Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 165 - Robb Wolf: Electrolytes, Sodium, Sick Pumps and Performance Enhancement

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Thanks For Listening!SUPPORT THE SHOW:There is NOTHING more valuable to a podcast than leaving a written review and 5-Star Rating. Please consider taking 1-2 minutes to do that HERE.You can also leave a review on SPOTIFY!OUR PARTNERS:Legion Supplements (protein, creatine, + more!), Shop (DANNY) HERE!Get Your FREE LMNT Electrolytes HERE! Care for YOUR Gut, Heart and Skin with SEED Symbiotic (save with “DANNY15)  HERE!RESOURCES/COACHING:I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE!Want Coach Danny to Fix Your S*** (training, nutrition, lifestyle, etc) fill the form HERE for a chance to have your current approach reviewed live on the show. Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Sign up for the trainer mentorship HEREFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Rob, how are you doing, my man? All good. All good. Another day above ground, so I'm calling it a win. My grandfather used to say the same thing. My dad says the same thing to this very day. Beats the alternative, right? I assume so. I don't know yet, but I assume so. Yes. Yeah, things have been chaotic the last two years, but I will take my chances above ground. Yeah, things have been chaotic the last two years, but I will take my chances above ground. For those of you who aren't super familiar with Rob's work, Rob is an author.

He's also one of the founders of Element T, Elemental Labs, which is the electrolyte supplement I use. I have been a big time advocate for the utilization of sodium, potassium and magnesium to enhance exercise performance for quite some time. But it wasn't something I knew a ton about until about two or three years ago when I started experimenting with electrolytes. And then somewhere along the road, I found LMNT. And if you guys have listened for a while, you know I love it. You know I love to use it fasted in the morning. But there's a lot of benefits for understanding how these different minerals interact with our physiology for your health, for your performance, and for your longevity. So Rob was the perfect person to bring on and talk to about this topic in particular because he's an expert in biochemistry, but

specifically in electrolytes. So Rob, I guess my first question for you is what got you into physiology, chemistry, biology, and then how did you stumble into this kind of, I want to say it's semi-untapped, which is how electrolytes can enhance our wellness. Because we're all familiar with Gatorade and Pedialyte, but many of those beverages contain a ton of sugar. And that's usually where people's understanding of this stuff stops. that's usually where people's understanding of this stuff stops. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the long arc, and I just turned 52 weeks ago. So my story keeps getting longer and more meandering and all that stuff. Thank you. Thank you. I have always been interested in human health and performance. Both my parents, unfortunately, were pretty ill as I was growing

up. Both of them smoked. My dad drank. My mom had a host of autoimmune related issues. And so I've always been interested in living better. You know, I remember having a conversation with my mom and saying, hey, wouldn't it be great to live to be 100? And she was kind of like horror stricken. She's like, no, it'd be horrible. You'd be like sick and hurt and all this. And I was kind of like, it doesn't have to be that way. You know what I mean? Different people

pull different cards out of the deck and we're dealt different cards. And, you know, you know, so people have different situations, but I had always been tinkering with my, my nutrition. I was a California state powerlifting champion a long time ago, did a biochemistry undergrad, was looking at either medical school or a PhD track. And around that time, I got really sick. I developed ulcerative colitis so bad that I nearly died from it. And it's an inflammatory bowel disease. At the time, I was eating a high carb, low fat vegan diet, which I think works great for some people. And for me, it was like exactly the opposite of what I should have been doing. And I had a bunch of other issues, stress and low vitamin D and a bunch of other things.

But in figuring out what I needed to do to heal my gut and autoimmune issues, which ended up being a low carb diet. And that's the way that I've eaten for the last 23 going on 24 years. And that worked great for my gut issues. It worked great for like my cognition. Like I just have really consistent mental focus, but I co-founded the first and fourth CrossFit affiliate gyms in the world. And so the physical activity that I usually do is kind of higher intensity, which sucks on low carb. And, um, and I do Brazilian jujitsu. I have my brown belt now. And, and, uh, jujitsu is also tough on, on low carb, unless your electrolytes are on point I discovered. And so it was, and again, like I have a degree in biochemistry,

