Kelsey HigginsonSports Nutrition Coach and Founder at Clutch Day Coaching

You need to be focusing on water...even if you don't feel thirsty

4 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief instructional segment, the speaker emphasizes that feeling thirsty indicates you are already dehydrated, so athletes should drink water before they feel the need. He proposes a simple rule: take your body weight in pounds, halve it, and consume at least that many ounces of water daily (e.g., a 150‑lb athlete should aim for 75 oz). He notes that training and other activities likely require even more fluid. The speaker clarifies that waiting for thirst does not necessarily mean imminent clinical dehydration, but the goal is to stay proactive and avoid ever entering a dehydration phase.

Chapters

If you have gotten to the point where you are feeling thirsty, you're already dehydrated. You need to make sure that you're drinking even when you don't feel like drinking. A good place to start here is taking your body weight in pounds, chopping it in half, and that is the minimum amount that your body needs to be drinking. You probably need more than that for practices and for other things, but if you weigh 150 pounds, you chop that in half, that is 75 ounces minimum. And I guarantee a lot of athletes are not doing that. And I'm not saying that waiting until you're thirsty means you're clinically dehydrated and you're going to faint or have heat exhaustion or anything like that, but this is just a rule that I give athletes, we need to make sure we're being proactive with our hydration. That way we never even touch the dehydration phase.