How to Hydrate Quickly: Fastest Ways to Rehydrate Effectively

The Difficulty of Dehydration

Without question, dehydration is the most pernicious disruptor of workout quality, and perhaps the most common disturber of everyday life enjoyment. 

When you feel yourself becoming fatigued throughout the day, you may not automatically link your decline in physical and mental function to the same problem that’s causing your dry mouth and dark urine, but those are both surefire signs that you’re already experiencing mild dehydration. 

Failure to address fluid loss at this point is simply going to result in a continuous decline in your physical performance, whether you’re directly involved in vigorous exercise or not.

Your first instinct upon reading this is probably to say, “Why don’t I just drink water?” And, you’re probably right. That is seldom the wrong answer, and almost never a course of action that could be harmful to you. 

However, is drinking water really the fastest way to cure dehydration, either in general, or in all circumstances? Or, is the fastest way to hydrate your body some other oral rehydration solution that can provide you with some other benefits as well?

Water: The Classic and Most Accessible Option

If you’re feeling the effects of dehydration, plain water is usually the first place you should turn. This is owed to simple physics. If you have a physical makeup similar to the average person, your body weight is composed of approximately 60 percent water. Beyond that, everything you’d drink for sustenance is almost entirely water at its core.

Therefore, drinking water daily is simply a means of allowing yourself to replenish your most vital component on a consistent basis. It also helps you sustain your natural body weight while ensuring the efficient transfer of nutrients without allowing your blood pressure to fluctuate to levels that are either dangerously low or high.

Aside from this simple analogy, relying primarily on water intake to address moderate to severe dehydration has other advantages. Plain water is free of added sugars, artificial sweeteners, or any other substances that might cause unwelcome side effects in your body.

On top of this advantage, water is also the most inexpensive way to rehydrate fast. Bottled drinking water is usually the most inexpensive beverage at the grocery store or convenience store, and public drinking fountains can even provide you with a free source of water if you find yourself in a public place and in dire need of more fluids.

There is only one potential downside to drinking ordinary water; if you find yourself suffering from severe dehydration due to certain extenuating circumstances — possibly brought about by certain environmental or medical factors — sometimes water isn’t the most efficient way to transport nutrients into your body. In those situations, you’ll want to reach for oral rehydration solutions that are a bit more specialized or sophisticated.

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Electrolyte-Rich Drinks: Sports Drinks & Oral Rehydration Solutions

Sports drinks are the most commonly advertised specialty products for replenishing lost fluids. The magical property of sports drinks that helps them efficiently treat dehydration caused by intense exercise is found within their electrolytes. 

Because electrolytes are vital to helping your body maintain its fluid balance, and because electrolytes are commonly lost through sweat, it makes perfect sense that sports drinks would be one of your preferred resources for fluid intake during or after an intense workout.

However, there are other times when a sports drink — or some other oral rehydration solutions containing electrolytes — might be the most logical choice to rehydrate your body. For instance, if you’re taking certain medications, like medicine that treats diabetes, this can also cause a drastic loss of electrolytes. 

In addition, lingering in hot weather is also likely to prompt excessive sweat that can upset your fluid balance and diminish your hydration status. In these cases, a sports drink or an oral rehydration solution is once again an advisable source of fluid intake.

Milk: An Unexpectedly Powerful Rehydration Tool

If you’re looking for another simple dehydration remedy, and you don’t want to simply drink water, you may want to just drink milk. 

Not only can milk help you rehydrate quickly, but it is essentially water that already contains healthy fat, protein, and carbohydrate content. 

So while there is little about milk that will help you avoid dehydration on the level of a customized beverage containing electrolytes — and yes, calcium is an electrolyte — milk certainly contains enough water to help you replenish your fluids and improve your overall health.

Of course, the matter of lactose intolerance is certainly going to be an issue for the two thirds of the global population that suffers from some form of that issue. If you fall into this category, the ability of milk to restore your fluids is going to be offset by some of the problems it may cause in your body. 

In fact, because two of the common symptoms of lactose intolerance are diarrhea and vomiting, an attempt to address mild dehydration with a glass of milk may lead to moderate or severe dehydration due to the side effects of drinking that milk. 

Fortunately, there are other beverages you can drink to replenish your fluids and cure your dehydration if milk disagrees with you.

