Affect of fluid on exercise

osbornea · Post by **osbornea** » Mon Dec 15, 2003 6:06 am

Help! Want to do a project on the affects of fluid on exercise and don't know where to start! Can anybody help? Thanks!

shijun · Post by **shijun** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 2:45 pm

Do you have a hypothesis yet? In other words, what do you think is the relationship between fluids and exercise? For example, does drinking 1 pint of water prior to exercise improve performance? There are actually many ways that you could go about doing this: You could try to find out what is the optimal amount of fluids to drink? 1 pint, 2 pints? When is the optimal time to drink fluids, 1 hour prior to exercise, 2 hours, 15 minutes? What type of fluids is the most ideal: water, juice, sports drinks like gatorade, etc. Some things you may want to be careful about are:

1) Make sure you can quantify what you are testing, and make sure to test 1 variable at a time or else you risk not being ablt to draw any valid conclusions.

2) Make sure your experiment is not subjective i.e. based on personal preferences. This is hard to do when testing commercial products (you want to stay away from a taste test).

3) Make sure you do many runs of your experiment to verify consistency.

4) Make sure you make your experiment very specific e.g. exercise is very broad and you should clarify what you mean by exercise, running for 15 minutes at full speed, lifting 20 lb dumbbells, doing 30 pushups, etc.

Good luck,

Shijun