We are over 800 posts into a discussion of working out. I wouldn’t think getting into some of the details would be so bothersome to you.
And I’m not talking about reinventing the wheel. I’m just offering some information on why it looks the way it does.
I’m really perplexed on the point of your posts.
The Role of Water Homeostasis in Muscle Function and Frailty: A Review - PMC.
The reason creatine is a popular and effective workout supplement is because it helps force water into the muscles.
I am embarrassed that I didn’t already know of that paper, especially given how much it apparently is the antecedent of so much of my daily discussion with parents!
Yes it has great parallel to this discussion. From the article the bottom line:
The key thing was to provide healthy food and let children eat as much or as little of it as they wanted.
Parents sometimes come in wanting to know exact amounts, from formula or expressed breast milk in the bottle, or amounts of each baby food. They have battles with stubborn toddlers. The advice from early on is that the baby is the expert in the room on amounts. For toddlers exactly parallel with this discussion - as parents we have three rules to follow: offer a variety of healthy options; don’t offer unhealthy options very frequently; then the hard one - look the other way. Don’t be the feeding fascist and don’t be a short order cook. Don’t fight fights you will lose. Yes it all goes to hell as the processed and sweetened crap gets introduced which overrides the circuitry.
Re creatine, and how it can
Exactly. Drinking lots of water doesn’t translate to full muscles. It makes you pee more. Creatine forces water retention. It gets in cells and water follows the gradient. Thus users often quickly gain lean body mass from water plumped cells. Articles talk about being sure to drink more water when starting but reality here is that the advice is superfluous. Your body’s intact thirst mechanisms (assuming you have intact mechanisms) will respond to less extracellular water and you will automatically drink enough more.
Older adults can begin to have dysfunction in their thirst mechanisms and indeed can get low level chronic dehydration. But advice to healthy adults or children with intact thirst mechanisms and kidney function with free access to water of “drink X ounces a day!” is silly: drink water when thirsty and stop when not. Your body knows how much water you need better than any calculation you can do. It won’t store extra in muscles making them fuller. Maybe the frequent bathroom runs are good exercise though?
Details don’t bother me. And details can be fun. But details mislead and are misunderstood by some.
ETA over a slightly longer time frame creatine may have modest other effects as well. A separate discussion but should be acknowledged.
Lol, when i was nursing i read advice and was particularly annoyed by one snippet that said, “no you don’t need to drink extra, just drink to satisfy your thirst”. Which i suppose was true, in a sense. But i was thirsty ALL THE FUCKING TIME and drank far more water than when i wasn’t nursing. To the extent that that year, i decided i couldn’t safely fast on Yom Kippur, and broke my fast several times to drink water.
Who said that? You seem intent on criticizing my posts. Did I try to advocate for some absolute amount?
So advice to drink lots of water is good.
And so my advice that water makes muscles feel full is accurate, too.
No, you don’t need to drink so much you are constantly peeing. But if you are writing down things to consider when getting in shape, staying “well hydrated” is on the list.
No you didn’t. That is a separate common bit of “general advice” given in the spirit of determining what is “proper” from those who know a little.
For older adults with failing thirst mechanisms there may be a benefit to drinking more than thirst guides. Not a gerontologist but I would also be concerned that they could overshoot the mark too, especially if they also have renal dysfunction. Not sure if the parallel to marathon hydration applies but the bigger risk to health doing a hot weather endurance event is to those who drink too much, not those who drink when thirst guides. We survive mild dehydration better than over hydration. Some following the advice about the need to stay well hydrated during an endurance event have caused themselves serious harm, including deaths.
“Drinking lots” may be of psychological benefit for intake purposes for some. I dunno.
No it is not. Not at all. Not in the same galaxy as accurate.
Nah. No more than having to write down “breathe” is.
I was enjoying this thread until the last couple of days. Can you guys cool your tempers a bit?
I hope this is not Junior modding.
Ok, doctor
[/quote]
Ageing is characterized by a progressive process of dehydration that parallels a progressive decline in muscle strength. The relationship between these phenomena is not well understood, but a recent review has hypothesized that age-related hyperosmotic stress and cell dehydration could be major contributors to age-related muscle strength loss, frailty and functional decline [19]. The fact that age impairs the thirst sensation and the capacity to concentrate urine [20] favours low-grade chronic dehydration and hyperosmotic stress, leading to intracellular dehydration (cell shrinkage), an important inflammatory response, increased reactive oxygen species production and certain metabolic and cardiovascular disorders…
Our study reinforces the idea that low-grade chronic cell dehydration may play a role in muscle function in aged populations, suggesting the need to pay more attention to hydration status in persons aged over 65 years.
[/quote]
(My emphasis)
And that’s before getting into anecdotal reports of those who do work out hard: being well hydrated makes your muscles feel fuller.
For those seeking advice, and not dismissiveness, a simple rule of thumb is to monitor your urine. It should be transparent, although if it’s entirely clear you’ve probably gone too far.
Every time I post something there seems to be a response of “that’s not that important” or “people don’t need to go into that sort of detail”
I’m not sure why I’m being nit picked liked this.
I let it go earlier when it was a discussion of hypertrophy and things like farmer’s carry; it’s not worth my time. But it’s persistent, and I’m not sure why it is.
I sit here, aching unpleasantly from yesterday’s workout, thinking, “i don’t belong in this thread full of people who enjoy working out.” It’s all healthy, “i used that muscle” aches, not anything that suggests i did anything wrong. But i interpret it as discomfort, even if i know, intellectually, that i need a certain amount of discomfort to maintain my health and strength.