I've written on this stuff, I'm pretty well steeped on the, the biochemistry and the metabolism. But somewhere along the line, I didn't understand the really dramatically increased need for electrolytes for athletes in general, and then low carb athletes in particular. And I was I kind of stalked these two guys, Tyler Cartwright and Luis Villasenor. They're the founders of a program called Keto Gains. And they just they're so smart. And they work with lots and lots of people, literally 1000s of people, and these kind of lower carb body composition changes, but they had people doing jujitsu, they had people doing CrossFit type stuff. I was like, how the hell are you managing these people? You know? And when I really dug in and looked at what they were doing, they made sure that people were

getting at least five grams of sodium per day and appropriate potassium and magnesium. Um, sometimes it was double or triple that on the sodium depending on the the person and when I fixed that it it was just like a light switch was flipped like I that that that low gear that is needed for grinding in like wrestling and MMA and and all that I had it again and it was kind of remarkable and then I noticed that some other problems like sleep related issues and my heart rate variability score improved and like all this stuff just started falling into place. And this was really where we had the idea for starting Element. This is Tyler and Luis, our co-founders in Element with me, but this was like five, six years ago, I guess. And then we,

when Tyler and Luis are smarter than I am, and they knew the importance of this stuff, I was kind of Johnny come lately in the whole story, but I have a pretty good audience. I have pretty good reach. And so what we did is put together a free downloadable guide for people to make their own electrolyte mix. And we called it KetoAid. And it was like this much sodium, this much potassium from no salt, some magnesium citrate, lemon juice, stevia, water, shake it up, drink it. And in like six months, we had a half million downloads of this thing. It was crazy, you know, really popular, really helped a lot of people. And then the main feedback that we had was this is, this is really cool. Like electrolytes are critically important. I didn't realize how important they were. And by the way, guys, it's really inconvenient traveling with three bags of white powder, like the TSA doesn't like. Yeah, no doubt. And so would you consider doing some sort of a drink mix with this? And this was the whole genesis for like five years ago. We had no designs on starting Element or doing anything like this.

And I think right now it's like one of the fastest growing health and wellness companies in the world right now. Like it's just going like crazy. It right now. It's just going crazy. It's phenomenal. It's everywhere. I see it everywhere. And it's very, very useful, even for people who do not follow a lower carbohydrate approach. I've worked with a number of people who generally do better on a lower carbohydrate approach. And to the point you made earlier, a vegan higher carbohydrate diet can be very nutritious and very healthful, but it's not necessarily for everybody. And a lower carbohydrate diet with maybe a higher emphasis on protein and the right kinds

of fats can also be very healthful, but not for everyone. But the population that I've always felt responded best to electrolyte supplementation was those who follow that lower carbohydrate approach, specifically when they transition to it. Initially, a lot of people will get that keto flu that's often associated with shedding all the water from the glycogen depletion that can happen or just the general reduction of carbs. But as a guy who is pretty high carb, I was like, I don't know if I need to supplement with these things until I started doing it. I started realizing in the morning when I trained fasted, having extra electrolytes

with my fluid helps me get a better pump. I get fuller musculature when I'm training. I'm able to get much more what feels like power out of my training at times of day where historically I felt like I have the least power. Immediately after waking, I usually train better in the afternoon. The way I can rehydrate very quickly after doing things like the sauna, I started to realize, wow, you know, electrolytes aren't just for people who do endurance and they're not just for people who are low carb. There are applicable or there's applicability here for pretty much every athletic population and pretty much every single person. And so you start trying to communicate with people like,

have you ever thought about supplementing with electrolytes? And the first thing you hear back every single time, at least in my experience is, well, isn't sodium bad for you? Or isn't too much sodium bad? And there's certainly some populations that might have contraindications for large amounts of sodium, but for people who maybe aren't hypertensive, what can we, you know, what can we teach them about sodium? And is a lot of this stuff kind of misconstrued? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a really good, good tee up for that. Like that was, that was a great tee up. I'll probably do a poorer job answering it

than what you did teeing it up. But the most people who are, some people exercise so they can eat whatever they want. You know, they're like, I do my century rides each weekend so I can eat whatever I want. That's okay. It never goes well for them.

