Habituation to Dehydration during Exercise: Impact on Health and Physical and Cognitive Performance

Dear Colleagues,

The importance of adequate hydration and nutrition during exercise has been emphasized for years. It is generally commonly admitted that during exercise, dehydration—the dynamic loss of body water through sweat, respiration, and urine losses—may handicap physiological functions and subsequently lead to decreased cognitive and physical performance quality. This should not come as a surprise as we humans are primarily composed of water and that circulating water inside the body plays a role in the regulation of heat loss and maintenance of cardiac output, oxygen, and nutrient delivery to the working muscles and waste removal. Much of our understanding of how dehydration impacts the capacity of humans to exercise has been acquired using a single, potentially naïve research paradigm in which the typical participant exercises once while being well-hydrated and, on the other, while being dehydrated, with the researchers not considering the extent of the habituation this participant has had with dealing with daily, repeated training-induced dehydration. It is intuitive to believe that, as it is possible for athletes to adapt to the effect of heat or hypoxia, for example, daily exposures to dehydration could lead to specific adaptations that would render the athlete more resilient to the effect of dehydration, either from a physiological, physical, or cognitive perspective. Research on this topic is in its infancy but promising. However, results from field studies strongly suggest that humans do possess the intrinsic capacity to habituate to dehydration. Indeed, some of these studies have highlighted that humans can achieve formidable physical performance while being dehydrated by 5% to 10% of their body mass. This Special Issue invites submissions for original laboratory- or field-based studies as well as case reports looking at how the habituation to dehydration modulates the physiological responses to the acute effect dehydration during exercise and, ultimately, whether this potential adaptative capacity offers some form of protection for physical and cognitive-related performances. Papers reporting on the incidence of health issues in individuals habituated to being dehydrated by daily exercise in warm/hot or humid ambient temperatures are particularly welcome. 

Prof. Éric Goulet
Guest Editor

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• acclimatization
• aerobic exercise performance
• cognitive performance
• dehydration
• health
• heat
• high-intensity exercise performance
• hypohydration
• physiological functions
• resistance exercise performance