Technical note: the use of an additional shirt significantly increases the degree of dehydration when playing soccer.

Abstract

During physical activity, increased body temperature activates the mechanism of sweating. Sweat evaporation avoids excessive increases of body temperature, but this occurs at the expense of dehydration. Dehydration in turn may be increased by many factors, including the clothing used by the exercising person. In this report it is experimentally demonstrated that the use of an additional shirt while playing soccer induces statistically significant increases in the exercise-induced percentage of body dehydration. Taking into account that dehydration has the potential to adversely affect certain physical and cognitive abilities in an acute manner, using an additional shirt when playing soccer is not desirable from a purely thermoregulatory standpoint.