Fruits and Vegetables: Nutrient-Dense Hydration

When you lose fluids, you may not think about fruits and vegetables as your best bet for staying hydrated. The reality is that fruits and vegetables are water rich foods that can help you hydrate fast while simultaneously helping to make your dry mouth symptoms disappear.

The average water content of a fruit is between 80-to-85 percent, and the fluids contained within that fruit will rehydrate your body just as surely as the fluids that you would acquire from a glass or cup of your favorite beverage.

This is certainly a helpful strategy on another front, since fruits and vegetables are core components of a balanced diet. So not only are you preventing dehydration by consuming fruits and vegetables, but you’re helping to preserve your overall health as well.

In a study involving school children, consuming water and milk were the most likely indicators of hydration — or sustaining a respectable free water reserve. Beyond that, free water reserve was significantly higher in children with greater fruit and vegetable intake levels than in those who consumed low levels of fruits and vegetables. (1)

While these study results underscore the efficacy of using fruits and vegetables to contribute to your overall hydration, these study results also make it clear that consuming direct liquid nutrition is the most reliable way to stave off dehydration symptoms. 

In light of these outcomes, when you’re dealing with severe cases of dehydration, your safest bet is to reach for an option that is a surefire source of more fluids, and to leave fruits and vegetables for steady sources of additional fluids that can help you stay hydrated throughout the day.

Coffee and Tea: Hydrating in Moderation

Caffeine is a known diuretic, which is often associated with dehydration. This leads to a common misunderstanding of what dehydration is with respect to the beverages that we commonly consume.

While it is known that caffeine has diuretic effects, the technical definition of a drink that has a dehydrating effect is that it withdraws more fluid from the body than it adds to it.

An example of this is alcohol, which literally extracts fluids from your body by inducing processes in your body that are attempting to get rid of it. In comparison, a caffeinated beverage may lead to a prompt accumulation of urine, but it does not cause the body to excrete more fluid than it ingests.

With respect to coffee and tea in particular, scientific evidence indicates that moderate coffee drinkers who drink 3-6 cups of coffee per day — or 300-600 mg of caffeine — do not experience diuretic effects from caffeine. Moreover, their bodies were equivalently hydrated to test subjects that consumed water. (2)

To put it another way, as long as you don’t drink an excessive amount of caffeine — and assuming your beverages don’t contain excessive quantities of sugar — caffeinated drinks like coffee and tea can still be used as a remedy for dehydration.

Hypotonic Solutions: The Fastest Rehydration Method

If you’ve never heard of a hypotonic solution before, no one will blame you; they aren’t supported by the same mass marketing efforts as some of the other hydration methods on this list.

The definition of a hypotonic solution — for purposes of human hydration — is a solution that has a lower volume of solutes and a higher concentration of water than the cells of your body. This results in a more rapid movement of fluids into your body’s cells.

A hypotonic oral rehydration solution — like Nuun Instant — provides your body with a salt or electrolyte concentration that will replenish the salt your body loses through workouts or other sweat-inducing activities. It is also hypotonic, allowing the water and salt content to be rapidly absorbed through your small intestine.

Because of this feature, hypotonic solutions are credited with being able to restore hydration to your body up to three times faster than other hydration methods.

Recognizing the Signs of Dehydration

By the time you notice the first signs of mild dehydration, it’s likely that your body is already feeling some effects that are at least slightly inhibiting its ability to function properly. Some of the early signs include a dry mouth, a dark urine color, and some light cramping. 

Once you’re feeling the effects of severe dehydration, you’re likely to experience a severely elevated heart rate, obvious confusion or other signs of a compromised mental state, a loss of balance and coordination, and ultimately a loss of consciousness.

If you’re experiencing any of these signs of severe dehydration, you should seek medical attention. This course of action may even include seeking medical help by making a visit to the emergency room to undergo formal oral rehydration therapy.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

If you’re hoping to hydrate fast, it’s nice to think that it’s a simple matter of cracking open your water bottle and making its contents disappear. While that’s partially true, there are a few morsels of information that you should be aware of if you want to give your rehydration strategy an extra boost.

What is the quickest way to rehydrate?

