Practical Hydration Solutions for Sports
What the paper is
A practitioner review (Belval, Hosokawa, Casa, Adams, Armstrong) on personalised hydration: the physiological, behavioural, logistical and psychological issues that set an athlete's fluid needs and their opportunity to meet them — specific to the environment, the event and the individual — plus how to assess hydration status and overcome sport-specific obstacles. The abstract states no thresholds or numbers.
Key Findings (from the abstract)
Personalised hydration strategies matter for both performance and safety
Fluid needs and the chance to drink are set by the environment, the event and the individual — not by a universal rule
Barriers are as much behavioural and logistical (access to fluid, opportunity, habits) as physiological
The paper's purpose is to give practitioners solutions to those obstacles per sport
Practical Application
This review's message is individualisation: fluid needs depend on environment, event and athlete, and the practical obstacles (access, logistics, habits) decide whether a plan is followed — the abstract gives no universal percentage or volume. For a cyclist, that means a plan built on your own sweat rate and the race's real bottle logistics, not a generic litres-per-hour figure.
Not from this paper; the base's own practice: measure sweat rate in training (weigh before and after a representative ride, correct for what you drank), then plan intake as a fraction of that loss so you finish with a modest deficit; the body-mass-loss threshold the base uses comes from REF-226 (blinded hypohydration study), the population norms from REF-221.
Not from this paper; the base's own practice: for gravel or mountain events with sparse aid, pre-position bottles or carry a pack; in cool weather set a drinking schedule rather than waiting for thirst.
Limitations
From the design as the abstract reports it: a narrative, practitioner-oriented review — no systematic search and no pooled data; the abstract states no thresholds or numbers.
Its solutions are the authors' practical recommendations, not outcomes tested in a trial.
How this entry was checked and changed
Why this level
regraded 2026-09-27 from B+: narrative review without systematic method; the abstract carries no data
Content correction 2026-09-27
"Target fluid replacement to prevent >2±1% body mass loss", "70 kg athlete losing 4 L → drink ~2.6±0.7 L (65-82%)", "sweat rate × 0.7", "1.2 L/h → 840 mL/h", "every 20 min" -> none of these appear in the abstract; removed, house practice relabelled without those numbers.
"Clinical consensus review", Level B+ -> narrative practitioner review, Level C+ per rubric.
2026-09-28: added Limitations from the abstract (Europe PMC PMID 31324008).