what does it mean to give off clear urine

There's a common misconception among athletes and the general public that you're optimally hydrated if your urine is a clear color. The colour of your urine can assist you sympathise how your hydration status fluctuates on a daily basis, merely drinking until your pee is clear is non the road to optimal health or performance...

Contents:

• Urine Color Nautical chart - What colour is your urine?
• How valid is the urine colour nautical chart?
• Does dark urine mean you're dehydrated?
• The relationship between urine colour and hydration status
• Urine colour and dehydration - Applied applications
• Further Reading

Urine Color Chart - What colour is your urine?

Every time I visit the locker room of a pro sports squad I make sure I visit the restrooms.

Often this is genuinely simply answering the call of nature, merely even if I don't actually need to pee I will normally brand my excuses to go and take a quick wait out of professional involvement.

Now, I know this all sounds a bit weird, but hear me out. What I tend to go looking for is an 'Armstrong Chart' pasted up on the wall above the facilities.

Armstrong Charts look a bit like a paint colour swatch yous'd find in any DIY store. They prove a range of 8 hues gradually transitioning from off-white, through various shades of xanthous, to finish on a nasty dark-green looking brown.

Image Credit: Wikimedia (Copyright free)

These charts can be establish in nearly all bathrooms in elite sports facilities. I've spotted them in the toilets of simply about every single NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, NCAA College, Premier League soccer and rugby squad that I've visited over the last 10 years.

How valid is the urine color chart?

The Armstrong charts take their name from Dr. Lawrence Due east Armstrong, who 'invented' the concept of taking a close interest in your urine output and he's almost famous for attempting to validate his chart's accuracy for predicting hydration status in 2 papers published in the International Journal of Sport.

In the team sports environment, these posters are often appended with provocative statements from team management. If you're not in the 1-3 zone, y'all're letting yourself down and yous're letting your teammates down. Sky prevent - you find yourself in the vii-8 (dark) area; you're definitely classified as 'dehydrated', you're a sub-standard man existence, and you lot demand to Drink More!

I believe the charts - and the widespread and vigorous promotion of the research that helped to validate them - are the main reason sports people are often obsessed with the colour of their pee (and what that ways for their hydration condition).

But, recent inquiry has bandage some dubiousness over exactly how valid using urine markers solitary to monitor your hydration condition might much of the time.

I asked the lead author of the recent British Medical Journal paper 'Dehydration is how y'all define it: comparison of 318 blood and urine athlete spot checks', Dr Tamara Hew-Butler (who we collaborated with on some research into the crusade of hyponatremia in sports last year) to give me a quick summary of what she thought the main take dwelling house points from her inquiry were for athletes…

"Equating dehydration with urine that is "less than clear" (i.e. xanthous to brown) has go popular amid sports coaches and trainers, because testing urine is inexpensive and like shooting fish in a barrel.

Plus, the colour chart is very cool and makes everyone feel every bit if they're an expert.

Yet, the scientific discipline behind these urine color charts mainly came from looking at the accurateness between urine variables (i.e. color versus urine specific gravity versus urine osmolality) with changes in body weight (also cheap and easy to measure out)."

Does dark urine hateful you lot're dehydrated?

Dr Hew-Butler went on to say, "Very few studies looked at urine versus claret variables . Studies (like ours) that looked at blood markers of cellular hydration (which is what doctors look at when assessing hydration status in patients) institute NO relationship between cellular aridity (blood sodium above 145mmol/L or "hypernatremia") and urine concentration.

Our body defends confronting cellular dehydration past irresolute the corporeality of water retained or lost past the body. So, dark coloured urine just means that our body is retaining h2o to protect cell size.

It'southward only when nosotros drink fluids higher up what our trunk needs that we produce clear and copious amounts of urine. Thus, the more we potable (above what we need), the more nosotros pee."

And then, what Dr Hew-Butler is substantially saying is that, whilst there is definitely a relationship between how much we drinkable and the color of our pee, that doesn't necessarily ever correlate with our bodily hydration condition at a blood and cellular level (where it really matters).

I find this extremely interesting considering, while it holds true for most athletes in almost circumstances, I've increasingly felt that the apparent obsession with 'peeing clear' is not necessarily ever a completely helpful a message to be promoting to athletes. I've seen it bulldoze some pretty questionable behaviours in my interactions with sports people (from aristocracy to amateur) over the years, myself included! I'd go so far as to say that information technology tin can actually be counterproductive in some circumstances.

Because the "clear pee = well hydrated" message has been pushed and then hard, I've witnessed highly motivated athletes over-drinking routinely in a bid to always pass large quantities of transparent urine, in the business firm belief that anything less than that is somehow sub-optimal. I was definitely guilty of this myself in the by when in total-time training (and before I got into the hydration game).

