Skip to main content

Posts

Is your sweat rate negatively impacting your health and performance?

  As the weather gets warmer, I often get emails from athletes asking me about my recommendations for sweat testing or if I can review sweat test analysis. Interestingly, almost every time I speak with an athlete in regards to sweat rate and sodium loss, they give a lot of focus to sodium. While sodium is important and plays a role in sport drinks (and in your daily diet), you can't load your body with sodium and expect your body to perform well if you are exercising in a dehydrated state. The   sweating response is a thermoregulatory mechanism designed to help cool down the body. Dehydration increases in hot conditions. Dehydration occurs from sweat loss. When you sweat you lose fluids. If you don't replenish these fluids as you are exercising, your blood volume drops, which causes your blood to get thicker. This makes it harder for your heart to supply blood to your muscles. As a result, your heart has to work even harder to pump that blood. Additionally, when fluid levels dr
Recent posts

3 days in Cape Town South Africa

  After the 4-stage PE Plett MTB event, we were shuttled back to the PE airport. Safair doesn't allow you to check in for your flight at the airport until 2 hours prior to departure so we had to wait almost 2 hours in the airport lobby before our early evening flight. We were pretty exhausted as we had a 7am race start that morning (Sat Feb 24th), raced for almost 3 hours, finished the race, showered, got our awards, waited a few hours for the shuttle to leave, sat in the shuttle for 90 minutes and then arrived to the airport. Although we had our bikes (and cases) driven to the race thanks to Manic Cycles , we flew back with our bikes to Cape Town.  After checking in for our flights, it was a breeze through security and then we went to the Bidvest Premier Lounge to wait until our flight was boarding. I was really excited to have some good food options after 4 days of not-so-great vegetarian options.  Our flight arrived at 8:20pm in Cape Town and after collecting our suitcases and