What Is Hydration? (Part 1)
This will be part 1 of a multi-part series for everyone, but in particular, the USA Weightlifting community. If one were to look for a topic that most people agree upon in performance athletics, hydration might be one of the few topics that does not produce a fistfight or an interaction that looks as unruly as typical Youtube comments. From mainstream medicine to alternative health practitioners, “hydration” is something that is generally agreed to be a good thing. But what IS hydration? Most people, when asked the question above, will correctly associate hydration with water, but this is at best only half of the story. In chemistry, “hydration” is defined as something like this: The process of combining a substance chemically with water molecules. This is actually a helpful insight, as proper hydration from a health and performance perspective is concerned not only with water, which plays a remarkable number of roles: from improving cardiac output due to proper fluid