They always look like shit, but you know, it's kind of whatever. But, um, but generally what we find is that when people begin to exercise, they tend to eat better. When people tend to eat better, they tend to exercise these things go hand in hand. And when we tend to eat better, we tend to eat less sodium because the bulk of the sodium that we get is from processed food, you know, unless you're doing like olives or pickles or salami or something like that, a really dedicated, you know, higher sodium content food,

our sodium intake tends to drop. And then when you look over at like the American council of sports medicine guidelines for people who exercise the exercise and heat or humidity you know but just exercise in general their guidelines are seven to ten grams of sodium per day for for athletes you know but the dietary recommendations are less than two grams of sodium per day and so there's this like there's a huge disconnect there's a massive you know There's a massive, you know, it's, it's like if, if you're supposed to eat, um, you know, if your energy output is 7,000 calories a day and you're only eating 2000 calories a day, you're, there's going to be problems there.

You know, there's similar problems here where people are chronically hyponatremic, low sodium. You, you don't always notice it immediately because we store sodium in our bones. And so we can pull sodium out of the bones, but when we pull sodium out of the bones, we pull calcium out of the bones too, which may exacerbate osteoporosis, osteopenia. You mentioned that sodium sensitive hypertensives probably don't need more sodium. But the interesting thing is that they don't really respond fantastically to low sodium diets. Like there are some populations, particularly African-Americans, some Hispanic populations, they do respond more vigorously to a higher sodium intake. And conversely, if they reduce sodium intake,

they tend to see a greater decrease in blood pressure, but it's still, it's like really unimpressive. It goes from really bad to just less bad. But if you get those folks to modify their diet so that their glycemic load is lower and they get a normal insulin response, so that their glycemic load is lower and they get a normal insulin response, then they're not a sodium sensitive hyper responder. So is the problem sodium or is it actually a mismanagement of insulin and calories and all that type of stuff? So, you know, hypertension is a major, major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. It is a gnarly health consideration. It increases the likelihood of stroke and kidney disease and all these other things. So it is really important to properly address that, but we've done a lot of very well-designed studies looking at low sodium diets

and their kind of poor efficacy in improving blood pressure. But then we have this other scenario where if people just modify their glycemic load, and this could be paleo, it could be vegan, it could be low carb, but generally eating minimally processed whole foods, they will reduce their insulin load. They will also reduce their sodium load because it's minimally processed food. And then the flip side is in, they need to start looking at supplemental, uh, uh, sodium intake. And it's worth mentioning. Um, we had a, a friend of ours go to Gatorade university and they have like the hall of fame there in Florida. And the original Gatorade formulation was a gram of sodium per serving. And now it's like 200 milligrams. Like the, the sugar has gone up

dramatically and the sodium has gone down dramatically. It was really a very good formula in its initial incarnation. Yeah, which is what made it so popular was you had, hey, this clearly works. I remember very, very well an advertisement that Gatorade ran when I was young that was chopped up and edited to look like it was filmed in the 70s and 80s when I think a lot of this research was being done. And it was about the evolution of Gatorade. And it started at the University of Florida. That's why it's called Gatorade. And they showed all these guys in the old football helmets using it. And then they flashed forward to Usain Bolt and all of the new Gatorade athletes. And they showed kind of how the product has changed.

But you're right. The formula has changed too, to basically what is now like a tasty soft drink beverage. It doesn't really contain enough sodium to even qualify as a good sports drink anymore. It's more of a piece of sports culture. Gatorade is like an inexorable part of sports culture. You see it on the sidelines in every sporting event. You'll see it on the

sidelines this weekend at the Super Bowl, but it's probably not the best beverage because again, it became less about getting the right amount of the electrolyte and more about, can we just make this thing sweet and tasty so that people will want to drink it? And the sodium recommendations for athletes remind me a lot versus general population, remind me a lot of the protein recommendations for athletes versus general population. So to your point, if you're inactive, metabolically unwell, you're not taking a particularly good care of your health you might not need five plus grams of sodium a day it could be you know it could have potentially deleterious effects maybe uh say in the same way that like if you're not active whatsoever you don't necessarily

need to eat a high amount of protein but if you are active you know increasing your intake of protein and increasing your intake of protein and increasing your intake of sodium can change your life, change your performance massively. And so as people look to try to get the most out of electrolyte supplementation or take their performance to the next level with electrolyte supplementation, I think they think of sport. But are there applications here for maybe people who don't compete in what we conventionally think of as sport like basketball and football, but maybe for people who do weightlifting or maybe for people who do endurance work? What populations stand to benefit the most from conscientious electrolyte supplementation? Oh, man, that's a good question.

that's a good question. And it, uh, I mean, it's, it's worth reminding folks that all energy production, every nerve impulse, every muscle contraction occurs as a consequence of sodium potassium pumps in the body, you know, TCA cycle, you know, that, that whole thing. And I was noodling on this And, you know, if we, if somebody arrived unconscious to an emergency room, the physician would look at blood glucose to see if they're like, you know, diabetic coma, but blood glucose can exist over a pretty broad spectrum and people will survive. So if we ignore that, then they will look at pH and the doctor will look at electrolytes and pH and electrolytes are arguably the most tightly regulated physiological processes in the body. If your pH goes up or down a little bit, you might die and you will feel terrible.

