Here’s an out-of-the-box way to stay hydrated this summer

Few golfers are aware of the importance of hydration and the impacts it can have on golf performance. In any weather, but particularly on a warm day, dehydration can affect cognitive function, athletic ability and therefore your golf game.

The only way to create an optimised hydration plan is to work with a sport dietician, but there are some basic guidelines you can follow. First, start hydrating before you get to the golf course. Once you’re on-course, the general recommendation is to consume 125-250ml of fluid with electrolytes every 15-20 minutes.

Another product helping you stay well-watered on the course is Hydrogen Health (hydrogenhealth.net.au). According to the experts at Hydrogen Health, staying hydrated while on the course is about more than just drinking water. We spoke about it further with Josh Hiam from Hydrogen Health.

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Australian Golf Digest: Tell us about your product and how important it is to drink water before, during and after golf?

Josh Hiam: Hydrogen Health is a company that specialises in water and medical gas infusions. The bottle is an on-the-go-based solution for revitalising your water into an antioxidant – or life-supporting or life-energy-giving – water. Within the world at the moment, and within health and sport, recovery is now becoming such a big concept. In the past, athletes would just be going hard in training but no one was recovering properly. Ageing and all these degenerative diseases essentially come down to how well your body can, firstly, hydrate, because that is what’s essentially running energy on a cellular level.

My background is in biomedical electronic engineering, so while essentially we’re a consumer product, our background’s more on the side of the revolutionary benefits of how medical gases can optimise cellular performance. Hydrogen is actually donating electrons to the energy systems within the cells. So every cell is tuning right up to its potential, which is pretty much electrical and it becomes chemical processes.

The cool thing about hydrogen water is it’s optimising that water into the ultimate bioactive form. So therefore, when you’re drinking one bottle, you’re getting what you would get from a waterfall or an ideal natural form – it’s been energised or, in this case, becomes an antioxidant water.

As a golfer, that’s going to give you an incredible way of taking your normal daily water intake and supercharging it to the point where now you can rehydrate and stay focused. Things like stress is a classic example of when you’re in the zone and you’re flowing, you’re going to be flushing the ball and it’s just like, Oh, I can play golf like this all the time. And then that’s a big thing where you’ve got both the physical and mental bodies coming together in a highly skilled sport. Because I love golf too – I play all the time.

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I don’t think people are aware how detailed hydration is and how it can affect your golf performance.

The simplest thing you could ever do for your health is change your water. The wild one is: the water molecule is so small compared to everything else, compared to proteins and antioxidants and stuff like that. So therefore on the molecular level, you’re 99 percent water. 

Getty images: charlie crowhurst/R&A