What's up folks? Welcome back to the Woop Podcast where we sit down top athletes, researchers, scientists, more learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. This week's episode is all about hydration. Woop VP of Performance Kristen Homes sits down with Andy Blow, a world renowned expert in sweat, dehydration and cramping to discuss how you can lock in your hydration. Andy is the founder of Precision Fuel and Hydration and is a sports scientist who spent part of his career working for the Beneton and Reno Formula One teams. Kristen and Andy discuss how our body functions when we sweat and the load that sweating places on our cardiovascular system. What electrolytes are when we need them and how to best go about replenishing them? How to avoid overhydrating and why some of the common signs you might look for to judge your hydration levels might be leading you a stray. The critical role sodium plays in hydration and what alcohol does to your body and ways you can approach hydration even if you are drinking. A reminder we have new ways to interact with the Woop Podcasts. You can email us
[email protected] or you can call our new listener line and leave a question or comment and your question may be answered on a future episode. That's 508-443-4952-508-443-4952. We also have an exciting new offer for Woop Podcast listeners. If you're a new member signing up for Woop, you can use the code will-w-i-l-l when you're checking out to get a $60 credit on Woop accessories. This includes bands, battery packs and our Woop Body Apparel. You can check out the newly released LuxBans too. So that is at join.woop.com and without further ado here are Kristen Homes and Andy Blow. Andy Blow is a founder of precision fuel and hydration. He is a sports scientist with a degree in sports and exercise science from the University of Bath. How salty is Andy? Well, he loses over 1,850 milligrams of sodium per liter of sweat. Andy, I think we should all just introduce ourselves with how much sweat we lose. Absolutely. It's a good idea. We've printed it on the back of our business cards. I love that. I'm just embarrassed to say that I actually don't know exactly how much you know sweat I lose. But I'm definitely on the salty side. No question about it. I'll have that ring of salt after a big track workout. I was just known for being quite salty as an athlete. So I can relate. Because that on the spectrum of saltiness, it will get into that. How salty is that? It's pretty salty, right? Absolutely. The range is probably 200 milligrams per liter. It's really low salt in your sweat and kind of 2000 to 2,200 is really high. I'm pushing that higher end. In fact, when I first had a sweat test, it was quite a few years before we met anyone salty than me. But I've been not down the pecking order in the last few years as we've tested more and more athletes. You're a world expert in sweat dehydration and cramping. You've worked as a team sports scientist for Beneton and Renault Formula One teams and your advisor for Porsche Human Performance Center. So you've just been in the space in your entire career. It's really interesting because when we, and this won't surprise you, but when we analyze population data, the one behavior that moves around our recovery metrics the most is actually hydration. When members report having hydrated sufficiently, they see marked improvements in heart variability and resting heart rate. So I think hydration on the surface seems relatively straightforward. But in my research for this podcast, I found that a bulk of the directives related to hydration are absolutely unsubstantiated and even flat aren't incorrect based on my understanding of human physiology. So on that note, Andy, I'm super excited for you to help us set the record straight on what a science-backed framework for hydration should actually look like. And I think if the goal of this podcast, I think if we can get the end and give people just a framework on how to think about hydration, I feel like that would be a huge win. So why don't we start with your background? Give us a little insight into your athletic background and how you've got into really examining hydration in the depth and level that you have over the years. Yeah, well, as a, as a youngster, I was very sporty, played a lot of soccer and like most kids in the UK, pretty convinced I was going to be a professional soccer player and until that dream was pop. I think I was once told that I was probably better at running without a ball at my feet than with a ball at my feet. So I got into, you know, endurance sports in my early to mid teens. Cross country did a little bit swimming, rode a bike a bit and eventually got taken by my dad to a swim run race that was alongside a triathlon, got immediately fell in love with the idea of having to go at that. And then that quickly became an obsession for quite a number of years in triathlon was kind of my main sport. It's a late in my late teens right through my 20s where I tried pretty hard to make it to the Olympics and kind of got as far as the British team for some events, but not anywhere near really going to the games itself. And that's sent me on a journey into Iron Man racing, you know, the longer course triathlon stuff. And that was where my interest in sports science, because I've studied sports science at college and my sort of own physiology came together and created this interest in hydration because whenever I went to a hot long distance triathlon, my performance with crater, I would fall apart. And you mentioned at the start, you know, being someone who has salt marks all over their skin and that kind of thing, when you do a hard workout, well, after a long triathlon, the heat, I could almost look white. You know, it was like white salt stains in my eyebrows or over my kit. And I would get rific cramps. I would get all sorts of problems, high pernay, tremio, which we can talk about a little bit in terms of the physiology of that later on, but really, really, really kind of poor performance. And it was only after talking to a friend of mine who's a doctor, a heart surgeon, and explaining to him the symptoms that I was getting and trying to pass out what this disconnect was between that my ability to perform at a very high level in cold conditions and total inability to perform in the heat that he said, I think, you know, there's a lot of fluid loss going on because you're clearly a guy who sweats a lot. You've got a big sweat rate, but also what about, you know, your salt loss because it looks like you're losing a lot of that. And he put, he put two and two together from my symptoms, took me to a hospital to have my sweat analysed, you know, with an inesistic fibrosis unit, looking at salt