And same deal with electrolytes. Like if you're a little bit off on electrolytes, you, you will really feel terrible and you could potentially die from it. And so, uh, you like, you mentioned, um, lifting weights and getting a better pump, even if a little bit on the lower carb side of things, like that's a big deal that that pump, that vascularization is a consequence of blood flow. And that is driven in large part by these sodium potassium, you know, processes of, of increasing a phase of dilation in the area and nitrous oxide release, like all that stuff is facilitated by, by adequate sodium levels. Um, having the proper amount of fluid in our circulatory system means that each time our heart beats, it beats efficiently. Like if the heart is, if we are hypovolemic, if we're low volume, the heart needs to beat faster to get

the same amount of work done. So that's a stress on the heart. Clearly hypervolemic too is problematic that that's where hypertension comes in. But you know, there's, there's just cognition, like the way that we think it's all driven by sodium potassium pumps and people will notice. And again, like the guy who was selling salt, of course, I'm going to be like, Hey, there's these million different scenarios where this stuff is beneficial for you. But it's what we've noticed is that there will be all these situations where folks would normally feel kind of low energy, like maybe that 2 PM in the afternoon, you know, and it seems like you get a second wind around three or 4 PM and all that stuff. But oftentimes the, you know, my impulse would be to grab some more coffee or maybe make a green tea

or something like that. I just find that if I just top off electrolytes, even if I make sure that my lunch at around noon or one o'clock is sodium rich, like I make sure to have some salami or some salted cheese, or I do like 20 olives that give me a gram, gram and a half of sodium, I don't end up with that slump later in the day. So this energy slump is a big deal. So, you know, having proper circulation, energy levels, cognitive kind of, kind of crispness. I can't think of any scenario where folks wouldn't want that unless they're, you know, wanting to like smoke a lot of pot and eat Cheetos and just sit on the couch and be super mellow or something, you know, it's about the only time

you're not like fighting for, you know, some sort of robust, like mental and physical state. No, I love that. And I think that when we're talking a lot about electrolytes, we do focus on sodium, but there's two other electrolytes in the element formula. And I think these are just minerals in general that don't get talked about much. Magnesium more so than potassium. When people think of potassium, they think of like bananas and that's really where it stops. Like I think, I think potassium, yeah, that's in bananas. Okay. But they don't really understand what potassium does. And I know magnesium does not everything, but it's involved in so many different biological processes.

We'll get to that in a second. But how do potassium and magnesium, starting with potassium, complement sodium? Why are these three often included in electrolyte beverages? Sodium on its own is, like you said, it is in a lot of these hyper processed foods so sometimes you get enough from your diet but potassium and magnesium are often things that people are deficient in why are those so important you know the i will actually tackle the magnesium first because it's kind of please please it um it's involved with at production. So this fundamental energy currency of the body. Yeah. It's part of the enzymatic process for turning ATP over. It regulates inflammatory markers, immune function, insulin sensitivity. It's just like on and on and on. It's critical in the functioning of vitamin D. Like it enhances the efficacy of vitamin D if you have, and we usually think about vitamin D and calcium, but if you have inadequate magnesium, then the vitamin D doesn't even

do what it's supposed to do appropriately. Uh, on the potassium side, sodium and potassium work synergistically. We, we tend to pump more sodium outside of cells and more potassium inside of cells. And that differential is what drives these sodium potassium pumps. Potassium, again, is really important in blood pressure regulation, fluid balance, kidney function. And it's all electrochemical gradients. The body uses these positively charged metal ions in the form of sodium and potassium to be able to move fluids around the body, conduct electrical impulses. And so if we look at our being as like an electrochemical battery that is mainly driven by sodium and potassium and

