Thermoregulation is a term used to refer to the ability of a human body to remove body waste or excess heat generated during workouts or physical activities. High power and intensive bodybuilding workouts are only made possible for a professional or armature body builder by his or her Thermoregulation capacity. Success in body building and even the health of a body builder is strongly pegged on the efficiency of the individual’s Thermoregulation

In early days of evolution, experts claim that Thermoregulation developed to enable the early man endure long and strenuous hours of hunting game. The men could rejuvenate their bodies while the game became overly exhausted after a long chase. The human ability of loosing excess heat became the reason why they could capture fast game animals with very primitive tools.

Thermoregulation involves a series of body reactions one of which is sweating. The ability of humans to control body heat through sweating is based on the effect of evaporation. When a body builder sweats during a workout, he or she clears the excess body heat by the strenuous exercise. What happens is that the sweat on the skin evaporates into the air leaving behind a cooling effect. This protects the skin from overheating until it cooks itself.

Sweating excessively can however cause adverse effects to the body builder. Dehydration consequent from excessive sweating is usually referred to as hyperthermia. Mild dehydration consequent from body water losses can and does impair the cognition processes of a body builder. The impairment usually starts only if the water mass lost is more than 1% of the total amounts in the body. The cognitive impairment as a result of excessive heat during exercises causes loss of integrity in the blood-brain barrier. Hyperthermia is also said to lower the cerebral blood flow rate and to raise the brain temperatures to unsafe levels. However, most of these conditions are very rare and happens only in very decimated instances and even then with mild effects.

The body usually makes up for this danger of over-sweating by stimulating thirst in the body builder. This prompts the body builder to drink some cold water amid the workout, time and time again. There are two benefits that accrue from drinking water during the workout. One is that the water levels of the body are replenished to optimal proportions. The second is that the water also becomes a cooling agent that goes a long way to lower the body temperatures. That is why during workouts, most body builders prefer, though unconsciously, cold water over warm water.

Another reaction that occurs to loose excessive heat during workouts is that skin hair stands upright in a bid to trap wind and moving air for longer on the skin. The more air that interacts with the skin, the cooler the skin becomes. The body also slows down the metabolic processes to ensure that less heat is produced during combustion. With little metabolic activity, heat production in the body steadily declines to the optimal levels. The human body is a masterpiece of regulation and optimal control of water, heat, sugar, glucose and a million other constituents. Thermoregulation is just one of the many regulatory mechanisms that help the body maintain optimal states.

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