Electrolytes – Essential Nutrition for Endurance Athletes

I’ve taken multivitamins and other dietary supplements, on and off, throughout my entire life, always keen on improving my personal nutrition levels. Still, I’d rarely, if ever, noticed a benefit from doing so. Here follows my story of the first time supplementation has provided noticeable effects for me.

It seemed every ‘sports drink’ had promoted their inclusion of electrolytes into their mix for a long, long time. One day it occurred to me that I didn’t have a full understanding of what electrolytes really were, beyond the most commonly known one, salt. We lose salt when we sweat, that’s why it’s salty to the taste. And so, we need to replenish salt when exercising for hours at a time, to avoid hyponatremia.  But wasn’t there an ‘s’ at the end of the word electrolytes? What were the others, and what did they do? Did I learn this in high school and forget it all? Were these electrolights some sort of nightclub lighting system which flickered as a strobe?

I decided to do some research into this mystery to see if I could figure out some answers in an effort to improve my physical performance, as well as recovery time. After a week or two of digging through various sources, I learned more than I had originally wondered. I’ll save you the science behind it all, and instead focus on how I applied it, and to what benefit or detriment.

First up, the key electrolytes seem to be:

1) Sodium

2) Potassium

3) Calcium

4) Magnesium

5) Chloride (table salt is sodium chloride, so you get two there)

6) Hydrogen Carbonate (baking soda)

7) Disodium Hydrogen Phosphate

They look innocent enough, but do wonderful things.

My approach to consumption of the first six has been simple, and I’m working on obtaining #7, as it’s not a standard food product. As it was, I headed to the store – anyplace that sells vitamins will do – and picked up what I didn’t already own. I ground up a tablet of each in a coffee grinder (a spice grinder will also work), added a pinch (1/16^th?) of a teaspoon of salt and baking soda, and added 1/3 of the powder to each of my day’s three 20 ounce fluid containers. The taste is rather unpalatable when mixed with plain water. Mixing it with a sugar free, flavored sweetener combined with the water, turned out to be a good approach.

Verdict? I haven’t felt any detriments, only benefits! As a formerly frequent sufferer of hypernatremia, otherwise known as dehydration, I’ve found that by supplementing with these electrolytes daily, as well as adding the powder to my beverages while exercising, I feel far less of my old dehydration symptoms than ever before. I can go further, faster, and feel better both during and after the system stresses. My recovery time is down to hours rather than days, even after a fairly strenuous 12 hour day in the mountains!

I don’t experience these benefits while consuming typical sports drinks. It seems to me that their electrolyte-to-fluid ratio is far less than this concoction. It’s a bit of extra work preparing my day’s exercise beverages the night before – which allows for the mixture to fully dissolve – but it has been completely worth the investment of time and energy.