But i feel you’ve been picked on because in addition to technical details (like info on complete protein) you’ve given more misinformation than usual. I think it all comes from an excess of enthusiasm.
Every muscle shows! Well, no, of course not. But i guess in a broader sense if you have more stability in your movements and more confidence that all your parts are working, that “shows”.
Drinking more water makes your muscles feel fuller! No, not unless you were dehydrated. But if you work out heavily and sweat a lot, i suppose you may experience minor dehydration, and maybe drinking will l actually will make your muscles feel different? Certainly not an experience I’ve ever had, but it might be your experience.
It’s nice that you get so much pleasure from working out. I wish i could. I will try to read your posts in that light.
Hard to say. I see that “fatigue” is listed as a symptom of low blood protein, but not libido specifically.
But if you were avoiding animal products (meat, eggs, dairy), then you may have been low on B12 (which also causes low energy) so that could also be the issue.
Done before reading further. 
My sense is that this thread is more aimed at you than the already faithful. It is preaching the good word of exercise and specifically of including some strength training as part of the mix.
But as a fellow Jew I’m on board with the idea that your accepting the joy of exercise in your life is less important than the practices you observe … and all denominations are welcome!
On the topic of creatine, one thing that I’ve theorized is that people who don’t respond to creatine supplementation are people who get sufficient quantities through their diet.
Creatine response could be read as a signal that we’re not consuming enough meat, relative to your body’s preference?
I almost never feel thirsty so I have to remind myself to drink water, even when exercising fairly strenuously. I’ve always been this way though so I don’t think it’s an aging thing. It would be hard for me to go overboard.
I’m off for a week of hiking but plan to join my local gym when I get back. It has one really great yoga teacher which is an extra incentive. She does a fairly rigorous kind of yoga which can be a really good workout in its own right.
I feel like there are three stages of thirst:
There may be more beyond that, I’ve never been without water long enough to know.
The first isn’t really thirst, it’s kinda a lack of saturation. Right before my Yom Kippur fast begins, i drink as much water as i can, and at some point i just can’t drink any more. It’s not a full stomach, water passes out of my stomach quickly most of the time. It’s just that i really don’t want more water.
The second is normal thirst. And sometimes, i feel that way, pour myself a glass of water, and suddenly realize I’ve swallowed it in two long gulps and I’m refilling my glass. Yeah, i was thirsty.
The third is less common for me, but i feel it sometimes at the end of a hike, or, a lot when i was nursing.
I was sooo thirsty when i was nursing. Which is funny, because it’s not like i was actually producing all that much milk, in terms of the amount of water i needed to replace for it. Of course, i was also ravenously hungry when i was pregnant, and gained a ton of weight, and gave birth to tiny skinny babies. I think my metabolism wasn’t well tuned to having kids.
@JaneA I’m guessing you don’t notice stage 2. I don’t know if there’s anything you can do about that other than making a note to drink from time to time. But you might try thinking about what signs there are of that kind of thirst.
A great teacher is really valuable. I’m sure I’d have given up working out ages ago if i didn’t enjoy my trainer.
This sounds about right. When hiking it’s helpful to carry water in a bladder in my day pack and have the tube right at clavicle level. I’m much more likely to sip as I go along.
@Mighty_Mouse I hope you can forgive me for posting this correction to potentially dangerous misinformation. The following is one of several consensus statements.
Since drinking fluid volume above sweat and urinary losses during and after activity is the main pathophysiological mechanism underlying asymptomatic, symptomatic and fatal cases of EAH, prevention is dependent on drinking less. Thirst should provide adequate stimulus for preventing excess dehydration and markedly reduce the risk of developing EAH in all sports. Physiologically-driven thirst has been defined as a “generalized, deep seated feeling of desire for water”145 and is an evolutionarily conserved, finely tuned, regulatory mechanism serving to protect both plasma osmolality and circulating plasma volume.146 Osmoreceptors located within the circumventricular organs of the brain (highly vascularized structures located around the third and fourth ventricles and characterized by the lack of a blood–brain barrier that are points of communication between the blood, the brain parenchyma, and the cerebral spinal fluid) and baroreceptors located within the aortic arch, carotid sinus and great veins provide “real-time” neural input to higher centers of the brain which continuously and simultaneously coordinate the regulation of both thirst and AVP secretion. Thus, there are physiological sensing mechanisms in place to prompt when to drink and therefore guard against excessive dehydration. Earlier published recommendations to begin drinking before thirst was largely meant for situations where sweating rates were high, above maximal rates of gastric emptying, and dehydration would rapidly accrue over time. Unfortunately, this advice has fostered the misconception that thirst is a poor guide to fluid replacement and has facilitated inadvertent overdrinking and pathological dilutional EAH.
I think we all can agree that people need a healthy and varied diet. Exercisers have even more need for fluid and protein, and creatine has some modest benefits. Educated people disagree on the specifics and nutritional studies are hard to do well and have led to wildly inconsistent advice over the years.
People who are passionate about exercise can be very focused on goals and have a tendency to want black-and-white answers to complex questions - What is the minimum protein I need? Which is better cardio or weights? What magic supplement lets me take shortcuts and speeds my progress? Which foods are super? What exact whatever is optimal?
This thread is about the benefits of exercise. Some brief discursions are fine and even welcome. But a detailed debate might merit its own thread - please create a new one if you feel inclined to argue these and other points extensively.