The Importance of Hydration as a Student Athlete: What does your pee mean?
April 15, 2013 Leave a comment
Emily Keyes
Sports Editor
This article is not for the easily disgusted; I am going to talk about urine. And I am not just going to mention it in passing, either; there is going to be discussion of its color and the subsequent meaning. Have you ever gone to pee on a particularly warm day and been a little shocked at the color you see when you look down? No? Well, get used to the idea of having an intimate relationship with the yellow stuff, because it’s the key to knowing your hydration levels, which are pretty imperative to that life goal of survival. What it all boils down to is the following; really light and really dark colors equal bad. Drinking water during physical activity is essential, but as your mama always says, too much of a good thing is, in fact, a bad thing. Drinking more than two cups of water an hour overhydrates your body, causing its salt levels to become diluted. This causes hyponatremia, which can lead to dizziness, confusion, and brain swelling, things you don’t really want to deal with after a hard practice, run, or game. Should your pee be the happy color of summertime lemonade, you are doing what you should. If it’s almost as clear as the water you have been chugging consecutively for the past four hours, put down the Nalgene for a while so your brain doesn’t swell and start to look like one of those weird anatomy experiments the Hopkins kids do.
