Full transcript of the episode:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Fuelled Triathlete. I’m your host, Andrea and today we’re going to be doing a deep dive all about electrolytes. So when you think of electrolytes, what do you think of maybe you think of different drinks, maybe you think of salt, maybe you think of potassium.
So there’s probably a lot of different things that come to mind. And hopefully after this episode, you have a better understanding of what they are, how much you may need and how to get them through your diet or supplements. So we are going to be talking about the following. What are electrolytes, why they’re important?
What are the five main electrolytes that we lose on our sweat and how much do we actually lose? How can we get them back into our body? Is it through diet, through supplements? What’s going to be best for us, why we should really even care about electrolytes and also talking a little bit about foods that contain electrolytes and different supplements, things like salt tabs, electrolyte drinks. So let’s get right into it.
What are electrolytes? So electrolytes are minerals in our body and they exist in different places. They exist in our urine, our blood, our tissues, our bodily fluids and this includes sweat. So when we think of proper hydration, this includes not only getting adequate fluids and liquids in our diet, but it also includes getting adequate electrolytes.
So there’s four main electrolytes that are in our body. There’s going to be sodium and chloride. There’s also potassium, magnesium and calcium. So they have different types of roles in the body. Sodium, chloride, and potassium. These are really important for maintaining and regulating fluid balance.
So they play an important role in hydration. Magnesium and calcium play a role more so in muscle nerve, heart and brain function, and they also play a role in our metabolism. So when we look at what we actually lose in sweat, the main electrolyte that we lose is sodium. Electrolytes also do play a role in helping our body balance a healthy pH level, and it helps remove waste out of the cells and move nutrients into our cells.
So lots of different functions within the body. As an endurance athlete, all of these important, we want to make sure our muscles and our heart are functioning properly, but we also want to make sure that we have proper hydration.
What electrolytes are we losing through sweat and what do we want to plenish? And why does that even matter? So if we look at kind of our sweat, everybody is going to lose different amounts. But the thing that is consistent between everybody is that sodium is the primary electrolyte that you’re losing through your sweat.
So I’ll kind of break down. Different amounts that we tend to lose, but just keep in mind. Sodium is a main electrolyte that we’re losing. There are going to be kind of our heavy salty sweaters and people that aren’t so salty sweaters. So some people are on the low end and the high end. But again, that is the main thing we’re mostly losing sodium.
So the range that we see is about 200 to 2000 milligrams of sodium per one liter of sweat. So that is a huge range. We’re going to talk a little bit later about, do you need to sweat testing? How can you determine how much you’re losing, but know that that’s a big range, the average amounts is going to be 900 milligrams.
Now potassium is only a loss of about 160 milligrams to 400 milligrams. Okay. So definitely lower. So you want to pay attention, I would say some sports drinks claim to be hydrating, like prime or just even drinking coconut water. You may hear as hydrating but, when we look at what’s hydrating and we’re looking at replenish and during exercise, you don’t want to see more potassium than sodium. Magnesium is lost in much smaller amounts. We can lose anywhere from zero milligrams, up to 36 milligrams per one liter of sweat.
And then calcium zero to 120 milligrams. I would say for ones that we lose on the lower end we’re focused more on getting these through our overall daily diet.
So we’re going to come back to those other electrolytes and talk about how to get them through our diet. But the main thing I want to focus on right now is sodium. Because as an endurance athlete and the role that it plays in hydration.
So sodium is consumed through food or potentially supplements and drinks and it’s excreted through the urine and the sweat.
Sodium levels in the body can fluctuate based on how much water is in the body. So if the amount of water that you consume, isn’t equal to what you lose, you can become dehydrated. So you have too little water, or if you consume a lot more water than you’re losing, you may become over hydrated and have too much water. There are other things that can affect sodium and electrolyte imbalances.
So certain types of medications, if you’re sick and you’re have diarrhea or vomiting, this can affect your electrolyte levels and cause them to decrease sweating a lot. Again, we’re losing a lot more electrolytes. Those can cause them to decrease. And then also, if there’s any liver or kidney issues, this can cause imbalances either low or high amounts of electrolytes.
