Building Muscle and Training Around Dehydration

Hello Jordan I hope all is well,

I work a physical labor job in construction. Typical no air conditioning, no shade. My job is pretty fast paced because I get paid off of a piece rate system rather than a standard hourly rate. I’m on my feet all day. I average about 45-50 hours per week. Anyway, I tend to get dehydrated every day. I drink 3/4-1 gallon of water per shift. I not only drink to thirst but a little bit extra when I can. I try to make sure I’m getting fluids pretty regularly as well. I’ve read that the color of your urine isn’t always an indicator but for what it’s worth my urine is typically a darker color until I get home for a couple of hours to rest and hydrate. My questions:

  1. Does this pose a significant barrier to building muscle/ strength gains?
  2. Is there any way I can stay hydrated better throughout the day? Would drinks like Gatorade on a daily basis provide any benefit at all?

JP,

A few quick questions back to you, how long have you had this job and how has your training been going in the interim?

-Jordan

I’ve had this job for almost 2.5 years. I started training consistently when I first got this job back in 2020. Before that, training was very sporadic and more or less body weight focused.

I’d say overall my training has been going well until the last 6 months which was the last time I pr’d. At that point my work stress peaked because I took on a lot more hours (10-14 hour days) lunch was stop really quick to eat then get back to it. On top of this I suffered a biceps strain at work while running gas. All of my lifts started to linearly regress every week about a month after this. Squat and DL took a 10% dip while bench took a 20% total. As of this week I’m back up to near pr levels and I’ve been building momentum. Honestly quite often I’m pushing off training sessions an extra day or even specific high priority movements if I think I’m way too exhausted/dehydrated from work. I just don’t want to deal with a random performance decrease if it’s directly because of work.

Sounds like training is going pretty well then and you’ve figured out a workable system for your current schedule. I don’t think there’s any need to specifically manage hydration here, as I don’t think that’s likely to change much.