All things are relative which makes sweeping statements like this total bollox. It might be you could prove that super mild dehydration does not harm performance but I’d be pretty sure that not drinking for 3 days and being on my death bed is not going to make getting within an hour of my 25 mile TT pb very achievable! The tricky bit is knowing what super mild feels like and I’d imagine most of us would struggle to judge it.

Jesus.

Saturday night…and even I am out with better things to do than argue about this shit.

😀

Ben Goldacre to the forum please. These are “Mail-esque” articles based on studies using only a handful of people. The one about stretching gave no guide on how the athletes were asked to stretch – quite likely they overdid it on cold muscles and pulled something.

I agree with ooOOoo – cat’s know what they’re on about.

teacake – completely agree. A combination of poorly worded headlines, misrepresentation of study results and accepted wisdom (rugby warm up stretches moved from static to dynamic about 10 years ago) dressed up as new revelations.

My thoughts on reading the link were the great Ben Goldacre catch all quote “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that…”

This is true (this isn’t an argument, it’s a fact), it’s not a myth.

The study that they mention was stupid, everyone knows static stretching is for after exercise, not before.

As for the injury part, how do you expect stretching to prevent knee pain? Your knee is a joint, not a muscle. Stretching is about muscles. And it does increase flexibility, which is a good thing in lots of ways.

TBF I’ve heard that dehydration doesn’t actually effect performance as badly as most people think, although it depends on where you draw the line between being hydrated and being dehydrated I guess.

Drink little and often kids.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDND#Hold_Your_Wee_for_a_Wii_controversy

Shock news the internet is full of crap, almost amazed you didn’t need to pay to follow the link

#10 seemed to work for Lance

Well that’s conclusive then. Improve your running time by sweating more. Does anybody know how to train to lose more weight by sweating?

as I understand it. what the excess hydration people are arguing against is the idea that you should drink before you are thirsty – they argue that the bo.y is very good at telling you when it needs water, and that you should just follow its signals. They’ve done studies showing that drinking before you’re thirsty actually decreases athletic performance compared to either drinking when you feel thirsty, or even compared to not drinking at allfor some lengths of races.

It’s obvious that many people hydrate massively more than they need to by the huge difference between the amounts of water you see people drinking on mountainbike rides – people who ride for three hours and want a three litre camelbak, and you compare it with a three hour road ride, where most people might ge some way through a 750ml bottle (and probably at a much higher intensity than your average mountain bike ride).

or look at runners – many club runners I’ve met just don’t carry water for normal hour to hour and a half runs. It certainly doesn’t seem like it slows them down.

It’s amazing that the human race managed to survive so long before we had sports scientists telling us how much to drink.

There appear to be some odd psychology at play too – at least for me.
If I go for say a 2 hour bike ride, I’ll take water with me because I feel thirsty, but with the odd exception I wouldn’t bother for a 2 hour run. What I don’t know is if that thirst with cycling is genuine or sort of Pavlovian response – get bike – get camelback.

Bit of a stupid thing to say. We’re talking about optimal athletic performance, not survival. I’d have thought that was startlingly obvious.

I’m sure the two have been linked many times over the millenia.

My great-great-great……great grandad (Steve) had to run all day to catch an antelope once. Saved the family. Nice one.