Two hours later, this theory wasn't looking so good.
At 4am, I decided to get up, go to the toilet (hah!*), and once I was done see how much water I'd shedded so far.
*This is worthy of a laugh, because it turns out that the absence of water coming into the body is quite directly related to an absence of water leaving the body in the form of urine.
Now, to put things into perspective, on Thursday morning (before I started saturating myself for the water cut), I weighed 68.8kg before doing my business, and 68.5kg after. So, when I stepped on the scale at 68.7kg at 4:00 this morning, I wasn't overly impressed with these results. It appears that what I've lost in sweat and breathing, I've retained in not peeing or pooing (yeah, the backdoor seemed to close up yesterday just as much as the front door).
So, I'm annoyed that I spent 3 days drinking too much and 1 day drinking not enough and got nothing out of it, but also kind of relieved -- now I get to rest assured that I won't benefit from doing it again (at least not using the same protocol) leading up to competition, so that'll make the week of competition less of a hassle.
Once I saw that I hadn't shedded weight, I went straight off the water cut, and got right back into rehydrating myself, although without the rapid reinjecting of water I would have undergone had I been trying to rehydrate for competition. I had a cup of water at 4:00, and after still failing to get back to sleep, had another cup of milk about half an hour later. I think I actually got a bit of sleep intermittently between the earliest part of dawn and about 7:30am. That's fairly typical of me on a restless night -- as soon as my brain acknowledges that it's no longer night and that it would actually be good to be awake, it lets go of whatever hangup has been preventing me from sleeping.
Worth givign it a go, like most things.
ReplyDeleteNot everything will work and this one didn't for you.
Same with the training, you find long warm ups of high reps on the excercise is best, I find a cardio style and straight to relatively heavy works best.
The trick is always finding what works for you out of the various things people suggest, brilliant for one is useless for another.
I did give it a go now instead of waiting until competition time to trial this water cut to see what impact it has while the stakes are low. When you're going to try something new, best not to do it when something else hangs in the balance. I have to take some joy in knowing that I've learned something over the last few days, and have some ideas about how I got the outcomes that I got. That's rewarding, even if the results aren't what I was hoping for.
DeleteThere's a lot of things that, according to experts with far more letters after their names than me, shouldn't work...but I find they do; and a lot things that I'm told should work, but when I do it the results are neutral or even negative. A lot of people with some sort of education in fitness have told me that chin ups are safer for the shoulders than pull ups -- I find that chin ups grind my shoulders something fierce, but pull ups are always friendly to me. I've always been told that wider grip bench presses are worse for the shoulders than closer grip bench presses -- I've recently found that I need to have my hands at least wide enough to get my middle fingers on the rings during incline bench press, or my shoulders do unsavoury things.
The one to always remember. All generalisations are wrong.
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