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I was told by a friend the other day that when you’re thirsty and drink cold water, before your body starts processing it is has to raise the temperature of the water and until then it just sits like dead weight in your stomach. Any validity to this? Cold water certainly tastes good after a run, but should I be drinking something warmer?
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I find after a run and when I’m lifting weights, I cannot shake the feeling of being dehydrated, no matter how much I drink. And if I drink too much, I start feeling sick and burping up water. Is there something else I should be doing here?
Drink cold water, it lowers your core temperature and hydrates you. Use your lips as a gauge, if they’re dry and chapped, drink more water.
Pee often, and pee clear.
When working outside on a hot day, even if I drink plenty of water, I still seem thirsty. I am wondering if my body is craving electrolytes? Should I try a sports drink?
That’s because water quenches your thirst before you are rehydrated. Sports drinks are sweet to encourage you to drink more but actually only contain small amounts of sodium. 8 ozs of Gatorade only has as much salt as a slice of bread.
Yes, and by lowering core temperature it speeds up the metabolism by making your body work that much harder to maintain it’s temp. So it’s one little tip to give to those who are trying to lose weight. In addition to drinking lots of water, make it as cold as you can drink. Now it’s a minor effect but when combined with a well-rounded plan it is a good idea, imo.
Thirst is short term. Hydration is long term. You have to plan ahead to remain properly hydrated. That means consuming water in quantity well ahead of an event that might leave you dehydrated. By the time you get “thirsty” you are probably beyond a point where consuming water will rehydrate you in sufficient time to revive you. Thirst is a warning but usually it occurs too late. Athletes that are competing in events where hydration can become a concern plan accordingly.
How far ahead of a workout should one drink?
As far as the GQ answer goes about planning ahead to have zero percent dehydration - thirst may be a better guide after all
You body can absorb cold water but it does not stay cold long. It absorbs excess heat from your body and is body temperature by the time it gets to the intestines where it is absorbed.
Are you diabetic? Have you been tested for diabetes? One of the symptoms of untreated diabetes is excessive thirst. Not to be alarmist, I just want to inform you of a possibility.
Also, if you metabolic/health issues aren’t in play, what type of workout is it? Because if it’s anything other than endurance-style training/exercise, like long-distance running or triathalon training, nothing too out of the ordinary is needed to ensure proper hydration. It should be a constant, throughout the day achievement, at best; with maybe a bit more before a workout. But drinking enough liquids (it doesn’t have to be water to ensure hydration) to have a lighter-yellowish color to the urine is a good general rule of thumb. Be hydrated before, during and after a workout; but this doesn’t need to be anything drastic.
Never been tested for diabetes. I’m only getting the thirst issue in the workout, not during the day.
I’m doing cardio for 30-45 min, and lifting weights for about an hour-fifteen.
This is highly unlikely to be substantially true. The body’s first and main strategy when faced with cold is heat conservation via vasoconstriction. Producing extra heat is a last ditch strategy. Any form of even moderate exercise in anything less than extremely cold conditions produces vast amounts of excess heat that your body has to take deliberate steps to lose. So your answer is not only wrong in general, it is dead wrong in the context of this thread.
Does drinking ice water burn calories? | HowStuffWorks 
Ok, it heats up the water not the body.
DSeid’s post is a bit technical but it does touch on how misguided the advice was to athletes in days gone past. Idiot coaches would tell athletes to swish water in their mouth and spit it out. Those coaches were idiots and should all spend some time in Hell. Hydration is important and 20-25 minutes can provide a benefit to the body. (A lot of athletic contests last longer than that). Hydrating during a contest, in moderation, is a good thing, not a bad thing. Even a few minutes is better than nothing.
Suffice to say that you should plan your hydration at least one day ahead of time. Drink more water liquids than your body tells you. Don’t go out drinking alcohol the night before which may leave you dehydrated. If you are flying on an airplane load up on the water.
I’ve seen numerous events where a team, usually college, has traveled to a distant venue and during the game have players on the sidelines with cramps. Hey coach, what about enforcing a curfew and having your trainers make sure that these guys are staying hydrated? The trip wasn’t for party time, it was for game time and national exposure. Ah well,.
Good luck! Believe in water. It is the essence of life.
