. I hope you're getting sold. I hope you're nodding your head yes and saying, yes, Coach, tell us more, let's do this. But there is an issue. You can overhydrate, and a lot of people have asked me this question, which is awesome that you guys are already aware of it. And it's something called hyponatremia. If you drink too much water without having the proper amount of electrolytes with it, it can put you in some tough spots health-wise. I'm not going to go deep into the side effects. You guys can go look it up, you can educate yourself on it, but I'm just going to help you guys figure out how much electrolytes with how much water that you need to be intaking in order to have the proper amount. The Goldilocks amount is what I like to call it. Not too little, not too much. We want the just right amount in order to see great performance without having any poor side effects. I hope I sold you on your why. I hope I gave you enough awareness and enough education to drive compliance. Now we're going to kind of get into the science-y part of the what, like what electrolytes are, what they do, um, how they help you. And then we'll get into the application part of it, the how. Now there's not going to be a quiz on this or anything like that, but again, I just want to educate you guys. So that you know the why behind this and so that you can be motivated even further to stick to this. I played college athletics for a time in Colorado and it was a lot of fun, but conditioning days sucked, especially because I played basketball. And so conditioning started in August and where I was playing, it was Grand Junction, Colorado. It can get hot there and it was dry heat, 95 degrees, and we were conditioning out on the turf field. Running shuttle drills. It was terrible. I don't think that I had hydrated enough for it, and I don't think that really any of the freshmen had. I think all of the upperclassmen kind of knew what was coming, and they probably were a little bit more prepared. But for us freshmen, it was a rough go. I remember that this girl, one of my teammates, she, she was a freshman as well with me, and towards the end of the workout, she literally almost fainted, and everyone and everyone kind of had to go around her and catch her. Several of the teammates did. And at that point, I was starting to get lightheaded. I'm a sweater anyway, so I sweat pretty bad, but I was starting to get lightheaded and kind of feel the symptoms that she was feeling. And I didn't really know what was going on at that time, but it for sure, for 100% sure, was heat exhaustion and dehydration. Sodium plus chloride come together and make salt, and salt is found and sweat. If you've ever tasted your sweat, it is salty, and some people's are saltier than others, but I am a very heavy sodium sweater. I sweat a lot of salt, so much so that when my sweat dries on my face, I can literally touch it and salt will come off on it. Because I lost so much sweat, therefore I lost so much salt, I was very depleted in sodium. Sodium plays a huge role in the body and is one of the key electrolytes. It helps regulate blood pressure. If you've ever ever been sitting down and then stood up too quick and you got super lightheaded and dizzy? That's basically a good example of what low blood pressure could feel like. You feel dizzy, you feel lightheaded, you want to pass out. That's pretty much low blood pressure. If you think of it also like a hose, if you turn on a hose full blast and a bunch of water is shooting out, that's high blood pressure, which we don't necessarily want high blood pressure either. But low blood pressure is like there's barely a trickle going through the hose, and we also don't want low blood pressure. That's something that we want pretty much just right as well, and salt can help with that, especially in athletes. If I was talking to an older 60-year-old man with heart issues, I would have— be having a completely different conversation right now. But in elite athletes, elite high school athletes training every single day, conditioning, running, jumping, lifting, you guys need salt to maintain your Blood pressure. Sodium is also super important for muscle contractions. If you think of how your body works, I don't know if any of you have taken anatomy and physiology, but just to, to simplify it for you guys, the brain is the control center and the brain will tell your body what to do when it wants it to do something. So if my brain was telling me to run, it would send a signal from my brain down through my nervous system to my muscle, to my hip flexor, to my quad, to my gluteus maximus, to my calves, and say, fire, fire, fire, at the exact time that it needed me to fire. And if I was sprinting, it would be sending the signals even more frequently so I can gather more power. It's kind of like a light bulb. If it doesn't have a ton of power going to it, it might flicker on and off. But if it has full power going to it, it'll just stay strong. That's what we want your muscles to do when you're running, when you're jumping, when you're performing. That's what we want, we want your muscles to do in sport. We want it to stay strong. We don't want it to flicker back and forth and have poor signal going from the brain to the muscle. So sodium plays a huge role in sending the signal from the brain to the muscle. Sodium is important. Cramping comes in from a lack of sodium as well. The signal gets messed up, you're super depleted in sodium, and cramps can set in. And the lack of sodium is where cramps set in, not the lack of potassium, although potassium is really important too, which is what I'm going to jump to next. Potassium Calcium helps your muscles contract and relax. And so, you know, again, I'm, I'm gonna just fly through these. I've talked a lot about sodium because that's what we're gonna have you supplement with most of the time. Potassium, magnesium, chloride, and calcium. Those are important too, but I'll kind of fly through these. Again, there's not gonna be a test at the end. So potassium, again, it's going to help muscles contract and relax, and it's also going to be able to regulate your Heart. Potassium plays a huge role in your heart beating and keeping that muscle in your body going. I don't have to tell you why your heart is so