loss. It was really, really high. And then all of a sudden, the pieces of puzzle came together. And although that happened to me relatively late in my own training career and racing career, after that, I made some substantial changes to how I hydrated, how much electrolyte I'm sodium in particular, I took in in races, how much fluid I took in, and it was like night and day. It made all the difference. That was kind of the catalyst then for then looking into the research, more starting to do sweat testing with athletes, starting to develop products because I felt that there was a, the market was like horribly underserved in that regard. What would you say is the kind of most, you know, seminal piece of research that you would point to, that really kind of highlights the relevance for being more prescriptive, you know, especially as we when we talk about kind of professional level athletes, we'll kind of just maybe start there, and then we'll trick ourselves down to, you know, more recreational type of folks and just folks walking around and just not sweating a lot, you know, but I think like kind of understanding what does that tip of the spirit really look like and what does the research say? Some of the research that caught my eye, my eye early on was really the stuff looking at population data of athletes, looking at the range of sweat sodium loss because the GSS side of the G-TRAD Sports Science Institute has published some very good papers on that. A lady out of I think Philadelphia called Dr. Sandra Godeck. She, she did a paper which I remember reading all about American football players and showing the massive variation in both fluid and salt loss that can occur with athletes essentially following the same training program, you know, she was looking at two a day practices in the preseason in the heat in August and showing that some players required less than a teaspoon of salt a day to replace their electrolyte needs and another players needed like handfuls of salt to replace what they were losing and gallons of fluid to go with it. And so the research has always is always existed to show that there was a huge inter individual variability in sweat and salt loss. But then what I felt was once I lifted the lid on that as an athlete, I thought no one is doing a fantastic job actually of communicating this to the athlete population. You talk to scientists and a lot of them will understand that there is this huge inter individual variation. But then the difficult bit is like getting that across to athletes and giving actionable advice so that people can actually individualize their hydration intake. I think for most folks they probably don't understand just the basic physiology of what's going on in kind of the chemistry. Do you want to just do a quick rundown of kind of what's happening in the cells in the tissues when we're hydrated versus dehydrated and you know how does that actually impact our perceived effort, our cognition, you know, our and just general performance levels. As regards athletes that we know that dehydration and chronic dehydration in the general population is potentially an issue certainly in certain specific groups like elderly and that kind of thing. When we're talking about athletes that
So the big lever that moves the hydration needle is acute sweat losses during training sessions and competitions. So you can be well hydrated one minute and start exercising and 90 minutes later, two hours later, you can be already quite severely dehydrated. And the biggest impact that that has is on blood volume because obviously sweating is a function of thermoregulation. Your hypothalamus detects that your core body temperature is rising. It sets off a cascade of neurotransmitters to cool you down by stimulating your sweat glands. Your sweat glands release some fluid onto the surface of the skin to evaporate away and take a lot of heat away. And that fluid, the crucial thing is that's coming from your blood plasma. So that's decreasing your blood volume and your blood is very salty. So this is why there's a lot of sodium. It's quite sodium-rich fluid. And the problem with a decrease in blood volume and a loss of sodium during exercises that ultimately it puts more strain on your cardiovascular system. So you see a heart rate increase, you see a perception of effort increase, and if it gets really severe, it will slow you down and stop you in your tracks. So I think that's a really critical thing for athletes to remember, especially those who are taking part in cardiovascular exercises, that heavy sweat losses impact blood volume, which then impacts performance. So hydration is really all about the maintenance of decent blood volume when you're exercising. Can you talk a little bit about just perceived effort and thirst and dehydration? What does the research say around that or what have you found in terms of just perceived effort when you're feeling dehydrated or thirsty during performance? That's an interesting one because there's been a lot of research in that area. And contradictory opinions are formed around, you know, we've all heard this phrase, like if you're thirsty it's too late, you're already dehydrated. If you dehydrated 2% your performance was suffered and dehydration pain is due. I can find anything substantiated in the literature around that. Is that a myth, right? Yes and no, it's not exactly a myth in that when you look at the aggregate data across lots and lots of studies, it seems to be that when people are forcibly dehydrated or otherwise to about 2% body weight loss, you do start to see decrements in performance. But that's not, it can certainly not be translated across as a universal statistic. You know, a lot of criticism of that type of literature is that if you take an athlete, put them in a sauna or give them a diuretic and forcibly get them to lose 2% of their body weight, that's and stop them from drinking even if they feel thirsty. That is not a representative of how athletes behave in the real world. You know, when we're exercising, if we've got of humans in general, when we've got availability of fluid and water in front of us, if we thirsty we will drink it. It's one of the most powerful urges you have in the body. So you know, so then it is contradicted by some data from marathon runners where they finish marathon's 6% body weight, with 6% body weight loss and are still running phenomenally quick at the end, then showing no signs of their performance degrading. And I think that there's lots of subtleties that get missed if you try and give a blanket answer because some of the time, if you become 2% dehydrated or for some people that may result in a substantial drop off in performance. Another time, you may only be 1% dehydrated