Electrolyte mix for long training sessions - Potassium Chloride, Sodium Chloride, Magnesium pills, Eggshells to make electrolyte drink

[leao]

I'm cramping hard in hot, humid conditions and drinking only water isn't helping. This doesn't happen to me when conditions aren't hot and humid. Also, I'm a heavy, salty sweater.

I'm trying to figure out a way to mix up a good and concentrated electrolyte drink for the days I train multiple hours. I plan on drinking around 50% of it per hour. I'll put it in a 355 mL (12 oz) bottle and otherwise just drink water.

I've recently discovered that Nu Salt (Potassium Chloride KCl ) helps my heart feel normal and I think my diet sucks so adding that and Magnesium pills (fancy ones that mix many kinds of Mg not just MgO ) greatly reduce cramps and help me fight waking up in the middle of the night. So they have an effect on me.

Does anyone know how I should dose these electrolytes? (I'm posting my current guesses as well, rough draft right now)

Sodium Chloride (table salt): 700 mg per hour, so 1400 mg.

Potassium Chloride ( KCl Nu Salt): 2300 mg (half RDA).

Sodium wo/Cl: ( Baking Soda): Unsure how much if table salt present. Skip table salt maybe if baking soda and potassium chloride present? (get K, Na, & Cl like this but bound differently). Seems like a lot of Chloride if NaCl AND KCl...

Sugar (WHO and DIY recommendations): 2 TABLEspoons

https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-FCH-CAH-06.1

http://www.rehydrate.org/solutions/homemade.htm

Magnesium: 150 mg (nature's truth brand Mg mix single pill 2h before training). ( Mg and K fight for absorption. )

Calcium: will try the egg shells from boiled eggs ground in a coffee grinder, but unsure how much. RDA is 1000 mg. Maybe 25% of that?

Can anyone help me adjust the quantities and get the best mix possible. I think my sources are decent but I would appreciate better suggestions if you have some. Thanks!

 

[davidm1985]

@leao https://science.drinklmnt.com/electrolytes/best-homemade-electrolyte-drink-for-dehydration/

This might help, from LMNT's website

 

[leao]

@davidm1985 Thank you!

Reddit is so hit or miss sometimes with getting useful info. That link is a great start!

Any idea where there might be a dedicated discussion of getting proper electrolyte quantities as part of a regular diet for an active athlete?

While there is an acute need to get them on long training days, the balance and bulk of them should likely come from one's normal diet. Like for example, a meal containing potatoes and salmon would have a fair amount of potassium.

Specifically considering electrolytes, how are people putting their diet together?

Are people just shooting for RDAs and supplementing about half of those amounts just to be sure they get enough if the diet fails a bit or is unreasonably expensive, or is there somewhere that people discuss well put together nutrition plans?

 

[steve45694]

@leao You kinda seem to be doing the most. Maybe just take a M supplement, eat more fruit, and throw some lite salt (it’s a mix of table salt and potassium) and sugar into your water? That will probably go a long way.

I’m partially convinced that people just in general are dehydrated and the electrolyte mix prompts people to drink more water

 

[leao]

@steve45694 Thanks for the advice! I've always sweated a ton, even in high school and drinking water alone was never enough. I have very salty sweat and back then I finally discovered that beef jerky helped a lot as a regular snack. Now I'm trying to do better and in liquid form. Aside from exercise I drink about 1 gallon per day of water from a with water, refilled milk jug, that I just set next to me while working. Cutting out caffeine helped a lot but I seem to be fighting cramps unusually hard this season.

What do you guys do to prevent and treat cramps? 3 bananas a day or something else?

 

[steve45694]

@leao I have constant cramps lmfao those are micro tears to your muscles

(Not to diminish your post I know some people are exceptionally heavy, salty sweaters but my guess is most people aren’t)

 

[leao]

@steve45694 For what it's worth, the micro tears get way worse if hydration / electrolytes are off. When doing distance training if I cramp and seize I double the recovery time in a very obvious way. Directly in crossfit, it's less noticeable, but the same principle applies. It's like that "dry day" when I pushed thru it, peed dark, and just kept on going without dealing with it, is the day that makes me need additional recovery time, in my experience.

 

[steve45694]

@leao The marathon / distance running / ultra _ers talk a lot about diy electrolytes- might be worth checking in with them, too

 

[leao]

@steve45694 I'll do that, thanks! I posted here because whatever I'm doing in crossfit is causing it because if I skip crossfit it doesn't really happen so far. My guess though, is that it's an overall training issue beyond just one aspect of training.

