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Healthy Eating

Drinking Cold Water Could Aid Your Performance

Drinking cold water during an intense workout is a good idea, according to new research from sports nutritionists. Cold water keeps your core temperature down and can help your performance.

Doug Dupont

Written by Doug Dupont Last updated on Oct 20, 2021

After a hard workout on a hot day there is nothing like a cold shower and guzzling ice water. It’s a primal human urge to seek out nice, cold, delicious water when your insides are piping hot. There’s a good reason for this, too. Your body regulates its internal temperature tightly and it’s critical that your temperature doesn’t change much.

Many of your body’s chemical processes operate like a lock and key. When one molecule in your body fits together with some other molecule of just the right shape, like a puzzle piece, important things happen. Things like your nerves keeping an electric charge. Things that mean the difference between life and death. When your body temperature changes even a seemingly small amount the shapes of these molecules start to change. When they change the key no longer fits in the lock. At lower levels of hyper- or hypothermia (being too hot or too cold, respectively), the processes in your body won’t work as effectively. If your core temperature changes just a few degrees further, it will kill you.

For athletes this usually means performance suffers from overheating. When your muscles produce mechanical energy, they also produce a lot of heat from inefficiency. The heat is especially hard to keep under control in a hot external environment. There are two ways to keep hyperthermia under control. One is to remove heat into the surrounding environment, which is what happens when you sweat or get in an ice tub. The other is to introduce something cold internally.

Although there has been a fair amount of research on drinking cold fluids to reduce hyperthermia many of the methods have been inconsistent. One recent study, published by the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, reviewed the impact of drinking cold water on body temperature during cardio exercise, and then performance on subsequent resistance exercises like the bench press. The study found that drinking very cold water in intervals during cardio helped substantially to keep core body temperatures closer to normal than room temperature water. There was only a small improvement in subsequent resistance exercise performance, but this was likely due to the fact the body temperature extremes in this particular study weren’t as divergent from normal as in some other recent studies.

Although the resistance exercise wasn’t importantly impacted in this study, the more important factor was elucidated. Cold water ingestion is effective at helping athletes maintain an ideal body temperature for exercise. On a hot day or when exercising intensely, be sure to keep some cold water on hand to stay hydrated, and to prevent hyperthermia from bringing your performance down.

References:

1. Danielle LaFata, et. al., “The effect of a cold beverage during an exercise session combining both strength and energy systems development training on core temperature and markers of performance,”Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 9,44 (2012)

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Doug Dupont

About Doug Dupont

Having grown up at the foot of a forest covered mountain in rural Vermont, Doug was active from a very young age. Hiking, running, and climbing were a part of everyday life in the Green Mountains. This culture of exercise led to dabbling in martial arts as a teen, and also getting work in a local powerlifting focused gym. Doug continued to pursue knowledge and training in exercise, becoming a certified personal trainer while still a teenager. Once in college he began his hand at the business side of fitness, taking a management position at a large local gym. During that time he became a founding member of the UVM Brazilian Jiu Jitsu club, and was the first among their competition team. After only a few months he was assisting in coaching, and ran conditioning program for the club.

Out of college Doug set up his own training center. He grew his list of clientele including several professional MMA athletes, eventually going so far as to corner a world title fight. He has continued ­­­to develop his business into today.

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