I think most everyone knows that drinking a lot of water is good for you, and extremely important if you exercise on a regular basis. However, if you ask 10 people, you're likely to get 10 different answers when it comes to how much to drink and why it's so important. This subject popped into my head last weekend when my dad was visiting and we were discussing ways to avoid getting sick so much (hint: drink more water).
Anyway, I figured it might be helpful to review what "most" health professionals believe about appropriate water intake. As you can imagine, there are millions of articles out there, like this one from livestrong.com or this one from fitness.com.
One thing that is pretty cool is this "water intake calculator" on about.com. 10 questions, including one about activity level, and they give you a suggested amount of water per day. For example, I am supposed to drink about 3.5 liters today (15 cups) because I worked out for 90 minutes, I weigh 225, etc. Very cool, very easy to use.
If you don't want to read any of the articles, follow my key five guidelines and you should be pretty good to go:
- Drink at least 8 cups of water per day, if you're going to err, err on the side of more not less
- If you're exercising at a normal level (not too vigorous, not too mellow), add at least one cup of water for each 15 minutes you exercise
- Drink more when it's very hot or very cold -the body needs it in both scenarios because it is working harder to either heat or cool your body. You need to especially pay attention to this if exercising in hot or cold conditions - the body is very susceptible to dehydration in these cases, which can be very dangerous
- Drink more when you're ill - your immune system is working twice as hard, which means it needs more water to help move toxins, cool fevers and thin mucus (yum yum)
- Drink one cup of water for each serving of caffeine, which is a diuretic and "steals" water from your body
Drink up!
I'm working on my fourth liter already! I love my water and totally don't feel normal without it. I must have been part fish in another life. :) Thanks for the workout yesterday! Great to get outside and burn some calories :)
ReplyDeleteNice work Pricey! Judging by your performance yesterday, I'd say you're a kingfish. :) Hope to see you next weekend ...
ReplyDeleteGood advice! Thanks for the link to the calculator - that's a great resource. An added bonus to drinking water... I realized that when I crave soda or sweet/salty foods, it's usually because I'm dehydrated - so when I drink enough water, I don't even want to eat all that junk. :)
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