Hydration. Not a sexy subject at the best of times. Now try selling it to footballers, laser-focused with a ball at their feet but never known for their love of science.
Everyone is aware of the importance of drinking the right things in sufficient amounts, and knock-on effect on sleep, on exercise, on all bodily functions. When you’re made up of more than 60 per cent water, you need a fair amount of topping up.
But even so – how do you use that to grab the attention of a dressing room? Keep it simple, stupid. That’s been enough to get Manchester City, Brazil and Barcelona among others on board in the past – and now Championship side Wrexham.
The Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI) have worked with those teams and countless others across a variety of sports for a number of years to give players a straightforward understanding of their own bodies and how they can fuel and hydrate themselves correctly to aid performance, lower fatigue and perhaps most importantly to any athlete, keep them off the physio table.
This isn’t a performance metric you can put through an excel spreadsheet, but the science is pretty unequivocal that if you don’t take on enough of those fluids, your performance will take a hit sooner or later.
Wrexham sit 13th in the Championship, 11 points above the drop and five off the play-offs, going into the international break
What can be quantified into something tangible is the definitive – and unique – demonstration of how each individual player’s hydration levels are affected by exercise and general life.
Making the most of that is where this all begins, and was what first caught the eye of Wrexham’s head of medical performance and sports science Kevin Mulholland.
He tells Sky Sports: “We do so many different bits around the players to help their performance but on a match day you really see the benefit, when we can test our players pre-match and post-match – and their hydration status at the end of the game is where we want it now.
“Historically, we know they were dehydrated coming into the final stretches of a game and we’ve identified the players most at risk during that period. We’ve put in strategies for them to make sure they can go for 96 or 97 minutes – and if you look at football, that’s when a lot of games are won and lost.”
So how does this all work in practice? I visited Wrexham’s home, the SToK Cae Ras, on the same day their entire male and female first-team squads were being put through a ‘sweat test’ to assess their individual hydration requirements. It’s something they undergo a couple of times a season.
Wrexham have partnered with the Gatorade Sports Science Institute to provide tailored drinking profiles for their players
The GSSI save their research days for particularly intensive training sessions, ones which most closely simulate the kind of output players will exert on a matchday – both in terms of effort and resultant perspiration.
I wouldn’t call sporting prowess my finest attribute but you can’t test without getting a sweat on, can you? But before that, we need something to use as a benchmark. A step on the scales and a urine sample, which are used to show how much weight players lose or gain during a session as well as their hydration levels before things get underway.
Dr Ian Rollo, principal scientist at the GSSI, tells me: “It’s really interesting. Even with a bottle of water you drank on arrival the analysis would suggest you’re mildly dehydrated. It’s something to work on.”
Okay, not the ideal start. But there’s 15 minutes on an exercise bike in the Wrexham gym next things going. Soon the blood is pumping, the heart is beating and the sweat is running down my forehead into my eyes, rather painfully.
As if to prove the point a ‘Gx’sweat patch on my arm fitted by Ian and his team, the same worn by the professionals during their tests, is beginning to show some results.
The GSSI’s ‘Gx’Patch acts as a tracker of how much sweat an athlete is losing – and what concentration of electolytes
A tiny tube has started to fill up with sweat and at the end of the overall session will be used to test exactly how much fluid I’m losing, and what concentration of salt as well. There’s a number of patches on my back which will be analysed separately too but in the mean time this will give me, and more importantly professional athletes going through this, an instant idea of our needs.
After the warm-up, it’s time for some drills on the Wrexham pitch to recreate the stop-start nature of a match. Players will cover between 10-12km during a game, and while I won’t be doing that, Dr Rollo makes sure there’s enough intensity to make breathing difficult and leave the patch looking particularly well-stocked.
On the plus side, I’m assured that’s what the players’ ones look like after training too.
Dr Rollo says: “During one of these sessions is when we would be recommending the Wrexham players something like the normal Gatorade sports drink, which contains fluid, carbohydrates and electrolytes.
“Not every day will be that intense, and for sessions like that is a Gatorade Hydration Booster which still has the fluid and electrolytes but without the need for that extra boost of carbohydrates.”
Finding out exactly how much of each I would be recommended, as well as old fashioned water, comes at the end of the session after another step on the scales, while the liquid bottle I’ve been using during the session is also measured.
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Wrexham are on a five-game unbeaten streak and beat Charlton 1-0 on Saturday in their final game before the international break
You don’t need to be a maths genius for this – my weight difference minus the amount of liquid I’ve consumed, represents my fluid loss during the session. A bespoke phone app analyses the sweat patch and immediately tells me how much I should be drinking during every hour of exercise to stay hydrated. I’m surprised my results aren’t as much at the bottom-end as I thought – but it’s not quite the win it might seem.
“We’ve been testing athletes for 40 years across a variety of different sports, and of course they all sweat,” says Ian. “There’s a common misconception that people have good results or bad results.
“The more muscular you are and the harder you work, the more metabolic heat you generate and the higher your sweat rate will be. Some of our highest sweat rates we see in American football players – huge bodies, huge muscle masses and they’ve got to wear all that equipment in really hot conditions. It’s the perfect storm.
“You also see this in football players as their kit can be completely saturated with sweat during the match”
So good to know it’s not just me sweating just by looking at a football pitch. All the hydration in the world won’t be enough to impress Ryan Reynolds or Rob McElhenney any time soon, but it might make more of a difference than you might think in who finishes where in the Championship and beyond this season.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: skynews.com
