A dehydrated swimmer: water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink

Familiar with one or heard of it?

Yes? No? You may have heard though of Beethoven, the deaf composer. He went on producing great music he couldn’t hear. How did he compose music we still enjoy today?

It is like wondering about Samuel Taylor Coleridge declaring “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.”

So how do swimmers get dehydrated?

Swimming is a sport reported to be more likely to put athletes in danger of dehydration. And swimmers are more at risk for dehydration than other athletes.

Why?

Swimming is a tough physical exercise. The body perspires even in the water. If swimmers have not hydrated properly before training, they can experience dizziness, muscle weakness, and labored breathing — signs of dehydration.

Christine Gerbstadt, a registered dietician and anesthesiologist notes when should athletes take in liquids and how much, during an event:

• If an athlete’s event is an hour-long or less, they shouldn’t drink water during the competition.
• If it is more than an hour, the amount of water they should drink depends on the temperature, humidity, and how much they actually perspire.

Proper hydration is vital to any sport. But fluids need to be done in correct amounts.

That is why athletes are warned not to go overboard with fluids. Diluted fluids in the body are risky, besides making an athlete feel heavy, and consequently, struggle as they perform. Studies suggest that it is actually better to be under hydrating than taking in too many fluids.

Non-athletes may not experience the same athletic demands for Olympians but if they exercise, they should weigh themselves before and after their workout.

A decrease in weight that they may discover represents the amount of lost fluid. The advice is to replace a pound lost with twenty-four ounces of fluid.

That should be enough if they want to perform well.

During summer, families love to spend long hours in pools, the ocean, lakes, or rivers. Children could stay in the water all day. While it’s fun, parents should remember that children are susceptible to dehydration because their bodies sweat even though they are in the water.

Have you witnessed a child experiencing dehydration? It’s not immediately obvious but when it manifests, it could be alarming.

On a hot summer day, a family and their friends trooped to the beach. One of the children was left alone in the water for too long. On the trip back home, that child became very ill. Pale and barely conscious, the grandmother then realized what was wrong. The boy was dehydrated. But he probably wouldn’t have drooped like dead if he was kept away from the water between 12 and 4 pm, the hottest hours of the day. Parents could have imposed breaks and given him water.

Prevention is better than cure. One way to keep dehydration at bay among adult swimmers and or those training competitively is by osmolality. It refers to measures of dehydration that trainers and coaches regularly check among their athletes along with gravity.

So with water everywhere, we take no dehydrated swimmers.