Thursday, June 24, 2021

Electrolytes and Hydration

My renewed interest in cycling has me looking at electrolytes and hydration. A post in a private forum in which the author suffered the effects of dehydration offered some additional encouragement in this area. 

Also, I experienced the beginning stages of heatstroke once when I was a teen. I actually went blind for a few minutes until I got inside, cooled down, and rehydrated. (Incidentally, everything went white, not black. One of the two times I really came close to dying.)

I did some searching and ran across this article, Ask the Coach: Which Electrolytes Does a Cyclist Need? Another good article is from Blue Collar Prepping: Electrolytes Revisited.

The key takeaway from both articles is that if you'll be exerting yourself and sweating a lot in warm weather you need to replenish not only with water but also with salts your body needs.

On my hot weather rides, I've mostly been using Gatorade made from powder mix at 50% strength. I'll generally mix it in one bottle then split it between two, and then fill each bottle up from the tap to dilute it.

At the suggestion of the author of the private forum post I mentioned, I also bought some Liquid I.V. Hydration Multiplier. I tried the lemon lime and found that it's much sweeter than I like, when mixed full strength, but more palatable when mixed half strength.

Another option is SaltStick electrolyte chewable tablets. I bought a pack of these but haven't tried them yet.

Anyway, something to be aware of.


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