Water retention & multiple trainings a day

Hi,

Can anyone give me advice on how to deal with water retention?

For the past 3 months i have been training ~11 times a week (and most of the trainings are pretty intense), usually taking a week off from this helps, but it feels kind of counterproductive.

I've tried until now:

- increasing the caloric intake - though switching from a relatively clean diet to more white bread, sugar in the morning coffee etc. might only made it worse

- increasing/decreasing salt intake

- increasing/decreasing water intake

Also:

Do you have any advice what to eat? I assume that with this much training i need to eat a lot, I live in Hungary, the food is somewhat expensive, so I cant afford eating meat/veggies/fruits all the time. I assume eating buckwheat and oats is a good choice too.

Water retention usually happens when you go from eating a low calorie diet to a high calorie diet very suddenly. For example when you go from a cut directly into a bulk without any transition period.

Usually it goes away within a couple of days to up to two weeks depending on the person though. I get the impression you're dealing with prolonged water retention? Are you fluctuating your calorie intake alot or is it relatively stable? Also are you fluctuating your carb intake alot? Those can be reasons for prolonged water retention.

My calorie intake is relatively stable, or at least i think so; my carb intake however does fluctuate depending on the day in the week - we run out of fruits at home after Wednesday .

I'll try to keep both stable for a few weeks, and see what happens, thank you.

Please define what water retention means to you. That is very ambiguous. What, specifically, makes you feel like you are "retaining water"? How did you arrive at this conclusion?

If you think that you're retaining lwater only beacuse you feel "puffy" then decrease the ammount of starchy carbs...

Water retention is not bad, even it has it's positive side, in order to bring you a greater rate of force production...

as it was mention before, it can be due tu a surplus in a caloric intake...

as Joshua mentioned, please describe what is for you water retention

Are you supplementing with creatine? do you usually consume salt in your meals?

By water retention I mean puffiness. I had the same problem/symptoms when I was experimenting with IF. Back then I arrived to this conlusion from a leangains article:

http://www.leangains.com/2010/01/how-to ... -part.html

"(...) Water retention can take many forms, such as swollen watery tissue or as an accumulation of fluids in the stomach, chest, lower body and in between joints. You might notice it in the form of fat that feels "squishy" or in the form of red stretch marks when waking up in the morning. You can also notice it on your ankles when taking your socks off in the evening; the pressure from the socks leaves an indentation (...)"

This time I considered the possibility that I just simply got fatter, but I think that's unlikely. Before I started to have a lot of training sessions per week I ate the same amount of food as I am now and I was constantly loosing weight (somewhat slowly). It started a bit after I started to train this much, later I tried to increase the amount of food I eat and see if it solves the problem (I figured that my caloric intake might be too low), but it didn't.

Yes, I am supplementing creatine, but only the last two weeks, I've had this problem for more than a month and a half now.

Salt: usually my meals are the following:

morning - oatmeal with milk and a banana (no salt at all)

noon - sandwiches: bread, veggies, ham, cheese etc (only as much as the ham contains)

afternoon - fruits

evening (before training) - homemade meal: meat + potatoes/rice/pasta/etc. (there might be plenty of salt in these)

night (after training) - the rest of the prev. meal (I cant eat too much before training)

I thought my salt intake might be too low (as I might be sweating it all out), so for a week I increased it, nothing happened.

Sounds like you need to see an RD. This is not an issue to try and resolve online.

If you have fluid retention it can mean an enormous number of things, from impaired kidney function to impaired cardiac function as well as the issues you have asked about.

Go see a professional, seriously.

Okay I'll do that, thank you for the advice.

Smec said:

Okay I'll do that, thank you for the advice.

No problem! I hope you know I'm not trying to shoo you off, I am simply concerned about your health.

It's a bad idea for any of us to try and help with something that appears to be this complex.

If you can, you might want to contact local or regional athletic organizations and get some opinions on who their preferred RD's are. It's worth taking a little bit of time to find one who deals with this kind of thing regularly.