in your performance suffers, but there'll be certain situations where 5% or 6% or even 7% might be acceptable if you started very well pre-hydrated if you're doing an activity where you're pushing within your limit, you're not going over your limits. If the weather conditions are suitable, then all of these factors can mean that there's no hard and fast rule. And I think that's where when you get into the hydration science, there are sort of two camps that have developed. Those that, who argue pretty strongly for this idea that you don't need any plan with hydration, you just need to drink when you're thirsty because the first instinct is exquisitely maintained in most humans and if you respond to that, you will stop yourself becoming significantly dehydrating and everything will be fine. The kind of opposing camp is saying, well, actually you need to have a plan for hydration because thirst isn't always a good indicator. You need to drink to a plan and you need to work out what you're going to take in. The problem with that is like many, many issues that you come across in sport and in life is that this polarized debate occurs where some people want to universally say, drink when you're thirsty, only some people want to say, you have to have a plan. There should be a way to meet in the middle, but there's not because people's opinions get turned into sound bites. I think that's where we're trying to come at it from precision fuel and hydration's point of view, is trying to teach athletes the messy gray area in between the nuance that actually know what, a lot of the time, most people can approach hydration in a very natural way, which is to listen to their body and respond to the dictates of thirst. If we do that, the likelihood is we're certainly not going to die of dehydration and in a lot of circumstances performance is probably going to be fine in sport. I would argue though, if you go to an extreme and they say, right, I'm going to do the Hawaii Ironman triathlon in 85 degrees and 90 percent humidity and I'm going to go into that without plan for hydration intake, then that's a serious role of a dice. Actually, optimum performance is only really going to be achieved in those heavy sweat loss scenarios with a really strategic approach to fluid and sodium replacement. Just as you were talking, I was thinking about just all the variables that come into play that influence our food levels. I'm wondering about food intake prior to a workout, like how does that impact, how we need to think about that hydration plan or caffeine supplementation that we might have taken on. Maybe just hit on what are some of the things that actually impact that planning for even if it's someone going out for a two-hour kayak and really hot conditions, for example, how do some of these other variables impact the strategy? Yeah, I think pre-hydrating before workouts is really, really important and that's actually an area that after each often get things a little bit wrong. I certainly used to, so I can speak from personal experience on this, in that if I was going out to do a very hard training session or race on an extremely hot day, if I was being super diligent, I might even start drinking more water the day before or the night before, and then the morning of, and thinking that more is probably going to be better because I'm worried about dehydration, so I'm going to put more in. Then, overwhelming the body a little bit and actually over-drinking and over-consuming playing water and fluids, so you end up peeing a lot of it out. And you're diluting the plasma, like if you think about it from when the concentration of sodium gets too low, I mean, that could actually have some pretty serious consequences too. So maybe, maybe hit on that again, I'm forgetting the term hypotremia. Hypotremia. Hypotremia, yeah. Yeah, so you're exactly like that. When you over-drink, you start to dilute the blood plasma, your kidneys kick in and obviously you start to urinate, you start to pee, and I'm sure you will have been told as an athlete, look at the career of your pee, if it's clear, then you're well hydrated, if it's dark, you're dehydrated, and whilst there's plausibility of an element of truth in that, and that if you are peeing infrequently and it's very dark, your body is trying to conserve water, it's probably, you probably are dehydrated. The reverse isn't necessarily true. If you're, you mentioned caffeine before, a great example is if you get up and have a lice glass of water in a coffee, then you can actually stimulate quite a strong diuretic effect and pee out a lot of clear liquid, which makes you think, "Oh yeah, I'm really well hydrated, but actually what you're doing is just flushing water in the electrolyte, so you assist them." There have been some interesting studies before ultra-marathons. One in particular, the guys took some blood samples of athletes at the start line of the Spartathaline in Greece, which is, I think it's 150 or 170 mile running race in the heat, and sort of 10 or 12 percent, I think it was, of the athletes on the start line were showing signs of hyponatremia in their blood, and the research has basically put that down. You wouldn't find that if you took population date, if you walked down the street and took blood from 100 random people, you're not going to find that 10 of them, 12 of them are walking around hyponatremic. The research thought what's going on there, and they thought, "Well, the chances are what this is is these people are about to do a long, hot run, and they're all aggressively pre-hydrated with water only, and diluted their systems and given themselves hyponatremia." That's a really bad way to be starting an endurance event, because it only gets kind of worse from that point on. So to the point about pre-hydration, I'd say a lot of athletes neglect electrolyte intake when there's plenty of evidence to show that very strong electrolyte drinks. We're talking about electrolyte drinks, which have about three, maybe even four times the concentration of something like a regular gatorade. Having a lot of sodium in a drink pre-exercise can help your body move the fluid from the gut into the bloodstream and hold it there. So you're boosting your blood plasma without horribly compromising the sodium levels, and so pre-hydration with a strong electrolyte drink, and you can do that. So you need to do that about an hour before exercise. That is a really good strategy, and one that we employ with quite a few of the athletes that we work with in all sorts of sports, because universally, I think athletes want to be on the start line, they'll be at the start of the game, or the competition, whatever it is, optimally hydrated. And I'll give you one example.
