Drinking more water can actually make you build muscle and burn fat and increase your overall health.
Water is widely important since almost 60% of your body weight is comprised of water.
Almost all of your body’s physiological processes need water. I’m talking about things like digestion and detoxification and so on. Water also helps to transport nutrients into cells, helps keep your joints lubricated, which helps to decrease injuries and increase performance.
We need water to keep our noses, throats and ears moist. We also need water for our brain cells.
And if you drink enough water, you can expect your mind to be sharper, which will help you in school, at work, it will help with your workout which will lead to greater strength and gains.
And if you’re cutting, it will help you to burn fat.
The flip side – not drinking enough – can lead to a decrease in mental and physical performance. When it comes to building muscle, hydration plays a major role since it creates an environment for protein synthesis (muscle growth). On the other hand, dehydration affects protein synthesis.
Hydration helps to promote protein synthesis, so more muscle growth than protein breakdown equals gains. So, the implications are pretty clear, the more you hydrate the muscle, the more chances you have of building the muscle via protein synthesis and the less chance you have a shrinkage by protein breakdown or muscle loss.
But it gets deeper than that. When you are dehydrated, you will experience decreased performance and energy, and this will make your workouts suffer.
You won’t be able to work out as intensely. And if you continue to be this way time after time, week after week, you will be stalling your progress. But if you’re adequately hydrated, you will have more energy so you will progress faster. It puts your body in the best position to grow muscle and when you couple that with a muscle cell that’s in the best position to promote protein synthesis, then you have a recipe for success.
Now how does it affect weight loss?
Some people will tell you that being hydrated by drinking a lot of water will increase your metabolism. Maybe if the water is really, really cold like ice cold, your body may burn some additional calories forcing your core temperature to stay at 98 degrees. However, studies show that drinking more water people lose weight not because their metabolism is higher but because the water makes them more full which increases satiety. You won’t be as hungry when your stomach is full of water.
As a benefit, this will enable you to stick to your diet better and not only that, you will have more energy. When you are dehydrated you feel weak and tired and not able to work out as hard.
And if you’re not able to go as hard in the gym then guess what you won’t be able to burn more of? If you guessed calories, the answer is yes.
So, water doesn’t actually do it for you, but it places your body in a condition where it’s more effective.
Now a lot of people retain water and they get bloated. The reason you retain water is because you’re dehydrated. So, to prevent that, you need to drink more water. When you’re dehydrated your body starts to store water as a defence mechanism. The body thinks it needs to do that to survive. Once you’re getting adequate water, your body knows it doesn’t have to store water.
Speaking of holding water. If you drink excess water, what’s going to happen is your body will lose a lot of water weight and immediately you will begin to looking more ripped.
Water also helps your skin to stay clearer. Your skin is an organ and usually you see a manifestation of things going wrong inside your body via the skin.
Drinking more water will help you look and feel better, but you won’t know this by me just telling you that. You should experience it for yourself especially in a hot climate like Guyana.
Drink a gallon or two a day.