It'south likewise partly why so many athletes consciously over-drink immediately before competing. This can lead to problems associated with hyponatremia (the dilution of the body'due south sodium levels), which can ruin your event and can even exist life-threatening in the extreme.

In one pretty outrageous example, I've chatted with a high profile NFL Starting Wide Receiver who is adamant that if he doesn't drinkable so much water that he "pees his pants on the sideline" at least twice before the start of each game, he'south sure he'due south non 'hydrated' enough to perform at his all-time.

In the organisational context, I've seen pressure put on athletes by coaches or sports medicine staff. Sometimes they'll actively testing 'urine specific gravity' or 'urine osmolality' on a daily basis, with punishments for athletes who present with night coloured urine.

This can ofttimes result in some significant over-drinking going on earlier pee tests and even the watering down of urine samples in the irresolute rooms. I child you non. Pro tip: if you're going to do this, use the hot tap otherwise the Pee Exam Officeholder may go suspicious if you hand over a loving cup of rock cold pee.

Placing such specific and heavy accent on urine colour as THE Only disquisitional hydration metric incentivises athletes who focus on over-drinking, rather than just drinking appropriately.

It also fails to fairly promote the message that, although being chronically dehydrated is definitely bad, then as well is chronically over-drinking (especially plain water) and forcing your body to urinate more frequently than is necessary just to check that you accept clear pee the whole time.

There's a trend in sports medicine (and - to be off-white - in well-nigh walks of life) to focus on measuring and improving metrics that can be hands measured/quantified and this is what seems to accept happened in the quest to quantify hydration status.

The relationship between urine colour and hydration status

Hydration status is something that most coaches and athletes are, quite correctly, interested in getting right. The upshot is that, whilst urine color tin definitely be somewhat indicative of hydration status, in that location'southward definitely not a simple and linear human relationship between actual hydration condition and the color of your pee. Frequently producing very small amounts of dark urine tin can be a sign of bodily dehydration, simply it's not necessarily e'er the instance.

With those points in mind, numerous other factors can touch on the color of your pee (as this excellent article points out) and these include…

• Drinking alcohol
• Drinking a lot of tea, coffee or other mildly diuretic drinks
• Swimming in cold water (due to cold diuresis and/or immersion diuresis)
• Drinking a large amount of obviously water in a very short space of fourth dimension
• Fretfulness
• Certain medications

So, boiling a complex topic down to an overly simplistic statement - "your pee should be 1-3 on this nautical chart" or "y'all're not hydrated enough!" is appropriate for many - but misses many important nuances and creates the potential for the key message to be misinterpreted and drive behaviours that aren't actually helpful. i.eastward. to promote over-drinking.

It makes me call up of the famous quote that is ofttimes attributed to Einstein; 'Everything should be fabricated as elementary as possible, but non simpler.'

Urine colour and dehydration - Applied applications

Despite the weaknesses of the 'Armstrong Chart approach', I practice still call up that keeping an center on what colour your pee is from time to fourth dimension can exist a useful tool in helping to manage your hydration status, as long as it's not the only tool you lot use.

If you're regularly nearer to the '8' end of the scale than the '1', and so information technology might exist worth experimenting with taking in a little more h2o or sports drinks, particularly effectually times when you're working hard and sweating a lot. Run into how that makes you feel and whether it's of benefit.

Conversely, if you're always seeing 1-2 coloured pee, then maybe you lot could think virtually dialling back your fluid intake a touch to see if you lot're over-doing it a bit.

Again, how y'all feel overall after making these adjustments will give you the best idea of whether yous're better or worse off every bit a issue, and that is of course what actually matters nigh of all.

But I do remember it'south important that we start to move abroad from the overly simplistic idea that if your pee is clear y'all're definitely hydrated, and if information technology'southward not, you're definitely not.

This is non the case all of the time and drinking and drinking until your wee is clear is not the road to optimal health or performance . As a result I think I'd be happy to see some of these pee charts coming down off the walls in the nigh futurity. Or for the messaging to exist changed to something a fleck more than nuanced.

It's more often than not a good idea to provide prompts to assistance athletes self-monitor and understand their bodies a little meliorate. But it's important that those prompts 'nudge' the development of genuinely helpful behaviours and, to a degree, it feels like we may have strayed a piddling too far in one direction in this case.

Further Reading

• How to tell if yous're dehydrated
• How much aridity can yous tolerate before your operation suffers
• Does coffee dehydrate you?
• What is hyponatremia and how can you avoid it?

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Source: https://www.precisionhydration.com/performance-advice/hydration/does-having-clear-pee-really-mean-youre-well-hydrated/

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