SaunaScape

Photo by Tsja! on Flickr

Tim Ferriss, author of the highly recommended “The 4-Hour Workweek“, added a thought-provoking post to his blog today: “How to lose 30 pounds in 24 hours.” It describes his techniques for dropping weight in advance of the weigh-in for competitive sports.

Now, most times, sauna is not a competitive sport, and even when it is, it’s not divided into weight-based classes. So what is interesting to the average sauna-goer? Water, and how your body deals with it. Some of his interesting points follow:

If you weigh 200 lbs., 120 of those pounds are water, which is distributed between three systems: blood, cell interiors (as pertaining to powerlifting, muscle fibers), and the spaces between the blood vessels and the cells dependent on them. Approximately 8% of your total water volume is contained in blood plasma, 67% is contained in the cells themselves, and 25% is found in the spaces between the two, which includes subcutaneous water.

His point being that you can “safely” lose 25% of your body weight in water. Though this is not recommended long-term:

Ball State University research has demonstrated a 7% decrease in speed over 10 kilometers by runners dehydrated by just 2%-3% of total body mass. For a 150 lb. (68 kg) strength athlete, this represents a very meager 3-4.5 lbs. (1.4-2 kg) of water loss.

Of course, the most interesting revelation for me was not about the fluids you drink, but the fluids you absorb through your skin:

The author has seen elite wrestlers make the mistake of taking a shower the morning of weigh-ins, only to find they have gained 2-3 lbs. (1-1.4 kg)!

So that shower you take before and after your sauna isn’t just cooling you down. It’s actually rehydrating you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 11:18 am and is filed under Your Body. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.