with magnesium being a really important orchestrator within all that this is why this stuff is so important you know i mean it's uh trying to think of a good analogy but you know if if uh if we have a battery like a lithium ion battery that runs our computer or cell phone and we have something wrong with that it's just not going to function. Like the fundamental, you know, energy architecture isn't going to be there. And so it's not going to be able to make it function. Yeah. I remember when in rewinding all the way back to high school biology, like learning about the sodium potassium pump and my teacher being like, well, if this thing's off, you just die. You just die. If this thing doesn't work, like nothing in your body works,

your heart won't work. So much of what we do as an organism is contingent on maintaining the balance of sodium and potassium. And then to the point you made, magnesium is used in so many different biological processes, whether it's with vitamin D or the many different ways it's used as a cofactor, it's used everywhere. And you gave some really good recommendations nutritionally to increase your sodium, whether it's cured meat, like a salami, a couple of olives, some salted cheese, adding salt even to your food. We can talk about what kind of salts. I'm kind of a proponent that it doesn't so much matter. Some people in our space are like, dude,

no, it's got to be like from the beard of a seaman who's been at sea for 25 years, only in the purest of waters. It really depends. But where can we get potassium in our diet? And where can we get magnesium in our diet? For those who are interested, I guess, first and foremost, in getting these things from whole foods. And then we'll talk a little bit more, I think, about supplemental electrolytes and how to maximize performance with timing these things when you take your electrolytes, when I take mine, etc. So whole food sources of potassium and magnesium. or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. You really hit on it. That is where we get our potassium, magnesium, like any whole minimally processed food typically has a lot of potassium. Magnesium tends to be found a bit more in green vegetables because it's the chlorophyll component of green vegetables. Although nuts and seeds have a fair amount of potassium, seafood, meat. I've, I love grilling meat, but one of the things that makes me sad about grilling meat is you drip all the juice juice out of it and so like this is a part of

the reason why i'll kind of opt for more of a pan seared steak or even pork chop or something yeah because then i will take those drippings and then cook vegetables in it because i'm not eating all it that is a bunch of potassium and magnesium in there at the end of the day. Um, this is part of the reason why, um, folks in Westernized societies tend to be consuming inadequate amounts of potassium and magnesium because they eat a highly processed diet. I want to say there was a study recently that suggested that, um, 78% of the American diet would be considered, uh, uh, super processed, like, like hyper-palatable super processed, something like that, like crazy. So, um, the bulk of the potassium and magnesium has been removed from these foods. And interestingly, they get fortified

with sodium because it, it enhances the flavor, but this is where any move towards a minimally processed whole food oriented diet will, will typically really increase the potassium and magnesium in the, in the diet and oftentimes create the need for some, you know, supplemental sodium. It's interesting looking at more traditional like Mediterranean diets, Okinawan, Japanese diets, there's a lot of fermented food. There's a lot of salted food that is peripheral to these minimally processed whole grains, seafood, fruits, vegetables, root shoots, tubers. So very rich in magnesium and potassium with the baseline of the diet. And then usually used as a food preservative, the sodium is typically used in that way. But it's also interesting that it's very

complementary to these diets and very highly priced food. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and we were discussing a little bit about sodium and he was like, man, I've heard a lot about how my sodium intake should be lower because some of this conventional wisdom around sodium being bad. Because one of the things that we've seen, especially in the last couple of years, is it's really hard to nail messaging when it comes to large scale health information of any kind. It's really hard to provide nuance. We all struggle with it. It's something that I think you do really well. Having followed your work for quite some time, it's

actually something I feel like you get better at. Just the way that you've discussed a few things today with so much nuance, it's a skill. It takes a lot of humility, but it really also takes a lot of subject matter expertise to be like, this is what we know to be mostly true. These are some of the instances where, you know, hey, we might have to make some modifications. But he was like, one serving of processed foods has like my whole day's worth of sodium in it. So if I eat a diet that's generally whole foods and generally nutritious, yes, I might get more sodium and potassium or magnesium and potassium. But to your point, if an athlete who eats very few processed foods, you know, needs five, seven,