If we go back to how much we’re losing in sweat of sodium I mentioned we can lose anywhere from 200 to 2000 milligrams of sodium per one liter of sweat. Now let’s put that into perspective.
On average athletes lose 0.5 to 2.5 liters of sweat per hour. So let’s say you’re an average salty sweater. Average sweater is 900 milligrams per liter of sweat. If you have a sweat rate of a litre an hour and you work out for two hours, you could be losing 1800 milligrams of sodium. As can really add up over time. So if you have high sodium sweat losses and you’re only drinking water. This potentially can be dangerous. This can lead to something called hyponatremia. So hyponatremia is when our blood levels of sodium can become dangerously low. This can be potentially life-threatening. It can cause things like fatigue ,dehydration, swelling, nausea, vomiting, seizures, confusion, slurred speech, loss of consciousness, so it can be very dangerous.
It happens when you typically, when you lose high amounts of sodium and you have excessive intake of just plain water and this can dilute the level of sodium that’s in your blood. So basically your blood levels of sodium are decreasing and by taking in more and more water, it just, it dilutes the amount of sodium.
Maybe don’t get to that level of hyponatremia where it’s dangerous sometimes if you’re not consuming enough electrolytes overall in your training, it may, be something that plays a role in kind of muscle cramping, or poor recovery after training.
A good thing to keep in mind, to prevent hyponatremia, or just to make sure that you’re replenishing the amount of electrolytes you need is, is typically if you’re training for an hour or less, you’re, well-hydrated going into that training session water should be okay. But when you’re training more than 60 to 90 minutes, and especially in hot humid weather where you’re going to be sweating a lot, then you do want to be adding in, an electrolyte drink. There’s many different types of levels of how much electrolytes are in drinks. A good amount to kind of at least aim for is to try to find an electrolyte or sports drink that contains at least 150 to 180 milligrams of sodium per eight ounces or one cup.
So just to put into perspective, you know, there’s many different types of electrolyte drinks. So something like Nuun tablets can be pretty common. Noon. Tabs are 300 milligrams. Um, of sodium and it’s addressed to mix that into 16 ounces or two cups. So in that way, you’re getting 150 milligrams. Um, per eight ounces.
These are kind of on the low end of sodium and you can find much higher. Sodium electrolyte drinks. Um, which we’ll talk about more. So at the end, Of the episode. So it’s more to keep in mind. You don’t have to necessarily consume. A hundred percent of your sodium sweat losses through your training, but in those certain situations, we want to make sure we are consuming some electrolytes.
So we’ll get into kind of in different races and different scenarios, how much to consume. But I want to talk a little bit about our diet. So it’s important to keep in mind that sodium replenishment isn’t necessarily just happening during that training.
It’s also looking at how much you’re getting through the day. When we look at the recommendations for general healthy adults, the recommendation for sodium or the upper limit is 2300 milligrams of sodium per day. Now, most people, if they’re consuming a lot of processed foods, things with added salt, adding a lot of salt to the table, they’re probably getting more than that.
That’s equivalent to a teaspoon of table salt. 1500 milligrams is the limit for those who have hypertension also known as high blood pressure, or kidney disease. So we look at 2300 milligrams. If we look back to what I talked about in terms of how much you can lose through sweat, right?
If you’re an average sweater, You know, 900 milligrams and you lose a litre now, or like this can really add up. So 2300 milligrams to just get in your diet could be too low and could be potentially dangerous. It may be that it’s okay to be a little bit more liberal with the sodium. If you are someone who has high blood pressure, kidney disease, you would want to work with someone, a dietician or professional to figure out what your specific needs may be because there’s other factors playing a role in how much you excrete or lose, especially through the urine when it’s kidney disease.
So because our sweat rates can vary. In cold weather, easy workouts, we may not be losing as much sweat per hour. Whereas when you have higher, intense, um, training, You’re that’s gonna increase your sweat rate or is outside in the hot humid weather. If your sweat rate is increasing, you are losing more sodium. So there’s more need for those electrolytes in particular sodium. So our day-to-day sodium needs could be different.
