Hello, everyone, how's everybody doing today? So, I'm going to talk a little bit as fast as I can about nutrition and hydration and hopefully I can teach you all a couple of things. So, hydration, we want to start in the urohydrated state. So obviously you want fluid and electrolytes. So I kind of explain this to my athletes a lot as like peanut butter and jelly, right? You got to have both to make a good sandwich. If you only have one and too much of one or too much of the other, it makes a messy sandwich and doesn't do very good. So that's kind of what I try to teach them as my athletes of how I want to keep them in a urohydrated state. Because when they do get dehydrated, obviously it can affect your performance, right? So just a 2% loss in body weight can cause a huge decrease in performance, mental performance and physical performance. And so where that comes into me is that they'll start cramping usually and that becomes an issue because then they get pulled from practice, pulled from the game, pulled from weightlifting. So I don't, I'm trying to be preventative here, right? I don't want them to be pulled from those things. So how can I teach them how to be hydrated? That's kind of my goal. So with cramping, I've noticed that it's usually three things it tends to be. So it's usually lack of fuel or lack of calories, they didn't eat enough, lack of electrolytes. So I talk to them about obviously hydration stuff and then just neuromuscular fatigue, which is a new hot topic in the sports nutrition area about how maybe they've eaten enough and they're hydrated, but there's a neuromuscular interaction that's happening through the body. So how do you test hydration? So I've used a number of these field tests with working with my athletes. I've used USG testing. I've also done Gatorade sweat testing. So they give you these like patches and you put on the athlete and then you follow them around and you calculate how much sodium and electrolytes come out of their sweat afterwards and also how much fluid they have and you calculate it and then you can kind of customize their hydration individually to them. So I've done this on some higher profile athletes that we needed to make sure hydration was issue or like people have had cramping in the past. I've used that on some football players, basketball players in that sense. The easiest way to test is to weigh them in pre and weigh them in post. That's the easiest thing to do. I do it quite a bit, especially during like football camp and higher strain times. We do pre and post weights to kind of, and it's good too, I also make them weigh in again the next day to make sure that like they're getting their weight back and not just like chugging a bunch of water to make their weight because that was just going to make them throw up and we're dehydrated. And then also classic urine chart. You know, I always ask my, I ask my guys all the time, you know, what color is your pee today? And so if they tell me the color, like those simple things, it can be really fancy and do a sweat test or you can be really simple and just weigh yourself. So how do I prevent and help with hydration? So these are some of the different things that I use depending on the athlete. So there's this product called the Right Stuff. It's got 1700 milligrams of sodium in it. I use it with my heavier sweaters. It really can help them. And then a little bit lighter is Drip Drop or Gatorlite that we get provided to the school. So I kind of, and then like Gatorade obviously. So I usually rank it for them, you know, the worst is the Right Stuff, the second is Drip Drop, third is Gatorade. So just kind of educating them on how you need the electrolytes with the fluid because I have a lot of, especially my female athletes, they'll be a little bit more hesitant to drink Gatorade because of the sugar content, but you have to just kind of educate them that you need the electrolytes and the sugar during your activity. Also food, right? So I talk a lot about, with my athletes, just like soup, pickles, beef jerky, trail mix, all of your higher sodium things they can eat throughout the day to help with hydration. I also use it as an education point too because if you think about it, if you look at beef jerky, like how is beef jerky made, right? It's steak and the water's taken out of it. And beef jerky rips. So I usually teach my athletes, you don't want your muscles to look like beef jerky. So like you can eat it as a snack, helps with your hydration, but you don't want your muscles to look like it. Because steak, you have to cut it, right? But beef jerky, you rip it. And I don't want anything to rip. So also a good topic. And then there's this other product called Hot Shot and it kind of goes based on the neuromuscular component and it's spicy, it kind of tastes like Fireball a little bit without the alcohol. So it's really fascinating. I've used it with athletes and I used it one time and I had like four guys cramping. I gave it to them, two of them threw up, two of them it worked. So still not very sure about it, I don't use it all the time. And then obviously like just specific supplementation to that person. So I had a couple of heavy sweater basketball guy, he would lose like 15 pounds in a practice and it's basketball so it's indoor. He was a big guy, 6'10", 290, heavy, heavy sweater. And so he just really was struggling making sure he was getting enough and I used a lot of sodium and different things but I noticed if I supplement him with magnesium at night before sleep it helped him feel better and helped him feel more replenished. And I think that's just from the electrolyte loss that he was experiencing. So kind of practical examples, talked a little bit about the beef jerky and steak. I really do try to have education with the guys all the time because I think that's what can help. And then individualizing their hydration needs. I think nutrition is so individualized based, you have to have very individualized goals and the same thing with hydration as well. So I usually weigh them in, weigh them out and I can pick up pretty quickly who are the heavy sweaters, who are my high needs guys that are really going to struggle with this and just kind of start educating them about the consistency of rehydrating and not just like shoving a bunch of Gatorade at once and kind of teaching them to understand that. And then working also with sports medicine, I work a ton with them just making sure that we don't have to do IVs and we can be proactive and all of those things. And that's all I got.

nutrition

hydration

athletes

performance

dehydration