example was one really bad example we saw was an NFL player, an NFL team that we're working for. One of the players was cramping up quite a lot of games that didn't know why. That seems to be a regular event in NFL. I'm like, what is happening with these people? Well, I think some of its hydration practices, this guy since college, he'd been told he was a big sweater, he's been told he needs to drink a lot. So he openly told me that before a game, if he isn't stood on the sidelines, like literally peeing in his pants because he's drunk so much water that he doesn't feel hydrated enough to play. And so we went through a very long exercise of trying to undo 15 years of teaching to say to him, actually, you will be better hydrated if you drink significantly less, but if we put some extra electrolytes in it. And that was a particular success story because once we'd got the guy's confidence to try this out and modify the strategy, what do you know, the cramping went away overnight? And so I think pre-hydration in itself is a huge deal. If that's something that athletes can get right, it gets you started on the front foot, especially in hot conditions. On the cramping front, I talked to a lot of different CrossFit athletes and these are just folks who are doing an hour workout or whatever and might be on a keto type diet, let's say. And again, I just want to understand too just how food might impact hydration strategies because I feel like there's potentially a lot of confusion there. And so not to a huge volumes, I guess, is not maybe sweating a ton, but find themselves in the middle of the night cramping. What might be happening there? Yeah, keto diets is a really interesting one because when you eat in a ketogenic way and you shed most of the carbohydrates out of your diet, then you obviously start to deplete glycogen stores and in the body glycogen stores with it water. And so that's why when you go on a ketogenic diet, often you'll drop weight very, very quickly because you're actually not losing all that much fat necessarily to start with, you're probably just losing a lot of water weight. And then of course the knock on effect of that is you're effectively through a while until the body adjusts and the kidneys adjust, then you become more dehydrated. So one of the big recommendations that we've seen work with people who are on keto diets is to drink significantly more sodium rich fluids or take more sodium in their food when they're drinking water to help with fluid retention for them to reduce the cramping because those kind of nighttime cramps, post workout cramps, there's a heavy association of that with becoming dehydrated or sodium depleted. So if you know you're kind of that person, what would be the exact protocol you would recommend? For that individual is usually, if you're training, if we take someone who's training once a day as an example, we would usually recommend taking around about 16, well between smaller people maybe 8 to 12, bigger people 16 to 24 ounces of a very, very strong electrolyte drink about an hour to 90 minutes before a workout, then during a workout we'd have electrolyte rich drinks available but you kind of just drink the workouts usually of a duration where you just kind of drink to what you feel you need. You know, it might be more a hot day, less on a cold day or whatever. And then in the recovery period as well, trying to do a similar amount to whatever you did in the in the buildup. So you know, 8 to 24 ounces, depending on your body size of something which is a electrolyte tablets are usually good because there, if you're on keto there, there are low zero sugar alternative, but lots of sodium in there because all of the study data that is out there about fluids in recovery shows that fluid retention is directly correlated to the amount of sodium that you consume with fluid. So you can put a electrolyte tablet in or you can just eat a salty meal, a recovery meal with lots of salt in it, and drinks and water, but all of that will help you retain that fluid a lot better. What's your stance on? You know, I know a lot of athletes and myself now included like, you know, I use caffeine to kind of boost my athletic performance. Like I find it to be super effective, especially, you know, shorter durations. How does that impact, I guess, the hydration status and how do we need to compensate, I suppose, for caffeine dosing? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it was definitely perceived for a very long time that caffeine, caffeine is a diuretic. So what that means is it encourages the kidneys to produce more urine. So it means that you're in an outpour overall tend to rise. And it was therefore perceived that, you know, drinking a cup of coffee would almost dehydrate you rather than rehydrate you because you would lose fluid. There have been a lot more recent studies which suggest on average that when you drink a cup of coffee, if that's the way you're going to take your caffeine in, you actually don't get a net fluid loss in most people's case because you might pee more than you would otherwise, but you still retain more fluid from the coffee than you pee out as a result of the dioresis. I would say from personal experience, that's probably a little bit individual. As in some people appear to be able to drink coffee or tea or caffeinated beverages and stay really well hydrated. Others, I'd put myself in this camp where one or two coffees seems to be okay for me in terms of fluid balance. If I had one three or four in a day, I feel like I can become progressively dehydrated because the dioresis just kind of carries on. And I know that from experience of, you know, doing a lot of cross in the Atlantic, being jet lagged, relying a little bit too much on coffee, you know, to pick me up in the afternoon and things and then finding that progressively over a few days with that and so they're travelling, they're conditioned. Cabins and that kind of thing, you become pretty dried out and dehydrated quickly. So I would say the way to frame caffeine for most athletes is that it can be a performance enhancer. And to your point, you know, using it for short activities, taking three to six milligrams of caffeine per kilo of body weight about an hour before is a fantastically well validated protocol to boost performance because that caffeine takes, you know, 60 minutes to peaking your bloodstream. It's then doing all of the good stuff it does about resisting fatigue and improving cognitive function and alertness. And if you do that regularly, if you're a regular caffeine user, I would imagine that's not usually going to have too much of a negative impact on hydration status. I think if you're someone who's not habituated to using caffeine generally, then you might find that the dioresis is a little bit stronger, for example, and it's certainly going to be something you're going to want to test before you incorporate into your regime. I think when we see we work with a lot of ultra endurance athletes who use caffeine actually during events as well. So with the half life of caffeine being sort of three to six hours, if you're doing an iron man, you're going to want to take some caffeine on during the bike ride and early on in the marathon to help pick up your pre-exercised caffeine levels. And generally speaking, if you're taking say, you know, a lot of people use caffeinated energy gels for that, if you're taking those during an event, I don't think that the anti-diuretic effects of exercise, because when you exercise, your body releases hormones which stop you peeing quite as much. And I think I've rarely come across situations where dehydration is probably even worsened, at least where we perceive it would have been worsened by caffeine use during exercise because of that anti-diuretic effect of the exercise itself. So honestly, I think with caffeine, probably the biggest impediment to hydration with it is if you're relying on a lot of caffeinated beverages for your fluid intake during a given day, you're just not going to get as good a high overall hydration status as if you switch some of those out for things that don't have as much caffeine in. Will your performance levels be fine, but it will actually impact recovery next day potentially? Like I often see if my ratios are a little bit out of whack or maybe might, it doesn't seem like my performance levels will suffer that day, but it seems to kind of impact me the next day. Does that make sense? I would say so. I think for most people, if your exercise sessions aren't any individual exercise sessions not super long, you know, like a lot of people exercise for between, you know, let's say 30 minutes and 90 minutes on a daily basis if they're a fit active person, then a single session starting a little bit dehydrated or whatever is probably very manageable. What you're probably referring to there and I agree completely is this like step-wise depletion effect where you get where you start Monday pretty well hydrated and then you, but you don't do a great job and then you work out and then Tuesday you start a percent or two behind the curve and then by Wednesday, yeah, you definitely dig in yourself a hole progressively. That's certainly like that is classic for what happens to me if I fly from UK to the US two, three days in, if I've not absolutely nailed my hydration on the flights, you know, stayed off alcohol, state minimized caffeine intake, that's something like two, three days in, I'll jump in a swimming pool somewhere and just cramp up, you know, it's like, and that's a sure sign to me that it's taken, my body's just taken a beating and I haven't stayed on top of it. So it's really, that sort of knowledge has really changed my habits now, though, even though I'm not anything like a serious athlete anymore. I try to work out every day if I can and in order to be able to do that on the road, I have to absolutely crush the hydration, you know, to get that right. You know, some members on our platform drink alcohol. How would you recommend, you know, those folks think about, you know, they go out Friday night, they, you know, have a wedding Saturday night and you know they're just recovering Sunday and you know they get into Monday.