How can we get an idea though, of how much are we actually losing in our sweat? And how much should we be taking in? Just like our sweat rate varies each person, you may do the same type of workout in the same environment with your training buddy, and they’re dripping in sweat and you’re not so there’s differences there.
Same thing with sodium sweat concentration due to genetic differences there are differences in the amount of sodium that we lose in our sweat. So there are different sweat testing that you can do. I have with some of my clients use something called H drop, so it’s A patch or an arm bands that they can wear through their training and it estimates how much sodium they’re losing per. Hour and then your sodium sweat concentration. So how much sodium are they losing per liter of sweat? Precision hydration also has some sodium sweat testing. There’s something called Nix. You don’t always need this, though. I want to give you some tools that can help you estimate at home and then some starting points of replenishing your sodium through your training so that you can try to figure out what may be good for you.
So the first step is okay, am I a low, am I in the low end of salty sweat? Or am I on the high end of salty sweater? Or maybe in the middle? So a high salty sweater would be over 1300 milligrams of sodium per liter. Signs that you have this, when you sweat your sweat taste salty, if your salt getting in your eyes, it’s burning your eyes. You have white marks on your forehead once your sweat dries or on your clothes, once that dries. You may be a low salty sweater . You may be less than 500 milligrams per liter of sodium. And like I said, in the medium salty sweaters, right in and around, there are on average, about 900 milligrams of sodium per sweat.
So keep in mind, you don’t have to replace everything. We’re not always looking for that. However, the longer that you’re training. Or the longer that you’re doing endurance exercise or doing a race and the closer that you’re drinking to your sweat rate, the higher amount of sodium or salt that you’re going to need. So think of ultra endurance events or think of your half or full Ironman events. The longer that your endurance event gets the closer to your sweat rate you’re drinking, the more you’re drinking per hour to prevent dehydration.
You never want to drink exactly that or more cause that’s going to lead to over hydration, but you’re gonna be drinking close to that. And the closer that you’re drinking to your sweat rate, because you have to prevent that dehydration means we’re going to need more sodium that we’re taking per hour to make sure that we’re maintaining our hydration, we’re maintaining those blood levels.
I did talk about this a little bit in a couple episodes before. When you’re figuring out how much fluids you need to drink per hour, like when I’m talking about how much fluid you need to drink per hour to prevent dehydration. What I’m really talking about is we usually see that when people lose more than 2% of their body weights from fluids or from sweat, then you’re at a point of being dehydrated and you start to see those performance declines.
So you start to see increase heart rate, higher rate of perceived exertion, decreased performance, decreased concentration.
The more hours that they’re training, the more fluid that we’re losing and the more potential there is to get to that over 2% body weight loss. So we have to drink more per hour because the losses are accumulating over the hours. Whereas if you’re only out there for maybe one or two hours, Those losses, you know, there’s not as much time for that to accumulate.
Some general recommendations for how much sodium to consume per hour. So something maybe like a sprint, Olympic distance, 250 to 500 milligrams per hour. I would say the same for about a half marathon or a full marathon. Play around with those again, if you’re on the low, if you don’t think you’re very salty sweater, start with the low end.
If you think you’re a salty sweater, start with the high end and do that and see how you feel. And if it’s more for half full Ironman distance, you need more like 500 to a thousand milligrams of sodium per hour. And probably potentially more if you have a very high sweat rate and you find you’re a very heavy salty sweater, you’re probably gonna need more than that.
So when I say see how you feel, I just mean, do you feel well-hydrated enough if you’re kind of finishing that training session, where you’re testing out how much sodium you’re taking, because you always want to practice this before a race, how you feel after you feeling kind of nauseous. Are you feeling headache? Are you feeling dehydrated? That may be a sign that you mean we need some more sodium per hour. It’s hard to say exactly a specific amount to go for because one, every training session is different, race climates are different. . Reach out to someone, a dietician myself, who can kind of give you some guidance and help you figure out how much you may need. And the goal is again, race day, where we’re looking for performance, where we’re having long duration events, we want to figure this out beforehand. So it’s February you may be getting some races in the spring and the summer. Now is a good time to start thinking about trying to work on, dialing it in, practicing it in your training. Monitor how you feel, take note on what you consume on those long training rides and how you feel during and how you feel later in the day.
