THE EFFECTS OF DEHYDRATION ON ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE AND MONITORING HYDRATION LEVELS

Dehydration not only reduced athletic performance, but also may lead to severe health problems and death. Especially, for athletes, monitoring hydration and ensuring proper hydration levels have significant effect in maximizing performance requiring long term durability training and competition environments. The purpose of this review is to provide information about negative effects of water loss on performance, and to determine the level of hydration with an easy to use, practical and reliable methods also had been known by athletes and coaches by previous studies. A lot of methods are used to determine the level of body hydration. Although there is no gold standard for determining the level of body hydration changes, body weight changes, some blood values and urine parameters are the commonly used methods. Because using body weight change and urine test methods are easy and noninvasive, they are recommended for determining the level of acute and chronic hydration as the more commonly used methods in the sport settings.