and they are starting their typical workout on Monday. How do those folks need to think about their Sunday to get back to neutral in order to not suffer terribly or suffer less on Monday? - Yeah, yeah, it's a good, good and common question. And definitely, I'll put my hand up and say I've got a little bit of experience in that from time to time 'cause I ask her a friend, no, I'm just kidding. - Yeah, exactly. So a few things are, I guess, an obvious one is you can. If you know you're going to a big celebration, a big party, and you are just accepting the fact, you're gonna have a few drinks and you wanna just take the breaks off and not worry about it. You know, having, treating it almost like a workout in some ways. You're gonna, 'cause what you're gonna do, alcohol is diretic, it's gonna make you pee and you're gonna lose a lot more body fluid. And having like a, almost like a pre-hydration like you would before a workout with a strong electrolyte drink and trying to do the same as well, either during the evening at some point or before you go to bed, it's not gonna, it's not like a cure-all 'cause if one of those existed, I think people would have found it by now, but it can help. So if I'm having a party or something like that, I'll pre-mix up a bottle of electrolyte drink and have that towards the end of the evening or before I go to bed as one strategy. And then probably another one in the morning, if I'm gonna try and go out and, you know, work out, that work the hangover off, as it were. - The other thing to do, we've been chatting with an interesting company that's making some things like non-acoholic beers for athletes and that sort of thing. And they were trying to come up with this funky, like, a beer equation. So it was like having, the ratio, the ideal ratio of maybe having like two alcoholic drinks to then one non-acoholic beer or something like that. Because what's changed massively in the last few years, I think, is the range of like interesting, 'cause it used to be, if you went out and you were not drinking, you got offered a coke, you know, that was it, really. And that was kind of like, well, I don't really want to drink a coke. It's like that with glass of water, it's pretty boring now. You know, I'm a fan of drinking real beer, but some of the non-acoholic beers are fantastic. And if you just slip one or two of those into the room, into your evening. - In between. - Yeah, they're actually pretty good at hydration. You know, if you are in a social situation, you can feel a little bit less awkward, 'cause, you know, you're still, still, it still looks like you're having a drink if that's what matters. And it's certainly, they taste pretty good. Sometimes after a long, if I go out for a long run on a weekend, and it's hot, it's actually like a cold non-acoholic beer. It's a really nice thing to drink, as in recovery. I suppose those kind of things, you know, rather than trying to be preachy, 'cause we're all, you know, many of us are going to do it. We're going to go out and have a few drinks and enjoy it. And then still try and get up and train. So you do it, you can't manage it. - You know, obviously we've talked about electrolytes just kind of loosely, but I'd love for you just dig in. - So electrolyte, when do we need it? I think we've outlined some times where electrolyte, you know, cell limitation is going to be helpful if we're having caffeine, if we're experiencing cramping, you know, if we're doing longer endurance events. But, you know, if you just want to do just kind of a one-two on electrolytes, just generally, and then tap again, what the real protocols are for kind of maybe these different categories of folks who might be working out. - So electrolytes perform all sorts of functions in the body. They're charged elements in the dissolved in the body's fluids, intercellular fluid and extracellular fluid, things like the things that people have heard of is sodium, you know, calcium, magnesium, chloride, potassium. They all perform different roles. A lot of it is to do, a lot of their roles is to do with nerve impulse transmission and cellular communication. The big ones, though, really, I suppose, to understand, because people often put all of electrolytes in, they kind of cover them all over with an umbrella and think, "Oh, it's just they all relevant." Well, they all do different, slightly different jobs, but in the body, you've got two major pools of fluid. You've got intercellular fluid inside the body's cells, where the predominant electrolyte is potassium. And then you've got extracellular fluid, which is the blood volume and all the interstitial fluid in the fluid outside the cells. And the major electrolyte in extracellular fluid is sodium. And it's the sort of electrical gradient between the potassium inside the cell and the sodium outside the cell that is critical to cellular communication and functioning. And other electrolytes like magnesium and calcium are very, very tied into muscle function, a muscle contraction and relaxation, which is why they kind of get pulled into the picture when you start talking about things like cramping as well. Fundamentally, one of the biggest factors that use for athletes to understand is that whilst all electrolytes are critical, you'll get the vast majority of what you need from, of all of them in your diet, day to day, just by eating a range of normal foods. The major electrolyte that is of significance when it comes to succamentation for athletes for those who sweat heavily is sodium, because sodium is the one that's lost in the highest volumes by far in sweat. So people think, "Well, potassium is really important." I always hear about, you know, I need to be having more potassium or whatever it's like, "Well, potassium is critical, but it's locked inside the cell." So when you measure a sweat sample from someone, it doesn't contain much potassium at all. It will contain negligible amounts of milligrams of potassium, but it might contain, as we started off talking about, like, 2000 or 1 for 2000 milligrams of sodium. So that's kind of why sodium's got this outsize place in sports nutrition, because it's sodium and water that you principally lose when you sweat. And that's why all electrolytes are