When you work out, you want to avoid dehydration at all costs. Aside from just putting a strain on your body, it can also prevent you from working out at full strength or limit your exercise altogether. If you were never informed about how to prevent dehydration, now is the best time to find out how you can stay hydrated during exercise. Here are just a few of the ways that you can avoid it.

The most common mistake you probably make when preparing for a workout is trying to hydrate yourself just a few minutes before you're ready to start. It's the same mistake that many people make. You rush to the gym, throw on your workout clothes and then down a bottle of water and think that you'll be fine to exercise. That's simply not true. In order to properly hydrate your body, you need to drink water in the hours (yes, hours) leading up to your workout. Keep a bottle of water handy and make sure that you're taking in water at a consistent pace. This is the water that will help keep you hydrated later on when you start exercising. Any water that you take in just before or during your workout will simply help to replenish your body later.

It may not help you as much as the water you drink prior to working out, but you still need to make sure you're taking in water during your workouts. It will help to refill the water supply in your body. As you work out, you sweat out most of the water that was already in your system in order to keep you cool. So you'll need to keep plenty of it going back into your body to replace that supply. By making sure that water is cold, you can also speed up the process and also help cool down your body to prevent it from overheating.

Once you leave the gym or finish your workout at home, you're technically not out of the woods yet. Dehydration can linger on for hours after you're done working out if your internal water levels are still low. There's a very simple way to prevent this: Keep drinking water! You may want to try a sports beverage too to help replenish your supply of electrolytes. But drinking water after you exercise can prevent cramping later and help your body to start the recovery process more quickly.

It may not seem like it, but water is one of the most important things in your diet. By getting water into your system regularly, you can help speed up weight loss and also help you maximize your workouts. Water does not have any calories, so it's a good idea to drink water as often as you can during the course of the day. Even if you're not working out, you need to continue putting water into your system to reduce your risk of suffering from dehydration.