Sometimes your therapist may ask you how much water you drink per day, and often the reply is “does coffee count?”, and as a passionate coffee lover, I am sad to say that it doesn’t. We all know that a sufficient intake of water per day is vital to our health, but we don’t really realize how vital it is. Besides our general knowledge that on average more than half of the composition of the human body is water and therefore needs water in order to function optimally, we forget about how exactly the body uses water to make you feel like a super hero! In the most informal way possible, here are a few benefits:
- Maintenance of body fluids that aids in:
- Digestion (we all know how grumpy we get when this function doesn’t happen)
- Circulation (so that our better half may not cringe at our touch)
- Absorption (what is the point of eating broccoli if we not going to reap the benefits)
- Regulation of body temperature (this is particularly helpful in summer)
- The transportation of nutrients to every crevice of our physical being
- Essential for our kidney function, we want to avoid our oversized jelly beans to stop working
- Avoiding dehydration will help us avoid those pesky wrinkles
- Enough water intake helps us lose those stubborn love handles
- Helps lubricate cartilage leaving our joints feeling like they only 20 years old
- Washes away the brain fog
- Boosts our immune systems so that when someone sneezes around us we don’t get a sudden urge to perform a bolt like 100 meter sprint
- Helps to relieve a headache: in the case that wine is the primary suspect of said headache, add a couple of extra glasses to your usual daily intake
- Flushes out toxins/waste produced by the body reducing the risk of kidney stones, and for those who have experience with these minute but painful pebbles, we want to avoid this at all costs!
- Increases energy so that we may be inclined to do a lil dance
- And for all the athletes, it helps muscle recovery and adds muscle weight so that you can use it to help you get that podium finish!
Now, let’s talk about massage and water. During a massage, especially a firm deep tissue massage, we believe that toxins are released, i.e. the metabolic wastes of our cells are circulated. Technically we cannot flush these toxins away, but we are exposing them to the system allowing for them to be cleansed and reintegrated. That is why often one can feel quite lethargic and sore from a massage, even feel a bit flu-ish, hence the importance to drink water after a massage treatment so that we help the body process and deal with the overload to the system.
So even though most of us prefer coffee or tea or a few glasses of wine, give your body some love and hydrate with good old H2O, and if you really battle, spice up your water with some lemon and ginger or orange and cinnamon which will add a considerable amount of extra benefits, but more importantly, will keep you reaching for that water bottle throughout your day.