important. They're all important to be in your diet, and certainly a lot of people don't get enough potassium if they're not eating enough fresh fruit and vegetables and those kind of good natural sources of it. But when you go out and sweat and run a marathon and sweat for two, three, four hours, the electrolyte that you're going to lose the most of undoubtedly is sodium. And that's why that's the critical one to think of acutely in terms of supplementation. It's also the one that causes a lot of confusion, because recommended daily allowances for sodium in the, you know, for various governments around the world are usually really relatively low, modest and low, because the vast majority of the population is not super active and doing loads of sweating. But if I followed the RDA for sodium on a day when I'm doing a three hour run, I would be cramped up in a horrible mess in the corner. I'm going to need three or four times the RDA on a day when I'm sweating a lot. And as you well know, sodium's got a bad rap over the years. It's sort of a bit of a, it's seen as, you know, a cause of high blood pressure and something that everyone needs to cut down on. And like a lot of things, there's a contradiction in this, because probably a lot of people could do with cutting sodium down in their diet, but not if you're an athlete who's doing a lot of sweating. You might even benefit from actually turning the dial up on sodium. I mean, a lot of folks now, you know, we mentioned keto, you know, intermittent fasting, you know, just maybe how can we use electrolytes to kind of help, you know, those practices? Yeah, there's a lot of interest in that, in that sort of thing, as you say, with people eating much more low carb or intermittent fasting, when you maybe want to, you know, you've got to stay hydrated, but you aren't taking in a lot of, either a lot of carbs or a lot of calories at certain times in the day. And that's where we do see people wanting to reach for things like F of S and electrolyte tablets. That was one of the first products that we produced, because they're extremely low in calories or have virtually zero calories in, but they do provide you with the, you know, a dose of sodium and some of the other minor electrolytes to help keep your hydration levels up, because sometimes the temptation, if your fasting can be just to drink lots and lots of water, helps you make, makes you feel full and, you know, you kind of feel like you need something. But actually, it won't necessarily hydrate you as effectively as taking some of the electrolytes, because not only are you, if you're over drink water, you diluting yourself, when you're not eating, if you're intermittent fasting, you're not getting electrolytes into any food, either. So it can be a good counterbalance for that. And I think that becomes especially relevant, you know, we're recording this in the Northern Hemisphere summer. And it's like this time of year, when if you're fasting or keto, and if you're not taking supplementary electrolytes with your fluids, then you can run the risk of becoming pretty dehydrated quite quickly. Yeah, I've definitely gotten into the practice. I tend to work out fasted, and I find an electrolyte, you know, supplementation prior to the workout in an hour, so before has been so game-changing for me. Do you use caffeine before those workouts as well? Because that's something I've heard about people doing for fasted workouts. I do, yeah. Yeah, I think it's another good way, because you get some of the kind of cognitive and physiological boost from that, without it obviously being calorific. You know, I do that a few times a week, and I find that to be really effective, and workouts are great, and I respond physiologically, like very positively, to kind of that protocol. So maybe Andy, just to finish up, anything that we didn't cover that you feel like, you know, we kind of missed, or, you know, what would be any pepies that you have in terms of how people think about hydration, you know, anything that you want to kind of leave us with. I think one thing I'd like to just make people aware of is that with precision-fuel hydration, we're, we as a company are often, we produce products, we're often seen, therefore, as a products company, but that's not really what we are. We work with athletes to solve problems around their fueling and hydration. And one of our missions has been to start building this database of cases that is of athletes in action, doing very, very detailed analyses of what they eat and drink during competition, breaking it down in terms of, you know, hydration intake as fluid and sodium, looking at fueling with carbohydrates which is
something we haven't really got that stuck into today. But an also caffeine, which we have talked about a little bit, is then there. So if people want to sort of, I think as an athlete, I'd have massively valued being able to look at the case to be database that we have on our website. And it's in the top navigation bar of our website. You go to athletes and into case to these. You've got some really world class athletes, as well as some age group athletes and amateur athletes in there doing marathons, ultra-marathons, triathlons, all sorts of stuff, really detailed breakdowns of what they ate and drank during races, why they did it, how they performed. And that, if you're an athlete and are interested in improving your performance in that dimension, I would encourage people to go and take a look at that, because there's a whole world of information in there that really could hopefully shortcut some of the trial and error and some of the kind of heartache that I had to suffer as an athlete in terms of not having access to this information. I used to pick up bits of information, talk into whether athletes at races, some of it would become trajectory. You kind of pick up on the bits that you want to hear and discard the bits that don't jive with what you want to think. And whereas this is, we're in an age now, where information is a lot more available. And we're trying to condense some of the most useful information around this, how do athletes really feel and hydrate during their hardest, biggest efforts? Because I think if, you know, I'm sure weep people in general