Blog

By Edwina Clark, Athletes' Performance

Water makes up 60-70 percent of your body, and it plays an essential role in everything from your brain and organ function to joint lubrication, temperature control, and weight loss. It’s also essential for peak athletic performance. To find out if you’re dehydrated, look at your urine. Ideally, it’ll be a clear or pale yellow, which means you’re hydrated. A dark yellow color indicates dehydration, while a darker cloudy color means you’re severely dehydrated and should seek medical attention.

How Hydration Impacts Performance

For every 2 percent loss of fluid, physical and mental performance decreases by 20 percent. Below are some of the ways hydration affects physical and mental function.

• Boosts brainpower. Studies suggest that fewer areas of the brain are active when you’re dehydrated, and slight dehydration can also impact your mood.
• Increases metabolism. Water is involved in metabolic reactions that help oxidize fatty acids, break down large molecules into smaller ones, and release stored energy. Dehydration slows these reactions, which decreases energy and performance.
• Protects muscles and joints. Dehydrated muscles are inelastic and hard, increasing the risk of tears and strains. Water helps prevent injury by lubricating joints and muscles and acting as a cushion to reduce the risk of joint trauma during exercise.

• Aids in lung function. Water moistens air moving into the lungs and helps transport oxygen to working muscles. When you’re dehydrated this process is less efficient and performance drop.

Daily Hydration Needs

For a regular day, drink ½ an ounce of water for every pound of body weight. For a 180-pound person, that’s 90 ounces of water per day. A good rule of thumb is to drink one bottle of water (10-20 ounces) every three hours or every time you eat a meal or snack if you eat frequently. Create your own hydration plan by figuring out how much water you need, factor in the bottle or glass size so you know how many times to refill, and plan your drinking strategy around regular daily occurrences like lunch and bathroom breaks.

Recovery Hydration Needs

If you exercise or play sports, your hydration needs depend on the intensity and duration of activity and your goals. “It’s just as important to be strategic with your nutrition and hydration as it is with your training,” says Amanda Carlson-Phillips, vice president of nutrition and research at Athletes’ Performance and Core Performance. When the intensity and/or duration of your activity increase, you burn more fuel and need more fluids to rehydrate.

Once you’ve determined what you should drink, figure out how much to drink. While everyone’s sweat rate is different, the standard recommendation is 7-10 ounces of water every 15 minutes during exercise. For a sports drink, choose one with 30-60 g of carbs and 400-800 mg of sodium and drink it every hour to refuel. To determine your specific needs, weigh yourself before you work out, keep track of what and how much you drink, and weigh yourself post-workout. The goal is to lose no more than 2 percent of your body weight. Use the chart below as a hydration guideline.

For sport-specific hydration, see the chart below.

Put your hydration knowledge to the test and improve your fitness with the miCoach Learn to Run plan. If you’re an experienced runner, hydrate properly to push your body one step further and use the miCoach Run a Race – Marathon plan to run longer, faster, and stronger

By Craig Friedman, Athletes' Performance

At times in your cardio plan, you’ll train in the Blue Zone for longer periods or entire workouts, also known as “steady-state training.” Your initial steady-state training in the Blue Zone will help you establish an aerobic base. This base is essential in helping you train harder and longer without burning out or suffering an injury.

Steady-state Blue Zone workouts are optimal for your body to make several key physiological changes that will help support harder and longer efforts. While these adaptations happen within all of the miCoach zones, the Blue Zone helps your body recover best with the least amount of work. Increased blood flow to your muscles removes waste (lactate) generated by a previous hard workout. You don’t generate as much new lactate in the Blue Zone compared with other zones, so your body uses these workouts to actively clear the buildup, which in turn helps reduce soreness. All told, this lessens the cumulative stress on your body and helps you feel fresh for your next workout. Your body benefits and heals from this break, as does your mind.

At first, training in the Blue Zone for an extended period of time might feel hard, depending on your fitness level. But as you begin training in the higher-effort zones, training in the Blue Zone will become easy.

For more advanced runners, the Blue Zone can seem tireless and slow. Don’t give in to the temptation to blow off the Blue Zone and run hard. Trust in the miCoach workouts and you’ll see big payoffs. Although it sounds counterintuitive, running slow will train your body to become faster over time

By Craig Friedman, Athletes' Performance

Preparation for your next workout begins with your previous workout. Finish each cardio session strong by completing a full recovery in the Blue Zone. You’ll typically spend about 5 minutes in the Blue Zone, during which your heart rate will slow and your body will clear waste products from your muscles to help you avoid soreness. During the cool-down, it’s okay to walk or slow down, but it’s important to keep moving. Don’t just stop. The result: You’ll feel reenergized and ready for another fun workout!

To learn more about the Blue Zone, read “The Benefit of Training in the Blue Zone.”

By Paul Robbins, Athletes' Performance

There’s a method of working out that improves strength, speed, and endurance. It will keep you interested, keep your workouts fun, and help you avoid burning out. It’s called interval training, and you’re probably already familiar with it, at least in its most basic form.

Performing intervals simply means training at varying intensities. Run fast, slow down, repeat. That’s interval training. miCoach uses a unique form of interval training in which you’ll vary the intensity of your activity according to four personalized training zones.

The miCoach training zones are based on heart rate to help you gauge your efforts. Each zone is designated by a color—Blue, Green, Yellow, and Red—and each color corresponds to an effort. miCoach personalizes your zones based on the data collected during your Assessment Workout.

miCoach uses different combinations of the four zones to create varied, complete, and personalized workouts. Here’s a look at the four zones:

Blue Zone

The easiest of the miCoach zones, you’ll train here during early stages of your plan, as well as when you warm up, cool down, and dial back your training. Although it’s easy training, it’s extremely important. Training in this zone improves your aerobic base and helps your body recover. It also allows you to put forth a greater effort in the higher intensity zones to get more out of your training. Think of it as roughly a 3-4 level of effort on a scale of 1-10.

Green Zone

In this zone, you’ll burn calories, boost endurance, and build a greater cardiovascular capacity, or foundation, to push harder in later stages and more intense zones. It’s a sustainable medium effort, around a 5-7 effort level on a scale of 1-10. At the top of the Green Zone, you’ll transition to a harder effort that begins to draw on new energy systems to challenge your body in new ways.

Yellow Zone

At the top of the Green Zone and bottom of the Yellow Zone, your training will become more difficult. You can still push your body more at this point, but your body begins to rely more on your anaerobic energy system, meaning you’ll start breathing rapidly and you may start to feel your muscles burn. This offers your body remarkable benefits. Working at higher intensities in the Yellow Zone will improve your ability to run harder for longer. This is a hard effort level of about 7 or 8 out of 10.

Red Zone

This is where you’ll put forth your greatest effort. Training in the Red Zone develops strength, speed and power. But it’s stressful, so you can’t sustain this effort for long periods of time. Expect to put forth a level of effort of 8 or 9 out of 10. While it’s certainly possible to train at a higher intensity, the added stress on your body is not worth the extra effort.