Drink Up!

BY KATHLEEN

Hydra­tion is cru­cial to your health, but in the sum­mer, it is cru­cial to the pre­ven­tion of heat ill­ness. If your activ­ity lasts an hour or less, water is the best source of hydra­tion. Longer activ­i­ties will impli­cate elec­trolytes, and then sports drinks is the bet­ter choice (alter­na­tively, water enhanced with ½ tsp of salt per 16 o.z.). Stay away from caf­feinated or car­bon­ated beverages.

Pre-hydration is as impor­tant as post-workout hydra­tion. Thirst is not a good indi­ca­tor. By the time you feel thirsty, you are dehy­drated. Dur­ing the work­out, you should be con­sum­ing 8 o.z. of water for every twenty min­utes of activ­ity. After your work­out, remem­ber to rehy­drate. If you are feel­ing dehy­drated, in addi­tion to flu­ids, try a banana, some pickle juice, or a lit­tle mustard.

Don’t waste your drink­ing water by pour­ing it on your head. Pour­ing water on the skin does lit­tle to decrease core body temperature.

Finally, one more rea­son to wear your sun block: Sun­burned skin is less effi­cient at sweating.

Ice Ice Baby!

BY LAUREN

Great work this morn­ing, run­ners! I saw both groups in action and all of you were cov­er­ing a lot of ground in lit­tle time.

As Andrew men­tioned dur­ing the cool-down stretch, a cold shower or ice bath can help your sore mus­cles recover quicker. You can also try using an ice pack on any spe­cific sore spots.

Don’t own an ice pack? Here’s how you can make your own:

THINGS YOU’LL NEED

• (2) quart-sized Ziploc® Freezer bags *
• 1.5 cups of water
• 0.5 cup of rub­bing alcohol

PREPARATION

1. Fill (1) Ziploc® Freezer bag with the water
2. Add rub­bing alcohol
3. Gen­tly squeeze out any air and seal the bad tightly
4. Mix the liq­uids by squeez­ing gently
5. Place bag inside the sec­ond bag so your ice pack is double-bagged for protection
6. Place bag in the freezer until frozen (sev­eral hours)
7. BONUS: add blue food col­or­ing so that your home­made pack looks like the fancy ones you can buy in a sport­ing goods store!

The trick is that the alco­hol keeps the water from freez­ing com­pletely, so you end up with a bag of slushy liq­uid, which is ideal for plac­ing around your joints.

Be sure to always use a towel or cloth between the ice pack and your skin, and if pos­si­ble, ele­vate your limb while icing. Ice for 30 min­utes at a time.

* You can make larger ice packs by using the gal­lon size bags. Sim­ply increase the water and alco­hol amounts appro­pri­ately to fill the bag, using 1 part alco­hol to 3 parts water.

Injured. Can I Still Exercise?

BY DANIEL

WebMD reports, “[that] there is vir­tu­ally no med­ical con­di­tion that will keep you from doing any type of exercise.”

Peo­ple who have been diag­nosed with heart prob­lems will even ben­e­fit from mod­er­ate activ­ity every day. Even if your mobil­ity has been lim­ited due to injury, many of the exer­cises we per­form in boot camp can be mod­i­fied so that you can still receive some benefit.

The advan­tage of using our body weight as resis­tance is that we can feel directly the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of our form/weight on any injury.

Of course, check with a doc­tor con­cern­ing whether or not you should work out on any injury; but rest assured that, even seated, the train­ers at BC4C can find an exer­cise to get you heart racing.

Keep Your Dri-fit Clothes Smelling Fresh

BY ANDY

Dri-fit and other wick­ing clothes are great for keep­ing you cool dur­ing your work­outs but some­times they just don’t smell clean after they come out of the wash.

Here are things you can do to reduce the stench:

1. Do not put your wick­ing clothes in the dryer
2. If you do put them in the dryer, do not use fab­ric sheets
3. Use a deter­gent geared for dri-fit clothes
   1. Win Deter­gent
   2. Tide Acti-Lift with Febreeze Sport (the one that has worked the best for me)

Now you have no excuse not to sweat up your clothes as much as possible.

We’ll con­tinue to do our best to help!

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