Ignorance is bliss.
Thomas Gray*
Boxing for reasons of its own still has one foot stuck in the old millennium and the other just barely over the border into the new one when it comes to nutrition, strength and conditioning training, to name a few.
Old time boxers in the 30s, 40s and 50s did a lot of rowing, an exercise that uses multiple joints like the ankles, knees, hips, lower back, elbows and shoulders--a classic push-pull movement. Old timers used medicine balls and wall pulleys. They did tons of full body sit-ups and leg raises, great exercises for the hip flexors and the hips, the largest and strongest joints in the body and two important muscles and joints for boxing or MMA and most other sports.
In short, they did somethings right and they got more than a few things wrong like resisting resistance training and giving water a bad name. This is hardly a slam at the old timers.They didn't know then what we know now. And what we know now shouldn't be wasted or held hostage to outdated techniques or beliefs.
Two-thirds of the earth is water. Over 60% of your body is water. By some estimates 70-80% of the brain is water. Lungs are 86% water. Liver 85%, kidneys 83%, blood 80% and sweat 95%. As babies we are all about 75-80% water. Muscle is 70-75% and fat 10-15%. Even our bones are 12-15% water. What this means is if you pulled all of the water out of the body, you'd be left with a pile of tangible, dry substance on the floor not more than a few inches high.
Here are some comparisons. Cucumbers are 90% water, apples and potatoes 85%, bananas 75%. An elephant is 60% water, about the same amount in adult human males. That should tell you something about the importance of water in our lives. But here's another way of looking at the importance of water. It takes 3 gallons of water to grow enough lettuce to produce one serving; 13 gallons to grow one medium-sized orange; 40 gallons to grow enough cantaloupe for one serving; 80 gallons to produce enough almonds for a one ounce serving and 629 gallons to produce one egg.
Bottom line, unless you can't swim, water is your friend, not your enemy, especially if you're trying to lose or make weight. Water does not put weight on you. Nothing could be further from the physiological truth. Here are just a few reasons. Water suppresses appetite. It reduces sodium and helps maintain muscle tone. Water helps eliminate toxins and waste, especially those that build-up after intense exercise. Water helps metabolize fat. The kidneys need water to help rid the body of toxins. The liver is known as the body's "chemical factory." It detoxifies waste and metabolizes fat, among many other things. It can't do it's job properly without help from the kidneys.
Webster's defines a solvent as "a substance, usually a liquid, capable of dissolving another substance." Water acts as an important solvent for waste products such as carbon dioxide, CO2, urea and electrolytes like sodium, potassium and calcium. Every time you exhale you rid your body of a waste product, CO2, and there's some water in each exhaled breath. Water dissolves more compounds than any other liquid.
The prefix hdro means water as in fire hydrant. Hydrolysis is an important chemical process that goes on in the body everyday. Sugar, sucrose, gets hydrolyzed into two other forms of sugar, fructose and glucose, which the body uses for energy. Water has a high heat capacity, meaning it helps control temperature, absorbing or releasing more heat than many other substances for every one degree increase or decrease in temperature.
The human body has 10 trillion cells, 200 different types. Every cell, from the simplest to the most complicated, is mostly water. The protein and carbohydrates we eat are metabolized and transported by water in the bloodstream, a good thing. Water plays an important role transporting waste out of the body, another good thing. Overweight people have on average less water than thin people. The average person needs to replace about 2.4 liters of water per day. It gets replaced by the food we eat and the water we drink.
Earlier this year I had the good fortune to attend a national amateur boxing event in the Midwest. One evening in the workout room at the hotel where most of the participants were staying, I overheard a coach, after putting his young 10 or 12 year old charge through a strenuous treadmill routine in a room where the temperature had been cranked up to well over 90 degrees, telling him not to shower or drink any water the rest of the night because the all-important weigh-in was at 8 o'clock sharp the next morning.
Bad advice like that could in certain circles be viewed as gross negligence. The coach, grossly overweight, in his early 30s, looked as if he hadn't worked out in years. Implied in the parental consent form is the belief that trainers and coaches know what they're doing. Withholding water from hard training athletes, amateur or professional, is a no-no.
Boxing already has enough problems. The MMA people continue to make significant inroads in popularity. Like it or not, there are just so many sports dollars to go around. Bad matchmaking, poor judging, insincere hype, controversial endings, overcharging and underpaying are just a few of the knocks boxing as a sport faces.
As one now retired strength and conditioning and nutrition coach to several well-known pro fighters recently put it: "Boxing people know a lot about boxing, but don't know as much about the human body as they think they do."
Water is the basic substance of life. It's time people connected with the sport get informed. Despite Gray's above-quoted saying, this is one example where ignorance isn't bliss.
*The above quote first appeared in a poem by Gray in 1742
t.m. hatter
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