Hydration and Hot Weather

[Hasek]

 

The key is to stay ahead of the game. Once you get dehydrated it takes time for your body to re-equalize itself. It's not just as simple for your dehydrated body to a bunch of water and be okay in 5 minutes, it takes quite a while for your body to get everything straightened back out. If you get heat exhaustion, you'll probably be laid out for a day or three.

There's info out there saying you can over hydrate. This is kind of true as well as untrue. You cannot drink too much water, but you need to keep your electrolytes in balance. Drinking a lot of water throws the electrolyte level out of balance. That is where drinking too much water causes problems. To keep your electrolyte levels in balance, drink Gatorade, coconut water, or nutritional/protein shakes. Maybe a 4 or 5 to 1 ration of water to electrolyte.

You don't need to be in the heat all day to get heat exhaustion or heat stroke. A couple hours will do it. You also won't necessarily feel thirsty even if you are dehydrated. A good check for hydration is urine color. A few things can throw that off though. If you take vitamins, especially B vitamins, your urine will be kind of neon yellow. Hyperglycemia will have your urine be clear. I'm sure there are other things that will make the chart below not quite right for some, but for most people it's a good reference.

As mentioned earlier, heat exhaustion sucks... heat stroke is no frikken joke. Life changing consequences/effects. Be careful out there.

 

 

 

[cerfvoliste]

We used to have the urune color chart over the urinals at our fire station.

No Matter Where You Go, There You Are.