Why am I struggling with hydration

Posted on November 4, 2019

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Dehydration can impact your training

A lot of people don't realise dehydration can actually have a significant impact on your training ability, but also muscle aches, cramps, twitches, all that sort of stuff is all associated with dehydration. '

What it comes back to is not necessarily water intake, but how your body uses that water. So in your body you have cells, right. Inside a cell you have intracellular fluid, outside of the cell you have extracellular fluid.

Have the right mineral positioned in the right part of your body so that you're actually hydrated, not just drinking water that's flushing straight through you. So the way it works is intracellular minerals like magnesium, that's in this Endura as an example.

So Endura's Low Carb Hydration product. So what happens is when you put this in your water it actually makes your body use water appropriately.

The magnesium, it's an intracellular nutrient, goes inside the cells of your body, and then what happens is water gets sucked into that cell and then the water is actually trapped inside the cells of your body and that's when you are truly hydrated. But magnesium plays a major role in muscle energy metabolism as well as the aches, pains, twitches question.

So if you are getting a lot of those symptoms, magnesium is most certainly a problem, but hydration in general is also something to be fully aware of.

What can be some other reasons for dryness of the mouth?

Dryness of mouth normally comes from a high sodium intake. Magnesium intake alone is not 100% the miracle cure. It's still a good idea to do it in conjunction with a few dietary changes.

The first thing 100% to get onto is increasing green leafy vegetables and things like that, that are high in minerals like magnesium, but also getting rid of excess sodium consumption.

Try and avoid foods that are high in salt, I.e like packets of chips, you know things like that which are obviously highly salted. But also even when you're doing cooking, you wanna use a Himalayan type of salt.

Still getting dry mouth? Reduce your salt intake. Even Himalayan salt.

Himalayan salt has more minerals in it, so its got a broader spectrum of minerals and you want to avoid normal table salt, that a lot of people do use. Himalayan salt, is still quite sodium dominant, so what you wanna try and do is get your magnesium to sodium ratios back into balance.

What sort of frequency should I consume a magnesium supplement?

Ideally, over the course of time your bodies magnesium stores will build up, and that's the aim of the game, is to actually make you hold sufficient amounts of magnesium so that when you're drinking water, with or without this, that water is appropriately put into the cells of your body.

In the early days you'll still feel, a little dry in the mouth and you'll still have of those symptoms, but within, probably five days to a week, I'd say you'd start to notice a significant difference in those things. And water then would be sufficient, and ideally you wanna get down to a maintenance dose of using this once every morning, for example, in a glass of water. All of the water you drink from there on for the rest of the day will be appropriately used in your body.

Is it possible to start feeling good after 5 days?

There's two schools of thought on this, right. You can try and increase your magnesium levels in the short term by going with higher doses more regularly, which is 100% fine and works, right. Or the other option is, you go with one dose per day and you do that for a longer period of time and then you end up with the same result.

The downside... is easily managed.

The only downside of magnesium products is magnesium sucks water towards itself which is why it works in terms of sucking water into the cells of your body.

The downside of that is if you have too much magnesium in your bowel at any one time, it also sucks water into your bowel, and can give you loose bowel motions. That's the only reason, if you ever were using a hydration product, or a product that's high in magnesium, and you were experiencing any of those symptoms, best thing is, it's not a problem at all.

You're still getting the benefit and all the rest of it, but the best thing to do is to just reduce the dosage to the point that you then no longer have loose bowel motions.