So replenishing these electrolytes, making sure we’re having good hydration levels, why is it important? It’s important for maintaining or performance.
So I talked about when you become dehydrated, this leads to a higher heart rate, exercises feeling a lot more difficult, so it can decrease our performance. When we’re dehydrated, we may be at more risk of having GI issues, Runner’s Trots. Sodium also helps our body maintain more of that fluid in our body. We’re not just peeing it out.
As well when we have some salt or some sodium in beverages, we’re more likely to drink it. It kind of stimulates our thirst a bit more. So if you are someone who finds that you don’t feel like drinking much during, having some salt in there, having some flavor, it stimulates our thirst and helps us to drink. So, where do we get this salt? In our training.
They may be coming from your sports drink. And they may be coming from salt tabs. They may be coming from your energy gels . They may be coming from the foods that you consume. So if you’re consuming a variety of different types of sources of energy or fluids during your training, start to add up how much am I actually consuming? I get asked a lot. Do I need salt tabs? How much do I take? And it really varies if you are not meeting your sodium needs through the fluids and through the foods or the supplements that you’re consuming during training, you may need to add on some salt tabs. Salt tabs have wide different ranges of how much sodium they contain.
So I’ve seen some as low as like 50 milligrams of sodium and some as high as 200 milligrams of sodium. So you may need to choose how much do I need to kind of make up for that? Do I need one an hour. Do I need one every half an hour? That’s typically kind of the rate that you may take them. You can also look at adding salt, or sodium citrate into your drink mixes. So if you’re drinking scratch, or if you’re drinking Grupo, if you’re drinking tailwind, any of those kinds of things, can you add maybe a little bit of extra salt in there?
Then you don’t necessarily need to be consuming assault tab. An eighth of a teaspoon of sodium that’s kind of like those little packets that you might get at McDonald’s is 280 milligrams. So you can add that into your drinks. Again, practices in your training or you can buy sodium citrate, which tends to be a little bit more better tolerated on the GI system, then table salt.
There’s also different electrolyte drinks, right? So, element or LMNT has a thousand milligrams of sodium per packet. Can you mix that into your sports drink or consume that in your training? It doesn’t have carbohydrates so just keep that in mind.
I really like I use Redmond’s Relytes, which has either 800 to a thousand milligrams of sodium. So. Again, it depends. It can come from different sources
So some specific supplements I’ve looked up before that have higher amounts of sodium.
The scratch labs high sodium it’s a passion fruit is it has 1,720 milligrams per packet. So this is pretty high. . In terms of some gels. I find a lot of gels are pretty low in sodium.
So a Maurten gel has about 20 milligrams. GU honey stinger, 40 to 80. So they’re not going to be a very significant source, but some that I’ve looked at that have higher amounts, Are specific flavors of GU Roctane. So the lemonade, sea salt, chocolate and salted lime have 180 milligrams. There’s something called base gel is a brand. There’s a salted watermelon flavor. It has 270 milligrams per package. The Houma gel, huma plus. Um, it has some cheese seeds in there as well, but that’s 240 milligrams and SIS gels. haVe 110 milligrams.
When you’re looking at a sports drink, something that has 150 to 180 milligrams per sodium.
All right. So this is getting a little bit longer, but hope you guys are still here, still paying attention. I want to chat about some of these other electrolytes. So calcium, magnesium, potassium. We lose them in much lower levels in the sweat, but still all play a super important role in the body. Where can we get these? So you may be looking at Getting them in other food’s throughout the day.
So calcium, we probably think dairy milk or a plant-based beverages that are fortified, cheese, yogurt, canned sardines and salmon with the bones. Calcium fortified orange juice, dark leafy greens, kale, collard greens, Sesame seeds, or tahini and white beans. These are some good sources of calcium magnesium.
A lot of people don’t tend to get enough magnesium in the diet. So, spinach, Swiss, chard potatoes at a mom may brand cereals, beans, peas, lentils, Navy beans, black beans, chickpeas, nuts, and seeds like almonds, cashews, pumpkin seeds. These are all great sources of magnesium. Try to include these for the day.
