You have had your massage, you've peeled your head out of the head-cradle, staggered towards your clothes and your therapist offers you a glass of water (pre-COVID-19) and advises you to continue to fill up on H2O during the rest of the day - but why?
According to Access Health Louisiana the 5 main benefits of drinking enough water are:
1. Increases Energy & Relieves Fatigue
Since your brain is mostly water, drinking it helps you think, focus and concentrate better and be more alert. As an added bonus, your energy levels are also boosted!
2. Promotes Weight Loss
Removes by-products of fat, reduces eating intake (by filling up your tummy if consumed prior to meals), reduces hunger (hello natural appetite suppressant!), raises your metabolism and has zero calories!
3. Flushes Out Toxins
Gets rid of waste through sweat and urination which reduces the risk of kidney stones and UTI’s (urinary tract infections).
4. Improves Skin Complexion
Moisturizes your skin, keeps it fresh, soft, glowing and smooth. Gets rid of wrinkles. It’s the best anti-ageing treatment around!
5. Maintains Regularity
Aids in digestion as water is essential to digest your food and prevents constipation.
Let's go back to No 3 - Flushes Out Toxins
Though water doesn’t necessarily neutralize toxins, the kidneys do use water to get rid of certain waste products. If you don’t drink enough water, your kidneys don’t have the amount of fluid they need to do their job properly. “If the body does not have sufficient water, then metabolic wastes will not be removed as efficiently as they should,” explains Amy Hess-Fischl, RD, CDE, of the University of Chicago Kovler Diabetes Center. “In essence, the body would be holding in toxins instead of expelling them, as is required for proper health.”
Massages can be dehydrating. All that kneading and pummeling muscles gets fluid pumping out of the soft tissues and into your circulatory system, where it heads toward your kidneys and then wants to come out.
Have you ever noticed that straight after a massage you need to pee....like NOW?
You have to replenish all that lost water – by drinking more.
Then there’s the issue of metabolic waste, which is produced by muscles in the course of everyday function. When your muscles are tight or you’ve got a major knot, it constricts circulation in those areas, hampering the body’s ability to flush out this waste. And, since tight muscles are probably what made you book a massage appointment in the first place, chances are you’ve got some compromised circulation happening. Massage relaxes the tension, releasing the circulatory pathways and allowing metabolic waste to dump into the system. Drinking provides your kidneys with the water they need to effectively eliminate all the newly liberated waste. So, once again, it comes back to pee.
As a footnote - massage does not remove toxins from the body as is sometimes touted by massage therapists (me being one of them) we are taught at college that it does, it is one of the big 'reasons for having a massage'. When you do a little research, massage does not remove toxins but assists in their elimination....same but different!!
Keep safe xx