Broadly speaking, hydrating fast is a matter of drinking a substantial amount of fluids. While some fluids may help your body to be slightly more efficient at fluid absorption, the standard key to rapid hydration is to gradually consume more water.

With that being said, the recommended way to rehydrate is to take small sips of water or other fluids throughout the day, which will gradually and safely alleviate the symptoms of dehydration.

How long does it take to rehydrate?

The length of time it takes you to rehydrate depends on the level of your dehydration. If you are only mildly dehydrated, you should start to feel better in 30 minutes to an hour after you begin to drink water.

If your dehydration has reached a more moderate level, it can take several hours to restore your body to an optimal level of hydration.

If you find that you’re severely dehydrated, your best bet is to seek the aid of a healthcare professional so that they can administer rehydration therapy to you in a medically supervised environment.

How can you stay hydrated overnight?

Because your body loses fluid through respiration, this increases the likelihood that you will become dehydrated while you sleep. You can reduce some of these effects simply by drinking water before you turn in for the night.

Also, if your room is warm, you are wearing heavy clothes, or you are sleeping under too many blankets, this can increase your body temperature and induce sweating. When this occurs, your body is similarly likely to lose fluids through sweating. 

In response, you should be aware of the temperature of your room before you go to sleep and plan accordingly with respect to bedtime wear and bedding arrangements.

What is the best way for older adults to rehydrate?

Older adults are more likely to experience kidney-related inefficiencies, and are therefore likely to need more water than when they were younger to adequately hydrate. 

Maintaining optimal hydration is critical as we age; studies show that maintaining the hydration of your body literally slows down the aging process. Failing to hydrate optimally also results in an elevated level of serum sodium, which equates to a greater incidence of chronic diseases, and an accelerated rate of aging. (3)

To help seniors hydrate fast — or at least to reduce the likelihood of dehydration — it is helpful to have hydrating resources on hand, and to provide seniors with easy access to them.

Is it more challenging to rehydrate at a high altitude?

One of the reasons you tend to feel the symptoms of dehydration more rapidly during flights is because the low level of humidity and oxygen pressure in the plane induces your body to shed its water more rapidly. 

This is slightly different from simply being active at high altitude, but it follows the same basic principle; the low-moisture environment extracts a greater amount of fluids from your skin and lungs.

If you know that you’re going to be spending time either at a high altitude or aboard an aircraft, you should plan accordingly. Have a water bottle or some other source of hydration handy, and preemptively drink plenty of fluids before you enter the dehydrating environment.

Conclusion: What’s the best way to rehydrate?

This list began with a question of what the best way to rehydrate your body is. After laying out all of the options, the actual answer is… it depends.

Specifically, your best choice for rehydration is dependent on your individual circumstances, because there are so many different scenarios you can find yourself in, and varying degrees of dehydration you may be forced to endure.

To keep things simple, you should remember the circumstances that caused your dehydration. With that being said, always remember that In most situations reaching for plain water is a perfectly acceptable way to rehydrate. 

Other hydration options can be dictated by specific needs. If your dehydration is workout-induced, a sports drink or a hypotonic solution might be the best option to reach for, but if your dehydration was prompted by resistance training, a glass of milk may be just the thing you need due to its fluid and protein content.

Quite honestly, given how often most people find themselves feeling dehydrated, your best source of hydration is probably going to be the nearest source of fluid on this list, whether it’s a bottle of water, a glass of milk, or a juicy watermelon. Each of them will stave off dehydration and keep your body and brain running smoothly. In the end, that’s what truly matters.

References:

1. Montenegro-Bethancourt G, Johner SA, Remer T. Contribution of fruit and vegetable intake to hydration status in schoolchildren. Am J Clin Nutr. 2013 Oct;98(4):1103-12. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.112.051490. Epub 2013 Aug 21. PMID: 23966431.

2. Killer SC, Blannin AK, Jeukendrup AE. No evidence of dehydration with moderate daily coffee intake: a counterbalanced cross-over study in a free-living population. PLoS One. 2014 Jan 9;9(1):e84154. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0084154. PMID: 24416202; PMCID: PMC3886980.

3. Dmitrieva, Natalia I. et al. Middle-age high normal serum sodium as a risk factor for accelerated biological aging, chronic diseases, and premature mortality; eBioMedicine, Volume 87, 104404