I know some of my clients or some people I speak with also take magnesium supplements to help them meet their needs or magnesium before bed can help with sleep or muscle soreness, fatigue. If you are going to look for a magnesium supplement, choose magnesium glycinate.
Potassium, another mineral super important. Many of us don’t get enough in our diet, mainly in a different types of fruits and vegetables.
So some good sources are bananas, papaya, apricots, cantaloupes, sweet potatoes. Dark leafy greens, beets, avocado milk, dairy yogurt, chocolate milk, beans, chickpeas, lentils, that kind of stuff, nuts and seeds. So there’s a bit of overlap between these foods and what foods contain those.
But if you can try to incorporate these through your diet and your recovery meals. That can help you get, these minerals through your diet. Again, you may not be losing a lot through sweat. You are losing some, but just overall, because they play such a role in fluid balance or bone health or muscle functions and nerves we really want to get enough of these as an endurance athlete and start with those food first. And when it comes to sodium again, you way want to look at overall, like you can replenish those sodium through the day. You may be able to be more liberal with your salt intake, what you’re adding, adding something cooking or at the table. We get a lot through our diet, so things like cheese ,breads, pickles, deli meats, canned foods that aren’t a low sodium version can be sources as well, like beans or canned tomatoes or broth. Um, different bars or packaged foods is going to have some sodium as well. So that question of, do I need to be drinking these electrolytes drinks through the day really comes down to how much sodium are you actually getting in your diet?
If you’re not having a lot of processed foods, you’re eating more whole foods. You’re not using a lot in your cooking then yeah. You may need to supplement with some of these electrolyte drinks, but you may be getting enough through your diet and through your training to replenish. So. It’s very individual and kind of based on what you prefer. Sometimes in the day, if we’re having trouble, not drinking enough water, adding something that has some flavoring to it can help. So that’s where sometimes those electrolyte drinks can help, but just know there’s other lots of ways to add flavor to your drinks. So as always kind of with nutrition, there’s some general guidelines. But it’s very individualized.
Everyone is unique and an individual. So if you do have questions, if you try things yourself, having trouble still figuring out, then working with a sports dietician can really help you just figure out what’s going to work well for you.
So, thanks for listening to today’s episode, this deep dive on electrolytes.
If you have any more questions about anything, send me an email or send me a message. So my email is info@andreadochertyrd.com and you can find me on Instagram @andreadietitian is my handle. I so I just also want to announce that next week I am opening enrollment for a new program.
It’s called the fueled for endurance academy. So this is a group coaching program slash course. Really giving you education and knowledge around how to fuel your training as an endurance athlete. So if you are a triathlete or if you are a runner doing marathons, half marathons. This course is going to be great for you.
It’s 10 weeks long. We meet on a zoom call every week to do some training on a topic related to endurance nutrition. So there’s going to be things like eating pre-workout, post-workout nutrition, recovery, how to carb load, how to build your race plan, how to proportion your plates, how to figure out how much you need through the day, along with some really quick and easy and delicious meal and snack ideas.
And the idea with this is that because it’s in a group coaching format, you’re going to learn from others. So after we do our weekly training, you’ll be able to ask questions, get coaching directly from me in a group setting.
And then you’re going to have a habit to work on for the week. So you’re going to be able to implement that habit right after you learn it. And it’s going to help it stick more. So it’s like a course, but again, you’re getting actual direct coaching from me and learning from others as well. So, this is great for you, if you want to learn more about nutrition, how to fuel your body, if you have a race coming up again, after you finished this course, you will have a really good understanding of how to put together a race nutrition plan.
That’s my goal for you is to at the end, because we do talk about hydration, we do talk about, carb loading, we do talk about putting together a race day plan., You’ll be able to figure out something that you can put together for yourself and practice in training. So, if you want to learn more, you can also get onto my email list. So, how to get onto my email list, you can do one of two ways. If you follow me on Instagram, if you go to my link in my bio, there’s a pre and post-workout nutrition guide that you can download. You can get onto my email list and you’ll have early access to get into this new course.
And you can also go into the show notes if you listened to this, on apple and I think on Spotify, in the show notes, you can download