Welcome to Week 6 of our 10-week online delivery for Fit Fans. If you’ve missed earlier sessions, they are all still available on the club website and you can start at any time.
And if you are participating in the Leicester Tigers Foundation Round The World Challenge, you can still use your sessions to count towards your totals.
This week we are providing an insight on hydration as well as publishing a complete bodyweight circuit to help with your own fitness and wellbeing.
Our body weight is comprised of 45-75% water, depending on a number of factors including age, gender, weight and height, and requires this significant amount in order for our body to function properly and effectively.
Hydration, therefore, is a vital parameter when exercising. It has been shown that as little as a 2% decrease in our hydration measure (i.e. 2% weight loss) has a significant increase in stress on our bodies.
These include increased physiological strains (including increased heart-rate and blood pressure), decrease in cognitive function, increase feeling of fatigue, increased inflammation and overall as much as a 10% decrease in performance.
Furthermore, all of those physical effects don’t just happen during exercise. They happen every time we are dehydrated and, therefore, can have an impact on our work commitments too.
The NHS recommends that a woman should drink at least 1.6 litres of water a day and men should drink 2 litres (8 and 10 glasses of water respectively). Like the majority of diet and exercise matters, everyone has unique requirements with reference to weight, gender and environment as well as breathing rate, how much you sweat and how much you urinate as this all involves water leaving the body.
We recommend using this link to find out how much water you should be consuming and some more information on how our body takes on fluids.
This week’s exercise session outlined below is called ‘Seven Seas’ and is inspired by the Race Around the World.
The session is based on using some ‘dry land’ exercises that swimmers use to help with their conditioning and make a great alternative for making you feel like you’re in the water while public pools remain closed.
As always, there are three levels so you can choose your own challenge and you can complete most of them at home with two metres of space at home.
