If you have been sweating up a thirst by exerting yourself physically, whether from an intense workout session or from just plain hard work, then you will quickly find that water alone may not be enough to tame your thirst. When you reach that intense stage of needing liquids, your body must have more than water to re-hydrate and recover. As a result of this need, the sports drink market has created a wide variety of sports beverage choices to help you quench that thirst.

Back in the day, old-timers who ranched across America used to brew up batches of what they called switchel. This might have been the original sport beverage and contained a mixture of molasses, vinegar and water, and was used during the intense physical exertion the ranchers experienced during haying season. For most people, their workouts have changed since that time, and fortunately so have the products on the market.

There are many energy sports drinks on the sports drink market these days, but you won’t find vinegar and molasses enumerated on the ingredients list when you check the label of your favorite sports drink bottle. But, today’s sports beverage formulas do have some of the same basic elements that are in the old-fashioned recipe. Carbohydrates are supplied by sugars in the drink and electrolytes are supplied by various minerals such as sodium, magnesium and potassium.

This combination of carbohydrates and electrolytes found in endurance drink mixes essentially provides the same benefits to today’s athletes that the ranchers got from the switchel. The bottom line is that these extra ingredients give the body what it needs to re-hydrate quickly in order to replace the rapid loss of moisture from the body due to the physical exertion.

Every manufacturer of a sports beverage knows how important it is to keep an athlete’s body from becoming dehydrated. When dehydration occurs, performance is reduced. In addition, consuming the electrolyte sports drink formulations help to assure that the body does not become overheated which can cause problems and add stress to the cardiovascular system.

Even though many of the advertisements for sports beverage products put a lot of emphasis on the restoration and the balancing of electrolytes, many doctors say that the most important benefit in these recovery sports drinks comes from the carbohydrates. It is the carbs from the sugars that help to feed the muscles during the workout, help to replace energy stores, and help to delay fatigue, all of which improves endurance.

In the way of the ingredients, there is very little to distinguish the recovery sports drink formulations of the three major brands in the sports drink market. The big three names in energy sports drinks are Gatorade, All Sport and Powerade and all three of these brands have almost identical ingredients, although the actual amounts might vary slightly.

The question remains; what reason are you still losing time with those types of pills that are meant to assist you in loosing weight or increase muscles in that manner? You need to keep hydrated and those pills just take the fluids right out of your body. The very first thing that you lose is the excess water. That is the only real weight loss you achieve and it always comes back. You need a reliable way to build muscle, lose excess fat and become healthier. The answer you have been looking for is found within sports drinks such as high protein shakes. For more information click here: Junior Bodybuilding and at Bodybuilding Diets also Vintage Bodybuilding

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 4:54 am and is filed under Exercise. 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.