important. If it wasn't beating, you would be dead right now and not listening to me. So you want potassium. You don't want too little or too much either. Your body's really good at regulating it, so you don't have to worry too much about it. Um, but my biggest advice would be most of it comes from great foods anyway, which I'll get to in a minute. Chloride. I've already touched on chloride because sodium plus chloride equals salt. So if you're already supplementing with salt, you're going to already get chloride into your diet. So it basically just works with sodium to help maintain fluid balance in your body, and it also helps with digestion. And then we have calcium and magnesium. They're just super important for a lot of different reasons. Calcium actually helps your muscle contract. I want to geek out right now so bad, but I'm not— I'm going to save you guys that. We can talk about that in another podcast. I'm going to stay on track here. But yes, calcium helps your muscles contract and and move. And magnesium, it can help with recovery. It also helps you sleep better, which also helps with recovery. It's really important. So to recap all of the electrolytes in the body, we have sodium and we have chloride, we have potassium, we have calcium, and we have magnesium. Those are the kings. Most of these can be supplemented through food. You don't need to actually take a supplement to get it if your diet is balanced. So foods that you can find sodium in. Sodium and chloride always come together, so that's table salt. Some processed foods too. I, I always recommend pretzels. Pretzels can be a good one. I wouldn't go as far as to say like potato chips and all of these other crappy processed foods. I think some processed foods are okay at a certain time, but just loading up on them again, you can have too many electrolytes and too much salt, and so we don't want that either. So we want to maintain whole foods, but then be strategic about when we have more salty foods throughout our day to be around training time and to get the benefits that you need from that. Potassium can come from spinach, from bananas, from oranges. Calcium comes obviously from dairy, and then it can also be in leafy greens. And then magnesium can come from nuts and seeds and whole grains. Food is your best friend. Whole foods are your best friend. I talked about that in the Nutrition 101 podcast as well. You're going to get the micronutrients that you need if you just eat a balanced diet. Now transitioning from electrolytes into water. Hydration is two parts. It's electrolytes plus water. If you have too much of one, it's going to be out of balance. It's going to make your body out of balance. You want just a right— you want just the right amount of both of them. And those needs vary. A sedentary individual, which means just not moving around much, would need maybe 64 ounces a day total, whereas an athlete Who sweats a lot, who might be losing a lot of water during practice, might need 64 ounces during the practice alone. So I can't just make a one-size-fits-all statement. So get out your calculators, get out your notebooks. I'm gonna take you guys to school a little bit and we're going to create your own individual hydration plan. Step number one, you gotta find your baseline hydration. And what I mean by baseline, and all of this comes actually from Dr. Andy Galpin. He's been on Dr. Andrew Huberman's podcast. I think he is awesome and so knowledgeable. So if you guys wanna wanted to go look up more of him and listen to that podcast, I highly recommend it. They go pretty deep into the science part of things, which I geek out on. But if you guys don't want to do that, I can kind of break it down for you here too. I've taken a lot of his equations and examples for hydration and kind of blended them into our Next Level— what we— into what we do as Next Level Athletes business and what I'm teaching you guys today. So first of all, we need your hydrate— your baseline hydration. This means that even on rest days when you're barely moving, this is the amount of water that your body needs. So you're gonna take your body weight in pounds and divide it by 2. So if I had a 165-pound athlete, I'm dividing that by 2. The baseline hydration would be 82.5 ounces of fluid every day. Step number 2 is we wanna figure out how much you need for practice. So what you're gonna do is you're going to take your body weight again and divide it by 30. Okay, so I'm gonna just keep going with my 165-pound example. So my athlete who's 165 pounds, and I already did the math here, so 165 pounds dividing it by 30, that gives me 5.5 ounces. And this is not total, this is every 15 to 20 minutes during practice. So that tells me if, uh, let's, let's call this guy Johnny. If Johnny is a big sweater, I'd say, okay, every 15 minutes you need to be drinking. And I realize that a lot of coaches tell you when you can and can't drink water, so just do your best with this. But if he didn't lose a whole lot of water, maybe he was an indoor sport, we could do more every 20 minutes instead of 15. So you can decide based off of how much you sweat and what your availability is for water breaks during practice. But Johnny, he sweats a lot, so we're gonna say every 15 minutes he's gonna be drinking that. So if he needs that every 15 minutes, that means he needs 5.5 ounces every single 15 minutes. For the whole hour. So I'll go, there's, there's 4 quarters in an hour, 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 15 minutes. Every single time he needs to be drinking about 5.5 ounces, which will give us about 22 ounces total for that hour. That does not limit him to 22 ounces. That just gives him an idea, a ballpark of what he needs to be hydrating with during that window. That's per hour. So if he had a 2-hour practice, that means he'd need to double that and have about 44 ounces. So let me backtrack a little bit. Step number 1 was to find your baseline. Body weight divided by 2 equals your baseline. Step number 2 is to figure out how much you need every single hour while you're working out. You're gonna take your body weight in pounds and divide that by 30. That's gonna give you how many ounces you need to be drinking every 15 to 20 minutes. If you're gonna be drinking every 20 minutes, you can