Water's Role in Building Muscle and Losing Weight.

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What is the most important of all the essential nutrients when it comes to building muscle? How about which one is the key to losing body fat? When we think of building muscle we often think of protein and when it comes to losing body fat lowering our carbs is commonly thought of as the key. Both of those nutrients are important, but there is one that is even more important. Water, don’t believe me how long can a person live without Protein, fats or carbs. It is commonly thought a person can live about 2 months without any food at all, but only 3 days without water.

About 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. This affects their lifting performance in the gym and their ability to discern whether or not they are hungry. To illustrate my point I’ll leave some links to a few studies in the description. The first one is looking at the effect of dehydration on a persons one rep max. Showing a significant decrease in strength when dehydrated. On a positive note once they are properly hydrated they bounced back quite quickly. But if we are chronically dehydrated then that means we are chronically under performing slowing down or potentially even stalling our fitness progress.

The next 2 studies are on older men the one group obese and the other non-obese. They were given 500 ml of water one half hour before eating and as a result they ate less then when they did not have water before their meal.

The better we recover from training. The greater our fitness progress will be. And water plays an important part in our recovery. When we train we breakdown our muscles and with the process of protein synthesis we build them back up stronger than before. Protein synthesis requires that the muscles be well hydrated. If the are not then the recovery process slows way down.

Just eating all the protein fats and carbs we need for recovery isn’t enough our digestion needs to be working properly so we can breakdown and absorb all the nutrients and once again water is key. Our digestion starts with saliva which helps breakdown our food and is primarily composed of water.

Once these nutrients are in our bloodstream. We still need to be well hydrated to keep our blood volume up. Because when blood volume goes down it causes our heart to work harder to pump our blood, oxygen and all the nutrients required for recovery and really life itself.

Along with this when your blood volume goes down, you start to feel fatigued. Your body’s water content only has to drop by as little as 2% before fatigue sets in. These feelings of fatigue can keep us from training or we may miss diagnose our reason for feeling fatigued and eat when what we really needed was water.

So how much water should we be drinking everyday? And what about hydration around exercise? There is no real single definitive answer to this. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine makes the general recommendation of 3.7 litres for men and 2.7 litres for Women. Recognizing that about 20% of our fluid intake comes from our food.

If we are rarely thirsty and our urine is clear or very light yellow then we are probably getting enough water.

When it comes to hydration around exercise the American Collage of Sports Medicine makes this recommendation. Drink 16 to 20 oz, 4 hours before exercise. Weight yourself before training. Then Drink just enough during exercise to quench your thirst. Following exercise weigh yourself again and drink 16 to 20 oz of water for every pound lost during exercise.

When it comes to the best beverage for recovery most of the time water is sufficient so that we can keep working out, while having fun.

Link to study on dehydration and a persons one rep max; https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Abstract/2001/02000/Effects_of_Dehydration_and_Rehydration_on_the.18.aspx

The two studies on water reducing food consumption in obese and non-obese older men;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18589036
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17228036