Keeping hydrated is one of the most essential aspects of sport and physical activity, whether you are an athlete or someone who plays sports for fitness. It plays so many roles in keeping your body functioning properly that without adequate amounts of water, your body cannot function at its peak. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay If you exercise on land, such as playing ball sports, cycling or working out at the gym, you get hot, sweaty and so it's quite obvious when you need to stop for a drink. When training in water, however, the situation is not so clear. The usual signs that you need to hydrate are much harder to notice. Your body doesn't want to sweat, the water helps keep you cool and you don't often get a dry mouth while swimming. This often leaves you feeling like you don't need to rehydrate. As a swimmer, it is important to stay on top of your hydration by drinking plenty of water before and after, as well as during your training session. Water makes up about 60% of the body's overall mass, so you might imagine, it pretty much has a hand in everything you do. Helps regulate body temperature; It provides lubrication to joints, moves nutrients around the body, helps remove waste, aids digestion – the list goes on. So if you haven't been drinking enough water before, during and after your workout, your performance will suffer. Perhaps the most obvious is the fact that the less water you have in your body, the higher the temperature, therefore the more dehydrated you are. will become. It becomes a vicious cycle of dehydration. It also increases your heart rate, making the overall act of swimming much more difficult than usual. While you may think you've had an incredible workout because you're tired and fatigued, in reality it's very likely that your perception is simply skewed. This is not only detrimental to your physical improvement, but can also have a negative effect on a mental level. If you did the same workout twice in one week, but couldn't finish the second time because you were dehydrated, you can often feel like you're not making as much progress as you should. Being even 2% dehydrated can have a noticeable effect on your performance. However, it's not just your daily performance that suffers. An important part of any training is the recovery process and dehydration has a negative effect on this too. First, water is used to aid digestion. The enzymes that break down food and dissolve minerals are found in saliva, which is made up of water, and water is used to break down soluble fiber. Enzymes do not work as they should when they reach the stomach if the acidic solution (stomach acid) is thicker due to dehydration. This will reduce the efficiency of the digestive process and this in turn will slow down the recovery process. Muscles are made up of 75% water, and you need it to help digest the nutrients needed to repair and rebuild muscles that have been damaged. damaged during operation. In a dehydrated state, protein synthesis used to rebuild muscle is much slower, once again delaying recovery from training. A common effect of dehydration is fatigue. With less water in the body, the volume of blood in the body decreases, which means the heart has to work much harder to pump blood around the body to supply the muscles and organs with nutrients and oxygen. This also makes recovery more difficult and can make you feel lethargic and.