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Coach Ken: hydrate or die

  • Published
  • By Capt. Ken Corigliano
  • 56th Intelligence Squadron
CANNON AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. --  Coach Ken is a series of fitness tips and race experiences to motivate and educate Airmen to become more physically fit and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Capt. Ken Corigliano is a triathlete with the Air Force team and a nationally-certified coach.

The most important, most misunderstood and most asked about health issue is hydration--water intake.

Here are the absolute no-nonsense facts about water and your life:
  • Your body has an advanced monitoring and management system that can be affected by dehydration
  • Every process in the body requires water, and at every second water is escaping from your body
  • You control your body's ability to regulate and distribute crucial water
  • Thirst is not an indicator of a hydration status; it is a result of dehydration
  • Your body should be 60-70 percent water - the more physically active you are the higher this will be
  • Plain water does not exist in the body. You must supplement plain water with electrolyte and carbohydrate water
  • Muscles are 70-75 percent water, Fat is 10-15 percent water and blood is about 85 percent water
  • Your body needs three times more water than food, meaning for every ounce of food, you need 3 ounces of water
Water is incredibly important. It works to:
  • Constitute the blood so oxygen and nutrients circulate the body
  • Cushion the spinal cord to protect your nervous system from bodily movements
  • Permeate and penetrate all cells in the body to allow electrical impulses to flow and dissipate heat
  • Lubricate your joints to ease and glide movements
  • Constitute muscles to move the bones and provide movement. Proper hydration allows muscles to strengthen and prohibits injury
  • Flow through the skin to dissipate heat, protect your organs, reflect heat and allow movements
  • Soften food intake so you can properly digest and absorb nutrients from the mouth to the gastrointestinal system
Wellness

The Institute of Medicine of National Academies recommends as a general guideline that women drink 91 ounces of water a day and men drink 125 ounces a day.

Sometimes, you may have to force yourself to hydrate. Almost everyone I meet has been chronically dehydrated. Think of it this way, when sick you don't want to eat or drink but you know that you have to for the sake of your health. About 99 percent of all Americans walk around in a crippled state of dehydration.

It's my own personal opinion, which is shared by some of the foremost experts in physiology and performance, that the cause of most disease and sickness is chronic dehydration and improper nutrition. Dozens of times a day you make a life or death decision. With the food you eat and the amount you drink, you are accelerating your demise or boosting your liveliness.

Performance

Your ability to perform is a delicate balance between your ability to deliver energy and the ability to dissipate heat. Weigh yourself after a workout. If you lost weight, you lost water. The prevention of injury hinges on if you are fully hydrated. Make sure that at the end of the workout you weigh the same or within 2 pounds.

Being well-hydrated means you will digest food properly, your lower back will feel great, your joints will be smooth, your eyesight will be sharp, your brain will be focused, your muscles will be strong and resilient, you will get rid of poisons in your body, soundly sleep, almost never get sick, have supermodel hair, your organs will love you, your nails will be strong and your skin will be smooth.

Your amazing body needs amazing attention

Most guys know more about their vehicle than their body. Water weighs 8 pounds per gallon. My experience is that my performance greatly degrades when I am just half a gallon dehydrated which is about 4 pounds. I feel it in my lower back and my hips. At this point, injury is risked and I either ingest half a gallon of water within 20 minutes or stop the activity.

Here's some awesome math for you technical folks. Say you are 150 pounds, and ideally, you should have about 65 percent water in your body to feel really good. That is 97.5 pounds of water, totaling 12 gallons of water. That's just sitting around doing nothing. If we eat 1 pound of food we need 3 pounds of water to properly digest it without the body taking water from elsewhere. Remember, water is very dynamic in your body - the easiest place to get water to digest food is where your spine is, so you may notice you get lower back pain after a meal.

If you are always dehydrated, your body will take water from your muscles and joints next. Then it will take it from your blood stream. That's why you get tired after you eat a lot, not only is blood being diverted to your stomach to digest the food, and the sugar in your bloodstream is being consumed, but water is always being diverted.

At 2 percent dehydration we can see performance affected by 17.5 percent. This is staggering. For a 150 pound person that's a mere 3 pounds dehydrated or 6 ounces of water!

So, if you can typically type at 100 words per minute optimally, you will only type 83 words a minute if you are 2 percent dehydrated. If you can run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes, but are a mere 2 percent dehydrated, your time will now be 14 minutes, 6 seconds.

Push-ups and sit-ups are the same, if you normally punch-out 50 properly hydrated, you now will only get 43. Conversely, if you are one of those habitually dehydrated people, you can increase your performance by simply drinking more water in almost the same ratio.

Let's explore more, at 5 percent lack of water causes serious damage can occur within the body. That means for a 150 pound person that's 7.5 pounds dehydrated, or just under a gallon.

Back pain, joint pain, headaches and high blood pressure? Hydrate or die.

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