Let me tell you the story of last Saturday or as I like to call it the 12 hours I thought I might be dying.

Let us start off with I’m being a bit dramatic when I say I thought I was dying. It is true that I don’t really get sick often and if I do it’s never past a cold. I’ve also never broken a bone. So when I woke up Friday night after falling asleep for an hour and I couldn’t straighten my arm (without it being really painful) I was kind of freaking out.

But let me back up a bit

Thursday night I had lifted weights for the first time in a loooong time. The next day I was a normal sore as I had anticipated. My arm didn’t start to not work until late that night. It was also only my right arm so I didn’t think the two were connected. I decided maybe I slept on it wrong and to try and go back to sleep and maybe it would feel better in the morning.

By morning I had woken up several times and tried to move it with it still hurting extremely bad.

So, that next afternoon I went to the doctor. They took blood and I waited to see how many days I had left. Then the nurse came back. She goes “You are dehydrated!” and starts hooking me up to an IV to put fluids in me. I was confused and a little embarrassed to say the least. I did a pretty good job a drinking water normally and I hadn’t had a headache at all that week which my normal sign I was dehydrated.

The doctor then comes in and explains what happened to me. I will now try to explain it to you my understanding of it.* Basically, when you work out your muscles break down and then that tissue gets flushed out with the water in your system. So, if you haven’t drunk enough water before you work out (me) then it just sits there.

Over the next 24 hours, your muscles start to react and seize up. Normal muscle breaks down levels after a work out is 100 to 150. Mine was over 12,000, which as you probably guessed, are extremely high.

So after two bags of fluids and being in the ER for five hours I was done. They told me to just keep stretching my arm, drinking lots of water, and come back in two days to have another blood test done to make sure my kidneys weren’t failing (a fun side effect if it’s not caught early enough).

So that’s my story and lesson for why everyone needs to drink tons of water especially before working out.

*If you want to look into this more of getting the actual scientific explanation you can go to this website.