It is not normal to be puffy after a long ride or any other form of exercise. Your doctor should check for kidney problems, hormone abnormalities or diabetes. If these tests are normal, you drank way too much during your ride and are lucky that you only suffered from excess fluid retention. You could have developed hyponatremia, a serious condition that can kill you.
Normal healthy kidneys have a limit to how rapidly they can rid your body of excess fluid. If you take in more fluid than your kidneys can clear, fluid accumulates in your blood and dilutes the salt level. Since fluid moves from an area of low salt to high salt, and your brain has far more salt than your blood does; the fluid will move into your brain to causes swelling, seizures and even death.
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Fatigue during hot-weather exercise is caused by lack of water, salt, sugar or calories. Of the four, exercisers are most ignorant of their sodium needs. A study from The University of Otago in New Zealand shows that taking a salty drink prior to competition can help an athlete to exercise longer and harder. (Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, January, 2007; and Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, January 2007).
Athletes who took the salty drink had larger blood volumes and greater endurance. Salt makes you thirsty earlier so you drink more, and salt in your body holds water so you have more water available to meet your needs.
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Sometimes plain water just isn’t enough for the hydration needs of running. As you sweat, you lose water and electolytes, which both need to be replenished during the hydration process. Traditional sports drinks, such as Gatorade and Powerade, have offered viable electrolyte replacement drinks for years, but their high sugar content translates into an unsavory aftertaste in the opinion of a variety of testers. Moreover, hydration packs are particularly difficult to clean after holding sugary sports drinks.
In an effort to address these issues, CamelBak recently introduced their Elixir Electrolyte Enhanced Hydration as a convenient, no-sugar, no-mess hydration alternative.
The ingredients alone make the Elixir tablets an appealing choice. The electrolyte blend of Manganese, Sodium, Magnesium, Calcium, and Chloride works together to re-hydrate the body more quickly and more effectively. Other nutritional information to note is that each tablet contains only 10 calories and over 100% of the daily value of Vitamin C.
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It may. During hard exercise, particularly in hot weather, you sweat and lose a lot of water and salt. Your performance does not suffer until you lose a very large amount of fluid, about five percent of your body weight or more.
However, when you lose so much fluid that your performance suffers, you cannot catch up during that competition. That’s why you need to take in fluids during events that last more than 90 minutes. If your event lasts more than 2.5 hours, you also need to take in calories and salt.
According to a study from The University of Birmingham in England, cold drinks taste better so you will drink more (Experimental Physiology, September 2006). The researchers concluded that cold drinks also improve endurance during hot weather by acting as a heat sink, decreasing the rise in body temperature and therefore reducing the effects of heat stress.
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Excessive intake of salt causes high blood pressure in some, but not all, people. High blood pressure increases risk for heart attacks, strokes, and kidney damage.
Why do some people develop high blood pressure when they take in a lot of salt, while others do not?
A recent study from the University of Minnesota shows that middle-aged people who start an exercise program lose their tendency to develop high blood pressure when they take in extra salt (Journal of Human Hypertension, May 2006).
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Drinks that contain salt and sugar are better than just plain water during exercise, unless you are also eating foods.
A study from the Medical College of Georgia shows that tennis players have lower body temperatures when they drink fluid with electrolytes and sugar, rather than just plain water (British Journal of Sports Medicine, May 2006). Higher body temperatures during exercise slow you down and tire you earlier.
More than 80 percent of the energy that supplies your muscles is lost as heat. Less than 20 percent drives your muscles. So during exercise, your heart has to cool your body by pumping hot blood from your muscles to your skin, as well as pumping oxygen-rich blood to your muscles. If you heart has difficulty serving both functions, it cannot pump enough hot blood from muscles and your temperature rises.
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