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Water. My brother Dave Navarro always jokes that our mother made this great drink for us as kids. It was two parts H and one part O. Well Dave, that’s technically wrong, as an Oxygen molecule is some sixteen times larger than a Hydrogen molecule.*water - SO technically it should be eight parts O and one part H.

In this entry, I’m not going I bore you with the ins and outs of how our bodies are mostly water(but I WILL provide a funny article here), but focus on the relationship of massage and the drinking of water.

Toxins. How do you think you get rid of them?

Throughout our bodies, we have restproducts of all kinds of chemical processes. Lactic acid for example, which is a byproduct of  doing exercise without access to enough oxygen (which isn’t bad for you, it just tells you that you are running) is one you are certainly familiar with. In our bodies, scores of processes happen all of the time, and produce wasteproducts. Now, every single chemical process doesn’t get flushed out of the system immediately. Trash, in the form of things that dont really need to be stuck in the muscle tissues end up here, and over a period of time get flushed out. At the same time new toxins enter the system.

*It is very important to exercise. Read about the lymphatic system here.

Days you recieve bodywork, it is important to drink plenty of water both prior to the massage, and afterwards. The kneading of muscles, and deep strokes [always in the direction of the heart] stir up a lot of toxins. At a higher than natural rate, these[toxins] are expelled from the muscle tissues. This entry can be summed up in the next paragraph:

After recieving a massage, the toxins that were in your muscles are now in your bloodstream. If you do not drink water, they cannot get “flushed out” of your system.

So the toxins might keep circulating in your bloodstream, which often give flu-like symptoms.

So, drink water when you get started massaging each other. It’s the LAW. 

Massage therapists are actually required by law to tell you to drink water after a massage, not unlike a drug company has to tell you of all of the potential side effects and dangers of their drugs (unless they pay the FDA a lot of money).

So when is this important to you at home? Probably not when you first get started, as I strongly discourage you massaging each other for more than 10 minutes for the first few nights. After a while, when you increase you “dosage” of massage(you have no idea how many ailments it will fix!) and you are covering more tissues, then it becomes imperative to increase your water intake.

If you have any questions - ask them below!