The amount of fluid you need during exercise depends on the amount of sweat you loose while working out. You probably know you mainly take fluids to compensate for your sweat loss and your sweat rate is dependent on the temperature and the exercise intensity.

You might not know that one athlete may lose up to 3 or 4 fold the amount of fluid compared to another athlete. Fluid intake is necessary to limit fluid loss, because too much loss can seriously harm your performance. Therefore it is useful to know your personal sweat rate. Use the sweat rate test feature of EatMyRide and you get all these insights. Read further to see how this works and how you can use it.

Personal sweat rate

To put it simple, you can measure sweat rates by noting your naked weight on a scale prior to and after working out. If the temperature would be 30 degrees Celsius, don’t be surprised to see one athlete getting sweat rates of 1 liter hourly, while another might hit 3 liters. On a 4-hour workout this means 4 – 12 liters, that is an 8 liter difference.

The consensus used to be that you should limit your net fluid loss to below 2% of your body weight. Newer research is showing that in some cases more dehydration is allowed, but there is no consensus on one single maximum for all athletes, so you need to practise.

Perform sweat loss tests using EatMyRide

On the home page of EatMyRide app you’ll find on top a button Sweat rate test. You just enter your naked weight prior to an activity and afterwards and you enter your fluid intake and potential urination stops.

After you completed one or a few tests you will notice your sweat rate by clicking on the Progress button on the homepage. You can click on the dots for more details. Based on your sweat rate test results we create a formula for you that estimates your fluid loss for each new cycling activity.

You’ll notice the Completeness score, this is telling you whether you took enough tests within different circumstances.

Get fluid loss insights

When you open an actual activity you did, notice the new fluid loss overview. It shows your fluid loss but it also shows you the Confidence score. This score is an indication how reliable this fluid loss estimation is. It is based on the number of tests you did in similar circumstances.

Realtime insights on your Garmin

Your sweat rate tests are not only used to assess fluid loss during actual activities, you can also track in real time your fluid loss during exercise on Garmin Edge devices with touchscreen via our  Carbohydrate Burn / Intake data field. This enables you to know in time that you need to drink more and so avoid impaired performance.