According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , adults reported drinking an average of only 44 ounces of water per day over three years. Continue reading to learn just how much water you need, and the strategies you can take to stay hydrated throughout your day.

The human body is approximately 55 to 65 percent water, making fluid intake essential for numerous body functions. The benefits of optimal hydration include maintaining your core temperature through thermoregulation, removing cellular waste through respiration, perspiration, and digestion, and reducing stress on your cardiovascular system.

Dehydration decreases blood volume —the amount of blood circulating throughout your body—and to compensate, your heart rate and blood pressure go up.

Staying hydrated to maintain homeostasis in the body is particularly important during physical exertion. Exercise is a stressor all on its own, so if you add dehydration not to mention a hot or cold environment , your body has to work in overdrive to maintain fluid balance, optimal performance, and safe bodily functions.

Proper fluid intake before, during, and after a workout can enhance performance during the activity, protect your organ systems , and improve your recovery following a challenging session. Optimal hydration is also essential for brain health and function.

Even mild dehydration is associated with impaired cognition —mental processes required to perceive, process, and produce information—which is necessary to accomplish everyday tasks.

Proper hydration can improve concentration, memory, and reaction time. Staying hydrated is especially important if you are recovering from an injury. Optimal hydration helps to reduce inflammation and swelling after an injury, brings increased blood flow and delivery of nutrients to the injured area, and aids in the removal of waste products.

Alongside your standard rehabilitation program for soft-tissue injuries, keeping your water intake up can help you return to normal movement faster and, in some cases, expedite your overall recovery time. You may also find joint pain is more prevalent when you are dehydrated.

Up to 80 percent of joint cartilage consists of water, providing a cushion to prevent bones from coming in contact with one another. Synovial joints like your knees, hips, shoulders, or elbows have joint capsules filled with thick synovial fluid. When adequately hydrated, the gel-like liquid provides nutrients, shock absorption, and reduced friction, enabling smooth motion and joint mobility.

You lose water constantly throughout your day. For your body to function properly, replenishing its water supply is essential—but how much water do you need?

The most popular recommendation is to aim for eight cups of water a day. While easy to remember and a reasonable goal, you may need more water if you live an active lifestyle or live in hot, humid, or high-altitude environments.

The U. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine determined that an adequate daily fluid intake is about These recommendations cover fluids from water, other beverages, and food.

It's important to replace water as it's lost to stave off dehydration and maintain peak athletic performance. Challenging exercise can drain your body of electrolytes : special minerals that help the brain, heart, gut, and muscles send and receive electrical signals.

Electrolytes are critical for next-level athletic performance as well as basic biological functioning. Losing sodium and chloride can reduce power, strength, agility, skill, and concentration, all of which are essential for elite athletes.

Additional electrolytes are lost when you sweat: calcium, magnesium, and phosphate, all of which are important for muscle health and muscle repair post-workout.

Even the best of the best can lose their edge near the end of training sessions, races, and games if they're low on electrolytes. But not everyone sweats the same way, and athletes who lose too many electrolytes can experience performance-hindering cramps.

Have you ever noticed white grit on your skin after an incredibly hard work out? That's essentially salt. If your body had to be consistently primed to perform?

Elite athletes don't have the option of taking a day off when they aren't feeling their best. To continue improving their performance, they must be prepared to work harder day after day.

That's where a rehydration solution such as Pedialyte® Sport comes in. New Pedialyte® Sport is an advanced hydration option formulated especially for athletes - with five key electrolytes for fast rehydration and muscle support. Even if you're not a professional athlete, following a concrete hydration and recovery game plan can help you take your performance to the next level.

Head in Hydrated: "A common source of dehydration during exercise is starting the workout in a hypohydrated state," Williams explains. This poor planning can lead to workouts that feel harder, and that results in poorer performance.

Color Check: Check your urine's color to determine whether you're hydrated heading into your workouts. Your urine should be a light, straw-like color. If it's any darker, you're likely dehydrated and will need to level up with fluids. Diet Matters: One perk of specialized hydration beverages such as Pedialyte Sport is that, apart from being specifically formulated for recovery, they're ready to drink on the go and on the field.

Additionally, the foods you eat are also a considerable part of hydration and nutrition for recovery. Water-rich fruits and vegetables boiled whole grains such as pasta and oatmeal, and milk and yogurt are all great sources of the fluids and electrolytes you need to replenish during recovery.

Weigh In: Step on the scale both before and after your workouts. Be sure you're undressed and have an empty bladder for the most accurate results. During training, each pound of weight loss equals 16 fluid ounces of sweat lost, plus fluids consumed mid-workout.

It seems like elite athletes live in a world that's separate from the rest of us — one without gravity and that moves in fast forward — but the routines they use to power through each workout can also work for you.

If you're thinking of starting a new fitness routine or trying to elevate your nutrition, talk to your doctor about the safest ways to get started.

How Long Does It Take to Create a Healthy Habit That Lasts? Understanding Sports Nutrition for Teens. If you're a parent of a teen athlete, you want to see your child thrive in their sport.

But knowing what and how much to feed your young athlete can be challenging. You know nutrition is an important part of an active lifestyle, but which foods best support energy levels and help to improve sports performance? Understanding the three main components of nutrition for athletes — pre-workout fueling, hydration and post-workout recovery — is a good place to start.

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Most of us realize the importance of hydration while exercising; drinking water before, during, and after workouts regulates your body temperature, delivers nutrients and oxygen to your cells, and removes waste.

But did you know that proper hydration is also an essential part of the recovery process if you have an injury? Exercise causes muscles to become stronger by breaking them down, and then rebuilding them using muscle protein synthesis.

