If you love getting out of the city and hiking around in the mountains, you’re in good company. The number of outdoor enthusiasts in America is growing all the time. As technology frees us from the time-consuming chores of yesteryear, we have more opportunities to enjoy our leisure activities away from the confines of the city.
As people turn to outdoor activities and sports, their attention also, quite naturally, turns to their physical health. They begin to be conscious of what they eat and drink, how much they weigh, whether or not they’re getting enough cardio in their daily workout, and so on. They take vitamins, avoid sugary foods and starches, watch their alcohol intake, and study all the latest fitness trends.
Hiking is part of a healthy lifestyle, or a healthy lifestyle leads to healthy activities such as hiking. Whichever way you want to look at it, health and hiking go hand in hand.
Stay Hydrated
During physical exertion, you need to stay properly hydrated. Water helps regulate your body temperature, lubricating your joints, and transporting nutrients to your muscles. When you workout (and hiking is a workout) you sweat, losing water, which reduces the volume of your blood. That, in turn, makes your heart work harder to pump your blood throughout your body.
Additional problems caused by water loss during exercise are:
- Muscle Cramps
- Fatigue
- Dizziness
- Heat Stroke
- Heat Exhaustion
There are a lot of alternate drinks available out there – and we like many of them – water is still the best one for you. It doesn’t have any sugars in it. It doesn’t contain caffeine, food dyes, or any calories at all. It’s the ideal drink.
Where Does That Stream Come From?
Looks can be deceiving, and that’s never truer than with water. Despite the movies showing a mountain man flopping down on his belly to drink from a crystal clear stream, you never know what might be laying in the water just a few hundred yards upstream.
Any dead animal – raccoon, squirrel, deer, bird – laying in the water will contaminate the water with an endless array of unhealthy bacteria as the carcass begins to decay. Once they enter the water they can be carried along for miles, right down to where you’re taking a drink yourself.
Unless you know, know with 100% certainty that there aren’t any dead animals in the water anywhere along the stream you’re drinking from – don’t. Since it’s impossible to know for sure there aren’t any dead animals in the water somewhere upstream you should never take a chance on drinking the water without filtering it first.
Even if you’re trying to be smart and drink healthy smoothies, they still have water in them and that water had to come from somewhere.
Filtering Water Bottles
One of the easiest and quickest ways to filter your water at a moment’s notice is to get a filtering water bottle from TheWaterGeeks, a company dedicated to healthy, purified water.
These water bottles have built-in filters that let you filter water from any stream, creek, or river and make it 100% drinkable and healthy in a matter of seconds. There aren’t any batteries to change and no chemicals to add, subtract or measure. Outwardly it looks like just another run-of-the-mill water bottle, albeit a brightly colored one, but inwardly it filters all the water almost as fast as you can scoop it out of the creek.
These bottles give you 99.99% protection from harmful bacteria and pathogens in the water that could make you sick. They’ll also fit perfectly in the clips on your mountain bike if that’s your preferred way to traverse the great outdoors.
More Than One Reason
As wonderful as all that filtering is, that’s not the only reason to get a filtering water bottle.
- One of the results of people wanting to live a healthier life is an accompanying desire to drink healthier water. This has given rise to the whole bottled water industry with its attendant zillions of empty plastic bottles clogging our landfills.
Filtering water bottles are reusable. When the filter reaches the end of its life, simply replace it with a new one and keep on trucking.
- A second extra reason for using a filtering water bottle is to filter the water out of your tap at home. If it has a weird smell to it, is discolored, or has a strange metallic taste to it, a filtering water bottle is just the thing you need to make it drinkable in no time.
Filtering water bottles are the perfect accessory for the health conscious person on the go.