 Hydration. Let's talk about hydration for runners. I want to give you guys some really basic general guidelines as to how you should drink during your runs, after your runs. How much should you drink? How often should you drink? What should you drink? Just just some general guidelines in terms of hydration strategies for the average runner. Let's get into it. All right, so obviously hydration is a really complex subject. There are a lot of different variables to consider. You know, how long are you running? Are you running for one hour or ten hours? Are you running in the heat or is it a cool day? Are you running really hard or are you taking it easy? It depends on your sweat rank. These things are important to consider, but we're not gonna get into those nitty-gritty details today. I want to keep this video a quick informative video to the average runner with just some general guidelines as to how to drink during your runs. First of all, what to drink? Well, this one is simple. Water is the best drink. Water is the best substance. Essentially, water is what you need, right? Hydration is about water. But of course there are different things that affect how you absorb that water, which is linked with sodium content and electrolytes and the carbohydrate content if you're also consuming carbohydrates. So this is where it gets complex. This is what we're gonna ignore for this simple video today. Generally speaking, water will do the trick. Unless you're running for a really, really long time and sweating a lot, then you probably want to include some salt in your water. Okay, but generally speaking for a typical, you know, short run or normal run, water will be fine. Now, when should you drink? Well, if you're just out for a short run, say half an hour and it's not abnormally warm, you're probably not gonna need to drink. Well, you don't need to drink anything. It's just a hassle bringing it with you with the hydration belt and everything. It's not really that important. You can wait till after your run in terms of rehydrating. If you're out for longer than half an hour, though, especially if you're out for longer than an hour or if it's very hot and you're out for 45 minutes, for example, so let's call these runs longer runs, more than half an hour, then you can start thinking about bringing along some water and and taking it in during your run. They typically say that performance starts to decrease when you reach about 2% dehydration, right? And the main cause of dehydration during running is sweating, okay? So finding your sweat rate might be a good idea and very simply put the best way to do it it's just weigh yourself naked before you go for a run and then weigh yourself naked after you go for a run and of course account for things like did you pee in the meantime because that's going to decrease your weight. Did you take in any fluids that's going to increase your weight and then make the calculation and then you figure out your pre and post run weight and this will tell you how much weight you lost during your one-hour run, for example. And that way you can calculate, okay, if you lost a kilo, then you need to take in another. You need to take in a liter of water to correct for that loss. And as I said in the intro it gets way more complex than that. There are a lot of other things to consider in this equation, but generally speaking that's something to aim for. Just just covering your losses in terms of weight loss during the run. Now, even though you might have lost more than a liter of water during a hot run in the summer, there is a limit to how much water you can empty out of your stomach in an hour and not only that, but how much water you can absorb in your intestines, okay? So generally speaking, scientific studies tend to show that the most successful sort of water intake for most people is somewhere between 400 milliliters and 800 milliliters per hour, okay? So if we just take this the middle way, we can say that if you take in 600 milliliters of water per hour, that's 100 milliliters every 10 minutes, that's probably pretty good, right? That's not going to be an excessive amount, likely. And hydration typically seems to be more effective when done at shorter intervals. So doing it every 10 minutes is better than doing it every half an hour, say. Every hour, 600 milliliters, you do it the way you prefer. And then of course carbohydrate intake will affect your absorption of the water, same with electrolytes, etc. So that's a topic for another video. But generally speaking, taking in some water is a good idea. Some people will say that, you know, I go for two hours running and I don't take in any water. It's not necessary. I would argue that those people would perform better if they took some water on board during the run. And there's no evidence that suggests that you get better at dealing with dehydration, okay? Like the training effect is very clear with all types of stresses in the body, especially this is what training is. You stress one system and it adapts and gets better at dealing with that stress. That's what training is. But being dehydrated, there's no function in the body that makes you better at being dehydrated, okay? So there's no point in trying to teach the body how to be dehydrated. You're better off just staying hydrated at all times and every single time the more dehydrated you get, the worse you perform, okay? And you're getting a less of a training benefit because you're struggling to maintain certain functions in the body due to a lower hydration level. Which means you're going to use a hydration belt or a backpack with a hydration bladder, etc. You can check out my review of the Nathan Mercury drinking belt. I'll put a link to it here. After your run, you want to rehydrate further. Probably, it depends on how much sweat you lost, which depends on your sweat rate. It depends on how much you drank during your run. In other words, you drink 600 milliliters during your run. And then afterwards, depending on how much you lost, you might have another 600 milliliters or you might have a liter even or half a liter or almost nothing. It really depends and then also depends on what you're going to eat afterwards. I typically have a banana smoothie and I blend in with some water in that smoothie as well. So there's some water there. And without getting too complex, let's just say 600 milliliters during your run, most of the time for most people, and per hour and then a little bit of water or a lot after your run, depending on your thirst and depending on your sweat rate, which you've measured by weighing yourself before and after. But thirst is a really good indicator generally, not so much during exercise, but certainly afterwards and in the hours post run. You know, notice how you're feeling. If you're feeling thirsty, have some more water and notice your urine color and output as well. If you're not peeing for like two hours after your run, that's a sign you are kind of dehydrated. And if your pee is like super concentrated yellow, also kind of bad signs in terms of your hydration. So listen to your body, monitor these different signals, your urine color, your urine output, your weight before and after the run, and you should be able to find a pretty good sort of strategy that suits you in terms of hydration. Anyway, if you have any questions, if this seems unclear, anything like that, go to our Facebook page at The Lone Trail on Facebook, The Lone Trail. There's a link in the description where you can send me a message, ask me a question. Anything you want to know about hydration, I'd be happy to help you out discussing it. We could also do a coaching session, even if you're interested in that. It's worth mentioning just in here that dehydration affects performance negatively, but there are no, there's not that many dangers involved in being dehydrated. Okay, you're going to perform worse, you're going to be slow. If it's very warm, you might get into some heat stroke situations if you're very dehydrated, but you might also get into those, those even when you are hydrated. So it's not directly related to hydration. So there's no real dangers in being dehydrated, but there are dangers in drinking too much water. Okay, you can get something called hyponatremia, which means that you're diluting your blood sodium levels essentially. So you do not want to over drink. Okay, so if you're like, oh, you know, I need, I'm going to drink way more than 600 milliliters per hour. You want to be careful with that. You want to be sure you know what you're doing because there are dangers associated with drinking too much. But if you're drinking, as I said, 400 milliliters per hour, 500, even maybe 600 or even up to 800 milliliters per hour in normal conditions, that's not going to be very likely to cause hyponatremia. Just wanted to sort of throw that in there because that's the only danger associated with the drinking during running. Thanks for watching. Please subscribe if you haven't done so already and I'll see you in the next video.