 

[leao]

@steve45694 I'm fine with the micro tears. Quite used to that. Stretching after seems to help a lot as does stretching well the next day before starting crossfit training.

 

[steve45694]

@leao Ohhh wait you mean cramps cramps not DOMS - I’m lucky I don’t get those often. Sure I need a cane to lower myself onto the toilet weekly, but craps are rare! (And I do drink electrolytes when I get those just in case)

 

[leao]

@steve45694 No, not DOMS. I mix up all kinds of exercises in my daily training and some of that is distance endurance such as triathlon stuff. This season, long trips after crossfit training are getting me. I cramped to a stop on my last half-marathon run (just training, not a race). I know it's some kind of electrolyte issue and it's not as bad if I don't do crossfit stuff before, but something's off & this wasn't an issue last year. My current guess is my intake sucks before and during crossfit and I'm not fixing that before the triathlon stuff well enough.

 

[leao]

So I just found this guy, Dr. Alex Harrison here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/triathlon/comments/ypyd3d/sports_nutrition_resources

Who has a PhD in sport physiology. His youtube channel is here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Xe4xhaXBF2IUE1tAdtwjg

I just learned that instead of adding only pure sugar, it's better to mix glucose (pure sugar) with fructose (fruit sugar) in a 1:1 ratio to prevent energy spikes and dips. So that's an improvement of my understanding of the sugar component. He also recommends mixing simply water, table salt and sugar as an equally useful but much cheaper version of the electrolyte drinks, which is also what the WHO is using for fighting dehydration in developing countries.

I'm also wondering what ratios of Sodium, Chloride, and Potassium should be present. I believe the RDA for Potassium is about 4600 mg / day & for Sodium it's about 2300 mg / day so that's a 2:1 ratio, but where does chloride fit into this as potassium and sodium salt "supplements" are often bound to chloride as NaCl or KCl.

I'm still looking for more resources on the roles of: Sodium, Chloride, Potassium, Magnesium, and Calcium. Any info would be much appreciated!

 

[veve13]

@leao I think you could probably up your magnesium intake. I believe RDA is over 400 mg, so if you're exercising/sweating a lot, you might need more. When I did keto, adding a magnesium supplement was a game-changer for me in terms of how I felt and performed.

 

[leao]

@veve13 I'm taking one of these at night (about 35% RDA) about 2 hours before bed:

https://naturestruth.com/products/magnesium-complex-300mg

I read that Magnesium helps the body generate melatonin to enable better sleep and it does seem to help. Based on that bottle and some simple math, looks like the RDA is about 420 mg / day.

Otherwise going for bananas at the moment to get magnesium and my multivitamin has 100 mg in it. I'm just thinking that having it more readily available in a DIY sports drink, in the most bioavailable form, at the moment I need it most, could help.

I'm also really wondering how the RDA of electrolytes changes for very active athletes. I know for sure that the salt intake needs to increase ( NaCl ) by at least 400 - 700 mg per hour of hard workouts. I'd assume that to maintain the proper ratios, the other electrolytes should also go up in relation to salt, especially potassium which seems to be in a 2:1 ratio with salt based on daily values, but I've not yet found any info on what to increase things to.

 

[veve13]

@leao I'm not sure how much exact science has been done on the topic, but I would primarily just play around with sodium, potassium, and magnesium until you are feeling better.

 

[leao]

@veve13 Yeah, that's the default option. I'm trying to set upper and lower bounds and then dial it in. Trying to avoid placebo effects though and I've done so much wrong before in nutrition, I'm trying to figure it out well this time. At some point I'll pay for a good nutritionist, but I want to figure out all I can on my own first so I'm only asking the nutritionist the hard stuff that I can't otherwise figure out.

 

[leao]

Ok, turns out that Dr. Alex Harrison has actually developed an App to recommend electrolyte intake, water intake, and calorie intake DURING and after training, targeted I believe at competitive cyclists. It can be found here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fit.saturday.hydration.gx.fuel&hl=en_US

And his youtube talk (only 6 min) about calorie intake (he calls it fuel), hydration and electrolytes and symptoms of extreme hunger, light headedness and other issues we all feel when training hard is here:

I'm going to try out the app and post back what I think of it.

While this doesn't answer my question about making a good electrolyte drink, it approaches the problem from the other side, that being the deficiency aspect.

I'm hoping it will help me monitor and tune my intakes and get a better expectation as to whether I'm "doing it right" or not.

 

[leao]

Ok, nevermind, it's not a free app. The concept seems good though. If anyone has ever tried it, please feel free to comment here.