During the athletic glory days of our youth, we were always taught to take in enough water or Gatorade to combat dehydration, but not to overdo it, for fear of cramping up.
It seems as though professional athletes follow the same advice.
Is this true? How does more fluid help bring about cramping?
One of the SCUBA instructors around here doesn’t use a watch, dive table or computer. He insists that a the safe ‘surface interval’ for any dive is four beers. He has never cramped up on the second or third dive of the day, so I’m not sure your premise is true.
If we drank too much water back in high school football, we would just puke it on each other. It was considered preferable to puke on each other on purpose, rather than doing it on accident.
I always assumed that “cramping” was a euphenism for “puking”.
Muscle cramps as a result of exercise are the result of too much electrolyte lost through sweat. It has nothing to do with puking.