take that number and times it by 3. If you're gonna be drinking every 15 minutes, you can take that number and times it by 4. Okay, step number 3 is you need to add in post-workout fluid needs. A blanket statement, and this one I can make a little bit more blanket, and this is what Dr. Annie Galpin says, about 12 to 20 ounces of fluids is what you need to be consuming post-workout. If you sweat more, consume 20 ounces. If you sweat less, consume 12 ounces. And typically, to make this even easier, I just add this onto my baseline amount, onto step 1 that we've already talked about, and that will allow you to to just kind of have a whole idea of how many ounces you need per day besides practice. And then you just kind of know, all right, I'm going to just drink 20 ounces at dinner with my family type of thing, or I'm going to have a 12-ounce chocolate milk and then I can have an 8-ounce water. Making sense? Hopefully. Let's keep going. We have step 1, we have your baseline, we have step 2, we have your workouts, we have step 3, you're going to add 20 to, or 12 to 20 ounces after your workout, and that is on top of your baseline, not included into it, but you can add it to your baseline to make it easier. So my, my guy's baseline was 82.5. Let's say that he's gonna drink 20 ounces after practice. I could just add that and say 102.5 ounces per day, and he just knows that he needs to be drinking at least 16 to 20 ounces post-practice too. Now let's cover electrolytes and where they fit in with this hydration plan. A really cool thing is something called a sweat patch. Gatorade actually makes one. I'm sure other people do too. This is not an ad or anything like that. I haven't used them yet, but you can put it on your arm and I think it hooks up to your phone and it'll show you your sweat rate. So how much water you've lost and how much electrolytes you've lost. So you could go throughout a practice wearing it and then it will tell you after that 2-hour practice exactly how much fluids you lost and exactly how many electrolytes you lost. And then that could tell you even more perfectly how many ounces of water you need during practice and how many milligrams of sodium you might need during practice. So now that we have the electrolytes that you need during practice, let's put together a plan. So in the morning, the biggest recommendation I give to people: drink 16 to 30 ounces right off the bat when you wake up. It just, it gets that out of the way. It gets your body moving, it gets your brain moving. It's really great. And then during the day, you can just be sipping on fluids. Obviously during lunch, just carry a water bottle around. And then once you get to practice or about 30 minutes out, you can have between 2 to 3 cups of water with 500 milligrams of electrolytes or of sodium. This can come from a Liquid IV packet. This can come from half of an Element packet. This can come from 1/4 teaspoon of salt. This can come from a dill pickle. It can come from anything like that, um, where you will get your sodium. So that's 30 minutes out. During practice, if you are a heavy sodium sweater, you're gonna have 500 to 1,000 milligrams of sodium per hour. Light sweater, 200 to 300 milligrams of sodium per hour. Be— you'll take your during practice fluids and combine that with how much sodium you need to be having. And then you'll go to your post-workout and you'll have another 500 sodium with that 12 to 20 ounces that we've already discussed. So the 500 milligram sodium post-workout, especially if this is like post-practice and you go to dinner right after this, just put extra salt on your meal. It's a super easy way to do that. So guys, we, we've created your plan. You have it, you're ready to go. I will say, if you've ever had history of kidney issues or anything like that, please talk to a doctor. I'm not your doctor. I'm not your nurse. I'm not your healthcare professional. Talk to a doctor before you implement these things if you ever have a history of kidney problems. So some key takeaways today, just to kind of wrap this podcast up for you guys, is number one, don't just hydrate during workouts. Stay drinking the entire day and don't wait until you're thirsty. Okay, the human body is really good at something called the human thirst mechanism. It's when, oh, I'm thirsty, I'm gonna drink water. That's for the sedentary individual who doesn't do a whole lot of activity. When you're losing a lot of sweat and working out a lot, your human thirst mechanism has a really hard time keeping up with you. And so you need to drink even if you are not thirsty. Follow that plan that we talked about. Out. Number 2 is eat whole foods, those foods rich in electrolytes— nuts, bananas, oranges, greens, whole grains. All of those amazing things will help your body stay strong and healthy and will be able to allow you to use the water that you're drinking. The third thing you can do, if you kind of want to get even more specific to see if your hydration plan is on point, is weigh yourself before and after practice. Make sure that if you weigh yourself before practice in full pads, that you weigh yourself after practice in full pads. That'll give you a good indication on if you are hydrating well. If you gain weight during practice, that shows you you're drinking too much water. But if you lose weight during practice, that shows you you're drinking too little. So you can adjust based off, based off of what you find with gaining or losing weight. And then the fourth thing you wanna do is use your brain. If you feel like something's off, if you feel like you're bloated, if you feel like you're puffy, use your brain. And adjust it. Come get help. Go to a nutritionist. Come, come buy our program. Come join our community. Like, we will be able to help you with these things. You don't have to do 'em by yourself. It can be a little difficult to implement sometimes. So if you need help, please, please come get it. We, we are here and that's why, that's why I do what I do, guys. So I'm super excited that you were here with me today. I'm super excited that you were able to learn about hydration, and I hope that I provided enough awareness and education to drive your guys' compliance and to see your performance go next level. Thanks for being here, guys.