10 grams of sodium, they're going to probably have to use a supplement or they're going to have to probably be very mindful about using salt in their diet to get there. So are there types of salt that you think are more beneficial? I know in the bodybuilding world, pink Himalayan salt is like people crack it in their pre-workout, which I don't think there's anything wrong with pink Himalayan salt. But are salts created equal or is there a tier list of how these salts get broken down i'm really good at pissing people off at me and and uh i'm in very much the same camp that you are i i just it could be milked by you know the tears of llamas and collected in a basin and uh you know 22 000 feet elevation in the himalayas and everything and i, the thing that you need is sodium and people will talk about all these other trace minerals. Yeah. Some of those trace minerals are,

are lead and arsenic and cadmium and stuff like that. They're not necessarily good for you. So it's, um, I think that that's the wrong place to look for trace minerals. Like really good seafood is a great place to look for. Sure. Gosh, I mean, one oyster can give you like all the trace minerals you need for the whole day. Yeah, yeah. So I'm, I'm, I'm not a popular person around the like magical salt story. But yeah, I just, whatever salt you want to use, I think there are some really interesting salts that are like smoked salts and dip, you know, things that people have done interesting things with. And I think that they can have remarkably different mouthfeels and different kind of palate experiences and stuff like that. But as far as like the mineral content, like I think that when people get start geeking

out on that, I ask them, are you eating a gram of protein per pound of body weight? Are you strength training three to four days a week? Are you doing zone two cardio two to four days a week? Are you learning a new language, a musical instrument or some other cognitively demanding thing? Um, do you have adequate social connections like doing jujitsu or CrossFit or yoga? Like there's all this other, do you get a tan with any frequency? You know, there's all this other stuff that I just feel like is such guaranteed return on investment. And then getting out in the weeds about the mineral content of your salt, I think is kind

of, kind of crazy. Like if you're at that spot and you've really ticked all the other boxes, then great, but I don't see many people there. You're spot on. For people who have a tendency to miss the forest for the trees, I don't know why that started happening. It seems like it's unbelievably common amongst fitness enthusiasts, health enthusiasts. I think a lot of it just has to do with you can never really get it all figured out. There is so much to learn. Once you learn one thing, now there's 10 more new things to learn. And you can fall down these rabbit holes, but you're spot on.

You've got to nail those big rocks, the things that have the highest ROI. And then we can talk a little bit more about sodium. But I think you made the right point here, which is that most of the decisions one is probably going to make about which sodium or salt product they're going to use is largely going to be driven by mouthfeel, taste, and dietary preference. But from a performance standpoint, sodium is sodium. We're talking about the element sodium and how that actually helps the body perform physically. So when it comes to using sodium as a tool to increase performance,

same thing with magnesium and potassium. I like to use an electrolyte supplement, and I kind of alluded to the fact that I'll take it early in the morning before fasted weight training. I'll take it every day no matter what. I will start my day with one packet of Element in a big glass water bottle, and I will sip on that every single day, whether I'm training, uh, or not, but for people who are looking to get the most out of,

let's start, I guess, first with anaerobic exercise, resistance-based exercise, where might they want to supplement with something like element or an electrolyte to get the most out of their weightlifting experience? Definitely weight strength training. There's a great case to be made for pre and peri workout, you know, so like, you know, you've got a gram of sodium in a liter of water or thereabouts, you know, plus or minus, and maybe you do a third of that 10 minutes before, and then you do some during and a little bit afterwards. And, and you can play with, with that. But I think people will notice the, to the degree that you're going to get a pump, like if it's really low volume, high intensity stuff, you know, like

powerlifting and Olympic lifting, you know, it's going to be a little different, but to the degree you're going to get a pump, you will get a pump. You'll definitely get better like neural drive, like bow down on something. And I think that that's a great period to do it. Um, uh, we've noticed interestingly, when people are in that recovery process, uh, half a gram to a gram of sodium right before bed in just a scant amount of water. It suppresses antidiuretic hormone and kind of down-regulates some cortisol signaling. We've seen people experience really markedly improved heart rate variability scores by improving their sodium intake in general, but doing it right, you know, right before bed. So that's kind of an interesting time to take care of that. And then broadly, you know, one of the greatest challenges I have is trying to help people figure out how much electrolytes in general they need, but sodium in particular, because it's so variable, like big male, small female, hot environment, jujitsu, all this stuff. And the bracket that I feel pretty comfortable with is most people would benefit from getting about five grams of sodium per day.

