Gatorade Canada and the PWHL launch groundbreaking sports hydration research

The GIST: The PWHL’s best are getting ready to sweat ahead of Friday’s season-opening puck drop, and Gatorade Canada’s turning that salty effort into pivotal insights about women’s hydration standards. No, seriously — sweat isn’t just part of sports: It could be key to changing the game for women athletes.

👀 What’s this groundbreaking research?: Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI), aka the hydration brand’s research and development arm, is sweat testing 100 PWHL players from all four Canadian teams: the Montréal Victoire, Toronto Sceptres, Ottawa Charge, and Vancouver Goldeneyes, with the goal of better understanding the hydration patterns of elite women athletes.

💦 What exactly is a sweat test?: An excellent question. A sweat test measures variables like electrolyte replacement needs, fluid loss, and sweat rate. Athletes wear patches that absorb their sweat during a training session or game and are weighed before and after exercising to determine how much fluid they sweat out. Consider it the science of perspiration.

👏 Why does this matter?: Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but health and nutrition guidelines are usually derived from studies done on men. In fact, only 6% of sports science research is specific to women’s physiology. That’s problematic: Women’s bodies function differently than their male peers’, and this lack of women-centered data can be detrimental to performance.

• Now, study participants can fuel up with personalized hydration data and set a baseline for women-specific hydration standards. And this is just the beginning: By 2026, the GSSI’s research will include hundreds of athletes across multiple sports. And that’s on sweat equity.