Your sweat rate: How to check it and why it matters

When I work with any athlete, one of the first questions I ask is, "what is your sweat rate?". Ninety-five percent of the time, I get a blank stare. When creating a performance nutrition plan, knowing your sweat rate is critical to make sure fluid replacement during exercise is adequate (but not too high). Here is why:

The importance of water
Water plays major roles in the body at any given time, but especially during exercise. During exercise, water inside your body cools your core and muscles, keeping you from overheating too quickly. This helps your perform stronger and longer. In addition, water transports nutrients to your muscle for use in exercise metabolism and then "cleans up" by transporting metabolites away from your muscle to be filtered and excreted. Water plays a key role in preventing dehydration, which also keeps the athlete mentally "on" throughout the workout. Finally, water acts as a cushion to your organs to protect them in case of impact during sports.

Pre-workout Eating: Don't do what I did

Because I work professionally as a sports dietitian, I consider myself pretty good at workout fueling. So good that sometimes I forgot to use my head which results in really bad workout fueling. That is exactly what happened this morning. To benefit all of you, I want to share my mistake. I will tell you what happened first and then explain why it happened along with what I should have done differently...the same process I use with my clients.

What happened
Wednesday morning is my spin class morning. Spin is at 8:15am. My kids are generally up early (6am-ish). Typically my husband is up with my daughter at 6am, I get up to feed my son around 6:30am and the morning progresses from there. This morning was different in that I got up with my daughter at 6am and my son slept in, which meant I woke him up at around 7am. I ate breakfast with my daughter at 6:15am before tending to my son. I left the house around 7:45am for class.

How-To: Training Your Stomach to Tolerate Fuel During Exercise

Many athletes that walk through my door report difficulty tolerating food or even fluids during workouts. But, fueling during exercise lasting longer than 60 minutes is hugely important to overall performance and body composition goals. So, training the stomach like athletes train muscles needs to happen. The question is, how exactly does one DO that? Well, I'm glad you asked....

1. Start with your easiest workout
By easiest, I mean the workout that is either lowest intensity or during which you seem to tolerate fuel best. It may mean a cycling workout instead of running, a lifting day instead of speed or a long swim day instead of dry land.

How to train your body for fueling during a run

This week, enjoy a guest post from my intern, Ashley, who is training for her first full marathon. She offers some excellent thoughts about the difficulty but necessity of training your stomach like you train your muscles.

Be Extraordinary,

RDKate
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I have run multiple races in my lifetime 5, 10, 15k’s, half-marathons. Now I am tackling training for my first full marathon. Previously my training regimen included hydrating pre- and post-run, but I never fueled during a run. I couldn’t tolerate eating/drinking anything other than water while I was exercising or even within an hour of exercising. After the Rock n’ Roll Chicago half-marathon didn’t go as well as planned; I knew that something needed to change in my training. Even though I did stomach Gatorade with water at a few of the aid stations during the race, but it was not enough fuel and I felt exhausted the last 3 miles. I needed to train my stomach to handle Gatorade and gels to fuel my body for my marathon.