Are poor hydration levels impacting your performance?

Hydration impacts significantly on sporting performance. Lots of people skip the subject saying they ‘don’t drink water’ or they ‘don’t need to drink’ and many players will go through matches without having anything more than a sip of water from a water fountain. Whether or not your realise it, it has a huge impact on your performance, especially in the latter stages. If you start hydrating yourself properly, you’ll be amazed at just how much your physical and mental performance can improve.

One very important thing that a lot of people don’t realise is that once you feel thirsty, it’s already too late. Feeling thirsty is a sign of the onset of dehydration, albeit not at a serious level which will affect your health, but at a level significant enough to impact your performance. If you feel thirsty, your concentration and physical performance will already be suffering.

Pre-Game

Before a game, it’s important to start making sure you’re well hydrated in advance. To achieve optimal performance, you need to start preparing 2 to 3 hours before that match.

The drinking during this time should be in gradual doses and you should look to consume around 400-500ml of water. This sounds like a lot but isn’t all that much when spread out across 3 hours, particularly if you are about to embark on an intense match. Just make sure you’re close to the toilet in the lead up to a match!

As well as getting in a habit of drinking sufficiently, it’s also important to take steps pre-match towards aiding your concentration and getting in the zone.

Try having a 500ml bottle with you before you play a match which you can swig from. It’s a small and easy thing to do which will make a lot of difference to your quality of performance. If you’re really serious keep a 1l bottle with you at all times!

In-Game

You only need glance down at your shirt to see how much water you’ve lost during a match. This water must be replenished. Ideally, you’ll be able to drink smaller amounts gradually after each game, rather than necking a bottle every couple of games or when you feel thirsty.

It is estimated that both the average male and female need to drink just shy of 500ml per 30 minutes of intense exercise and I would class most squash matches as intense exercise. If your match is lasting nearer to an hour, then you’ll need over 900ml of water in order to maintain peak performance, which you don’t need telling is a lot!

This amount will vary of course on how long and intense the rallies are and also will change if you are smaller than the average male or female. You’ll need to drink significantly more if you’re bigger or if you’re playing high-level matches.. These are all rather generic figures though, as some people will sweat more than others or need more water irrespective of body size and it also varies depending on several other factors, so use what works for you. What is clear though is you need to drink a lot.

I’d recommend getting a 1 litre sports bottle right away and keeping it close by during matches.

Are electrolytes real? Is Lucozade Sport really better than water?

You might be surprised (or not surprised) to find that water isn’t actually enough on its own to rehydrate properly during and after intense exercise, as you lose lots of different minerals in sweat and during exercise. ‘Electrolytes’ is a term generally used to describe potassium and sodium, amongst a few other things.

Lucozade isn’t better than water, as their slogan suggests but it does have some important properties that water lacks, although it is no good on its own and not great in pure form.

Sports drinks are important for replacing the electrolytes which your muscles will need to function but most of them contain so much sugar that they will detract vital bodily energies away from the muscles. You need sufficient amounts of these electrolytes so that the Sodium-Potassium pumps in the cell membranes of your muscles can make your muscles contract effectively. These pumps rely on keeping a higher concentration of potassium outside the cell and sodium inside the cells to make muscles contract. During the more intense rallies, potassium can move out of the cells so rapidly that there isn’t a high enough concentration in the cell to maintain balance and the muscles gradually contract with less and less power until you’re fatigued.

You need to be able to replenish the stores of these electrolytes regularly during a match in order to keep your muscles contracting efficiently, which requires a sports drink of some kind. As I just mentioned, sports drinks have too much sugar in them on their own, which is detrimental to your performance. The best way forward is to have a diluted sports drink, i.e. put some water in your Lucozade, which will help you completely rehydrate.

If you don’t replace your fluids properly with a combination of diluted sports drink and water, you will not only find that your performance suffers but also that you’ll get muscle cramps and pains a lot more readily. Being properly hydrated goes a long way in staving off these aches and pains with some research suggesting that lactic acid may not actually be the cause of the muscle ache, but too much potassium building up outside of the cell membranes of muscle cells.

So make sure you bring a diluted sports drink with you alongside your barrel of water!

Post-match

There is a reason a lot of people drink milk based drinks after exercise and that is to help rebuild muscle fibres as well as provide carbohydrates, sodium and calcium, which are all important to recovering physically from exercise. Some of the protein drinks you’ll find will often advertise an excessive amount of protein though. As with all figures it varies a lot depending on your size, gender and a few other things, but generally you only need to take in around 20g of protein and any excess tends not to be processed by the body.

However, having a big glass of milk or healthy milkshake is a good idea to boost your recovery, particularly if you are at a tournament or playing again in a short space of time e.g. within 24-48 hours.

As always, you need to drink plenty of water too.