want to improve their performance. So I think that's a key area where there's, to use your phrase, you know, you're leaving something on the table if you're not looking into hydration and fueling in that regard. I feel like we've been robust not to talk more about glucose, but the blog is wonderful. Those are articles are beautiful. In this case, studies are amazing. So definitely folks should absolutely go to that as a resource for education. And, you know, we can just be a whole lot smarter, you know, by looking at some of the evidence that exists and build that into our practices. But what would you want to say about carbohydrates and just fueling in general? Yeah. So carbohydrates and fueling was something we started off really focusing on hydration and only started to look in more detail at fueling in the last two or three years. And that was in response to basically all the athletes who were working with the hydration setting. OK, we've got this. We're getting this now. Now what do we eat alongside it? And we went back to the science. We went back to our own personal experiences. After each and sort of said, OK, well, what are the basics here? And I suppose it's really, we call it knowing your numbers. You know, when it comes to fueling exercise, particularly endurance exercise, there's some really solid science out there to say that, you know, for shorter duration activities, kind of 30 grams of carbohydrate an hour is a decent level of fueling. As it increases, you might go up to 60 grams and then even 90 grams if you are really elite endurance. I think pushing the limits in long races, we've seen, we've got cases on our website of athletes taking 110 grams of carbohydrate per hour. And what fascinates me about all of that is we've been through a big cycle in the last 10 years of like a lot of people pushing keto diets, low carb stuff, all of which is phenomenally valid in clinical settings. It even is, it might be valid for a lot of people in day-to-day life. But in the endurance sport world, you know, what we're seeing now is if anything is an increase in what people are eating carbohydrate-wise to fuel performance because the physiology is quite simple is that to support a very, very high aerobic output, you're going to burn a lot of sugar. And you need to then find ways to train your gut, to actually find ways to, you know, digest and process. Lots of carbohydrate very quickly. Hence we're seeing lots of innovative new products in that space, you know, different types of gels and energy drinks and that kind of thing. And what we feel we're fitting into that is like with the hydration stuff, knowing the numbers for how much fluid you might need, how much sodium you might need when you're undertaking something significant. I think there's a huge amount of benefit with knowing how much carbohydrate you need to take in. So we've got tools on our website, like a quick carb calculator. We've got the full fuel and hydration planner. And that, yeah, those things, for me, are, again, where we're trying to fill a gap in the market. So there's a lot of people pushing products on athletes. And then you've got a whole bunch of really fantastically credible sports dietitians and nutritionist writing articles and or you can consult with them. But we want to bridge that gap in between and say, hey, you know, if you land on our website, you can get eight tenths of the way there by answering a few questions, reading a few blogs and hopefully get started on your personal journey. Because I learned the hard way that all of this is very individual. You can't copy what someone else is doing. Everyone's physiology is different. And, you know, so I think fuel fueling is a-- it was the piece that was missing from our puzzle until a few years ago. And it's now becoming baked into what we do. Folks have to check out the website. I think having those tools are going to be enormously beneficial for folks, you know, to kind of create guidelines or a framework on how to think about fueling and hydration for sport. There's no reason to guess, I think, at this point, right? Which is exciting. Agreed. That's exactly it. Lean on the knowledge that other people have gained out there. Certainly what we're doing and pulling it together. And ultimately, you know, we all do sport. A lot of the few people do sport because they're living or because they want to be the best in the world. Most of us do it because we want to enjoy it. And if you nail your fueling and hydration, then you have a way better experience. You feel great doing it instead of dragging your backside home, you know, feeling sorry for yourself. You can finish with a skip and you step. Where's the best place for folks to find you? Yeah. So for the company, it's Precision F and H is our handle across all the platforms. We do a fair bit on Instagram, on Facebook and Twitter. PrecisionFuelingHidration.com is the website. If you hit the contact form on there, it comes through to a real human. We're a small team and we get back to every single email that comes in. So do that or just email us at
[email protected]. We've also got in the footer of our website, the ability to book one-to-one video calls with members of our athlete support teams who are all sport scientists or elite athletes. So if someone's, if something that we've talked about today is kind of peak, someone's interesting. Wanted to more individualise a deeper dive into it, then book a one-to-one video call with the squad and we'd gladly have a chat with you. Very cool. Well, Andy, thank you so much for your time today. It's been fascinating and just yeah, really insightful. So thank you. Appreciate you, right? Thank you. Thank you to Kristen and Andy for coming on the WOOP Podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, leave a rating or review. Check us out on social @WOOP@WillAumid. You can email the WOOP Podcast at WOOP.com and we'll answer your questions. You can also call in at 508-4434-952. That's 508-4434-952. And new members can get $60 credit on WOOP accessories if they use the code will. That's W-I-L-L. Okay, that's it for this week folks. Thanks for listening. Stay healthy and stay in the green. (upbeat music)
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