Some people will need double that. Occasionally, very occasionally, you'll see 12, maybe 15 grams of sodium per day under really extreme circumstances, but that's pretty rare. I love that. One thing that I think comes up a lot when we talk about sodium is water retention and bloating. And you brought up antidiuretic hormone a little bit. That's obviously a piece of the puzzle. It's not as simple as sodium makes you bloated. No, sodium makes you not bloated. There are ways to manipulate how much fluid you hold by manipulating sodium, manipulating carbohydrate. But is there kind of a misconception around sodium as it pertains to bloating and water retention? And are some people more sensitive to it than others? Yeah, definitely. There are folks that are more sensitive to it than others.

Most people would probably be able to identify with this. You go out for a hike or, you know, long walk, but hikes are pretty good example. And you're just drinking plain water and you go through the day or several hours. And when you get done, your hands are swollen and your feet are swollen. And the reason why is that we're actually diluting sodium. We're in a hyponatremic, a low sodium environment. And that excess of potassium will actually cause cerebral edema, like swelling in the brain, you know, swelling of the hands and feet. And what would normalize that is actually getting some sodium in the mix. Now, the flip side of that is that people will go out for like a Mexican food meal and really burn it down.

And the next day they're like puffy and all that because they had salty margaritas and some other stuff. But they also had a mountain of calories and a bunch of carbs. Sure. And we know that elevated insulin, elevated carbohydrate intake causes us to retain sodium. So I think it becomes really important to parse all that stuff out and keep it kind of separated. It's a really good analogy. And I do think that there are many cases in fitness, health, wellness, where too little of something can be problematic and too much of something can be problematic. But the range at which most people will experience optimization is large enough that we can all work to get there if we're patient,

mindful, and pay attention to it. Something else I'd like to highlight here before I let you go is when we sweat, when we lose fluid, it's often recommended that we replace not just the fluid that we lose due to sweat, but also some of these electrolytes. Something that has become exceptionally popular of late, I remember maybe seven years ago when Rhonda Patrick first went on Joe Rogan and talked about the reduced risk of all-cause mortality that's associated with regular sauna use. Sauna started to become

a lot more popular. And then about five years ago, infrared sauna started to become really, really commonplace and people started getting saunas in their home. And now we've got people like Andrew Huberman who are also sharing some of the evidence-based benefits of regular sauna use. And this has become something now that is so popular, I sometimes have to wait in line to use the sauna at my local gym, which for a decade was the fucking most empty spot in the entire place. And so a lot of people who follow me know I like the sauna and they know that I will sip on electrolytes in the sauna. When your sweat rate gets really high or you lose a lot of fluid or you're doing something like sauna, should you always have electrolytes? Should you just use sodium? Do we lose just sodium? Do we lose a little bit of

magnesium and potassium? What's happening in those environments? And is that a situation where supplemental electrolytes is a necessity? Yeah. So we lose almost exclusively sodium. There's a little, it's like a hundred to one sodium to, to, uh, magnesium potassium. So it's not a bad idea. Like if you throw down some electrolytes to, to have some potassium and magnesium with it, but if you just had to focus on one thing, sodium, it's definitely the thing to focus on. We've had the good fortune of working with like some NHL and major league baseball, NFL teams, and some of these larger male athletes, males sweat a little bit differently than females do. Females, it tends to be a smaller, more ubiquitous sweat pores

and they get more efficient kind of thermal effects, cooling effects. Men, it tends to be more gloppy, you know, drips of sweat and they tend to lose a little bit more sodium in the sweat. And a larger male, you know, 200, 210 pound athlete, um, hard practice, a hard game, they can lose 10 pounds of water and 10 grams of sodium, 10,000 milligrams of sodium in that session.

Yeah. And so it, which is crazy. And if you do a hard training session the next day, and then the next day, and then the next day, if you're not staying ahead of that, then you're going to start pulling sodium out of the bones, we see disordered sleep, we, you know, we see all these, these different problems. So we really do need to depending on the, the, the physical demands of what the person is doing, total energy output, heat, humidity, type of clothing they're wearing, you know, all that type of stuff, like a jiu-jitsu gi,

you know, a person doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, they have a rash card, they have sprats, they have a gi on, like, they're in a sauna every day, and even if it's cool, it's hot, you know, and then you have a person laying on you on top of that. So it's, it's always warm and always a lot of fluid loss. But if you're going to do this stuff serially, it's critically important to recharge from one session to the other. And part of the, the real benefit of sauna, and this is why dry sauna, it appears to be so much more beneficial than like a steam sauna, a steam sauna. You don't sweat. The high humidity is really uncomfortable because of the, the high humidity. And so you can't sweat and you can't thermoregulate. Yeah. So you just get hot and

then you're, you're overwhelmed and you're done so much of what the benefit appears to be in, in like infrared and traditional dry sauna is the elevated heart rate that comes about from, you know, trying to thermoregulate and cool your body. Basically like a low dose of cardio. It is. It's absolutely a low dose of cardio. And to get the most out of that, you want adequate fluid volume.