8 oz water =237 grams
1 calorie raises one gram of water 1 degree C. Assuming your water is 15 degrees C then to get it to body temp (37 C) it needs to be raised 22 degrees. 237*22=5214 or a little over 5 food calories. So if it worked, one glass of cold tap water would burn half a gummi bear.
(did I do that math right? Probably not.)
Yep. My friend did this calculation once and was suddenly very excited about his cold-water diet plan, until I reminded him that food calories are really kilocalories.
In the grand scheme of things, unless you drink a lot of very cold water very quickly, the warming probably just gets lost in so much metabolic noise. I doubt you could even measure it.
You should be drinking Brawndo.
It has what thelabdude needs.
Yes there is a lot of wrong information about this issue on the internet, your cite being a classic example. People are so proud of their ability to remember their high school physics they can’t wait to point out that calories must be burned to raise the temp of the water. The problem is that in their hurry to show off their basic physics, they overlook the crux of the question which is not whether calories are burned but whether extra calories are burned.
The body is a net exporter of waste heat. As one would expect for a system honed towards efficiency by evolution, our body does nothing so stupid as to burn more calories to warm up, while at the same time giving off waste heat that it doesn’t have to.
The first thing the body does when faced with cold is not burn more calories, it is to stop exhausting as much excess heat.
The analogy that really brings it home is one thought up by another poster last time we discussed this topic:
Imagine a car that drives from A to B and in doing so burns a certain amount of fuel. Now imagine that it does the same trip under precisely the same conditions, but with an ice cold can of coke sitting on the engine. When the car arrives at B it will have burned precisely the same amount of fuel, but the can will be warm. How so? Well, the cold can will cool the engine a little, and the thermostat will shut down ever so slightly, and some of the heat that would have been dissipated by the radiator will instead go into the can.
Don’t worry that you got it wrong, so does every physics teacher I’ve heard talk about it, and even our own Cecil. You can read a lot more about it by reading this thread, amongst others.
There is detailed information here:Thermoregulation, temperature and disorders - Mednote.dk.
Read all the threads and that cite then come back and explain to me how sure you are that drinking cold water while exercising will burn more calories. The most you can say is that under some relatively unusual conditions some of the calories to warm the water will be extra calories burned for that purpose.
Apparently too technical, as you completely miss the point:
Let thirst be your guide.
Not only is there no reason to drink more than your body tells you to, doing such can cause harm.
Drinking more than your thirst guides you to drink (ad libitum) does not help in any way but increases the risk of over diluting you body’s natural salt levels (“cause exercise-associated hyponatremia”)
More about exercise-induced hyponatremia.
No, not a major risk during an hour work out, and neither is getting dehydrated enough to interfere with performance if one drinks guided by thirst. Drinking guided by thirst will keep you less than 2% dehydrated which is hydrated enough to not interfere with performance, and eliminate the risk of self-harm. Trust your thirst. Drink exactly what your body tells you to.
Oh Patch,
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Your friend is wrong. Cold water is just fine. As above makes very clear, you have plenty of excess heat that you’ve just produced that will be used to heat it up in a jiffy.
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What’s happening with the urping is that your body has responded to exercise by increasing blood flow to your muscles which requires diverting it from your gut. Things often move slowly in your gut during and after a major work out. Some get heartburn as a result and for some the reduced gut blood flow of endurance activity causes diarrhea, sometimes even bloody diarrhea.
Again, R.P., over-hydration is a very serious risk for endurance athletes. It causes many Emergency Room admissions every year, seizures, ICU stays, and even death. The people at greatest risk are those whose events go over 4 hours, and those, beginner and intermediate level marathoners, half-ironman or longer triathletes, and century riders, are the most likely to take to heart the commonly given but very poor advice to drink more than your body tells you to.
I went into heat exhaustion once from a lack of water.
It wasn’t from a lack of available water (I had 100 oz in a camelback + 2 water bottles of electrolytes)
The problem was I got a bit dehydrated, did not consume any water because I was not thirsty and so I kept getting more and more dehydrated from the heat (100+)
by the end of the day (8 hours of riding) I was a wreck. I was Rick jerky.
Fortunately my riding partner recognized the problem and forced me to drink water, lots of it. I was better a few hours and abot 5 pints of water later.
Since then I force myself to drink at least every 15 minutes when exercising. Just a sip or two but enough to keep me hydrated.