However, this process requires the muscles to be hydrated. If you are dehydrated following an injury, your recovery process slows immensely and halts the protein synthesis that rebuilds muscles.

The body transforms carbohydrates into a form of sugar called glucose that is used for energy. The glucose, in turn, is converted into Glycogen, a form of sugar that is easily stored in our muscles and liver, to provide instant energy. Water plays a key role in the digestion process.

Saliva is crucial to digest and absorb the nutrients you eat. It is responsible for the beginning stages breaking down food.

Rehydrating properly after an injury aids in the efficiency of the digestive process, which also enhances your recovery. This is why carbohydrates are so important for athletes to consume before and after training and sometimes during training if the activity takes a long time to complete.

longer than minutes. It is important to eat or drink carbohydrate-rich sources grains, fruits, and vegetables in the hours leading up to training and in the hours after training.

Two to four hours before training or competition: Prior to training or competition, athletes should try to consume slower-digesting carbohydrates, like grains and starchy vegetables rice, quinoa, potatoes, pasta, oats, etc. two to four hours before training.

Less than two hours before training or competition: As you get closer and closer to training time one to two hours before , athletes need to consume faster-digesting carbohydrates, like fruits, vegetables, and dairy so the body is able to get blood going to the muscles and brain versus to the stomach for digestion.

Your body only has so much blood in it, and it will prioritize where that blood goes based on the importance of the bodily function. After training or competition: After training or competition, refueling is also important. As you train, your body uses energy to run, jump, push, pull, and stay focused.

For the first four to six hours after competition, it is critical to take in a higher amount of carbohydrates to replenish glycogen stores in the muscles and liver. It is recommended to consume For example if you weigh 75kg, you should consume 75g of carbohydrates per hour for four hours.

As you can see, one cup of pasta and one cup of chocolate milk would get you right in that range in the first hour, which really is not all that much. Mix up your carbohydrates over those first four hours to make sure you are also taking in important micronutrients vitamins and minerals as well.

The most important nutrient for repairing muscle after intense exercise is protein. Proteins are broken down into amino acids through digestion. Those amino acids are the building blocks of muscles and other tissues, like bones, tendons, and other connective tissue and help repair those tissues that are damaged through exercise.

The process the body goes through to repair those damaged tissues is called protein synthesis, which is a metabolic process that binds amino acids to the proteins in those tissues muscle, tendon, bone, etc. to help repair them, and make them stronger for the next training session or competition.

It is important to eat between 1. Protein timing after training, although important, it is more important to hit the above range throughout the day. In those first hours after intense exercise make sure to take in protein to go along with the higher amount of carbohydrates to optimize your recovery.

During intense activity, our bodies increase the heart rate and breathing rate as intensity increases. As a result, the body tries to cool itself down through sweating. As we sweat and lose water and other nutrients, our bodies need to replace that lost water and minerals electrolytes in order to maintain our performance levels.

It is in water that all chemical reactions in the body take place and therefore, hydration is critical to optimal body function. As a general rule, follow the Galpin Equation developed by Dr. Dehydration can quickly impact your mental and physical performance negatively, so staying hydrated is always important, but it's even more important to athletes wanting to perform their best.

Electrolytes, when dissolved in water, are electrically charged minerals that play critical roles in hydration, muscular performance and other critical body functions.

Electrolytes include sodium, phosphate, potassium, calcium, magnesium, chloride, and bicarbonate. Your body needs both water and electrolytes to function properly, in part because electrolytes regulate the balance of fluids.

Additionally, electrolytes aid in building new tissue, maintaining pH levels, transmitting nerve signals. Eat a healthy diet full of foods high in electrolytes and drink plenty of water without overdoing it.

If you're an athlete, consider a water-based intra-workout product that contains electrolytes for hydration and Amino Acids BCAAs or EAAs for Recovery Support.

The importance of maintaining adequate electrolytes in our system impacts our recovery. Simply put, we can only perform as well as we recover. Intense training or a strenuous and physical day on the job both take a toll on our muscles, connective tissues, and critical fluid levels.

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BENEFITS OF BCAAs. COMBATS FATIGUE Increased BCAA levels in the muscles delay fatigue by limiting the production of Tryptophan in the brain. BCAAs help prevents the body from catabolizing muscle to produce natural BCAA for energy.

Love it! Please continue to increase your product line. I have been rarely sore the day after and I am always ready to get after again! It is absolutely amazing for recovery!

My husband works in construction and after a long hard day he will drink it and not be sore the next day, my teenage son with drink them after a work out or my younger kids when they are sick, works better than gatorade.

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We all hear "stay hydrated", but what does hydration mean and why is staying hydrated important, especially for athletes? According to H. Every part of your body, including your muscles, needs water to function properly. Therefore, staying hydrated can make a real difference in athletic performance with hydrated athletes' bodies being able to perform critical functions more optimally than those of dehydrated athletes.

In general, you are dehydrated when your water intake does not meet your body's water requirements. However, when you train or compete, your body utilizes water at a much greater rate causing dehydration to set in much quicker. Dehydration can quickly impact your mental and physical performance negatively, so staying hydrated is always important, but it's even more important to athletes wanting to perform their best.

Electrolytes, when dissolved in water, are electrically charged minerals that play critical roles in hydration, muscular performance and other critical body functions. Electrolytes include sodium, phosphate, potassium, calcium, magnesium, chloride, and bicarbonate.

Your body needs both water and electrolytes to function properly, in part because electrolytes regulate the balance of fluids.