So you, you would like to stay in that fight as long as you could. So you could sip on a, a, an isotonic electrolyte solution and where normally you might need to tap out at like 20 minutes, maybe get 25, maybe get 30. You get even more of the heat shock proteins. You get more of that, uh, uh, left ventricular hyperloading of the fluid upon the return, which seems to be beneficial for cardiac health and vascular health and whatnot. So, you know, there's a mental toughness element inherent in sauna, but I don't, it's silly in my mind to make it more about mental toughness. Like say, well, if I drink electrolytes, I'll be able to stay in longer. Good. You get more of a training effect. If you're dehydrated and you're low electrolytes, uh, like I saw a guy almost pass

out the other day when I was, when I was at the gym, like he literally went down on all fours when he opened the door to get out of there. And I, I gave him some elements and we, we had a chapter, you know, head injury. So you're doing all this shit for your health. And then you crack your head going down and you, you have a traumatic brain injury, like good luck with that. You know? So, um, I think that there's a really powerful case to be made for adequate sodium, adequate appropriate hydration to keep you in that process longer so that you get more of a training effect out of it. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And the mental toughness thing is going to be developed regardless. I think it's challenging to be in a hot sauna. And the reason I asked that

question the way I asked it is one of the more conventional pieces of wisdom that's shared about the sauna is that it helps you detox. And so I was like, okay, there's a lot of conflicting opinions about this. And I looked into some of the literature about what is and isn't exchanged in that fluid that's lost through sweat in the sauna. And you can actually find that a lot of the minerals and metals that are exchanged, you know, they're exchanged in these certain amounts. And sodium was just massively higher and everything else was tiny, infinitesimal and oftentimes significant, statistically insignificant. such small amounts that you would go, I don't know if we can say sauna is effective at detoxing the body, but it definitely appears to be effective at pumping sodium out of the body. And so as somebody who regularly recommends sauna usage for health, for cardiovascular benefits, I find personally, it's just from a subjective standpoint, phenomenal for my mood. Take electrolytes in there

with you every time, or at least crack some salt into your water. I think you'll do substantially better at replacing what you're losing and you will stand to be a little bit less likely to experience something like you said, where you pass out or fall over. There is at least one or two people a month that would have to get pulled out of the sauna when I worked at a commercial gym in my early twenties. Every month, like clockwork, code blue, somebody fell down in the sauna because they got dehydrated. All right, Rob. Well, I think that'll do it for today. This is very, very, very informative. And I think that people now kind of have the ability to make more

informed decisions about their sodium consumption, their electrolyte consumption. We've debunked a ton of myths. Where can they find you? How can they find Element? This is something that I've shared with them before, but it's a fantastic company. Your work has always inspired me. And I want to make sure that they know where to find that. Yeah. RobWolf.com is where most of my stuff lives. I do a lot of writing for Element. And if you go to DrinkElement.com, that's where you can find that stuff. And I'm sure you probably have like where if you know a trainer, coach, a frontline, you know, police, military, fire that is doing good work, you go to drinkelement.com forward slash give us salt and you nominate the person and we'll send them salt and we send you salt too.

So it's been this amazing program that we started really at the very beginning of COVID and it's become one of the biggest features of what we have going on. That's awesome. I love that. I didn't know about that, but you guys definitely check that out. Check out Rob's work. Check out the work that Element is doing. I think they're really changing the game and influencing what I would describe as a better understanding of how we interface with these minerals. Sodium is not all bad. And again, Rob, just to compliment you, you speak with so much nuance. You've really paint things in a way that I think is, you don't speak in absolutes. Let me put it to you that way. And it's been a pleasure to talk to you today and learn from you over the years. Thanks so much

for coming on. Huge honor. Thank you.