WHOOP Podcast - Sweat, salt, and hydration: Sports scientist Andy Blow covers the essentials of hydration

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes sits down with Andy Blow, a world-renowned expert in sweat, dehydration, and cramping to discuss how you can lock in your hydration. Andy draws on his experience as a triathlete and a Formula 1 sports scientist to help explain what you need to know about your own hydration -- and how to avoid common mistakes when it comes to hydration and fueling. Andy discusses the variability in sweat losses from person to person (8:56), what our bodies do while sweating (10:08), perceived effort and thirst (11:50), pre-hydrating (16:20), diet and hydration (21:46), caffeine's role in hydration (24:27), alcohol (30:09), electrolytes (33:14), hydrating while fasting (37:22), and carbs and fueling (42:05). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down on 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 Holmes, 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 Benetton and Reno Formula One teams. Kristen and Andy discuss how our body functions when we sweat and the load that's 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 astray. 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 Whoop Podcast. You can email us, podcast atwoop.com,

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 Whoop podcast listeners. If you're a new member signing up for Whoop, you can use the code Will W-I-L when you're checking out to get a $60 credit on W-W-P accessories. This includes bands, battery packs, and our Woop Body Apparel. You can check out the newly released Lux Bands, too. So that is at join.wop.com.

And without further ado, here are Kristen Holmes and Andy Blow. Andy Blow is the founder of precision, fuel, and hydration. He is a sports scientist with a degree in sports and exercise science from the universe of Bath. And how salty is Andy? Well, he loses over 1,850 milligrams of sodium per liter of sweat. So Andy, I think we should all just introduce ourselves with how much sweat we lose. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a good idea. We've printed it on the back of our business cards, in fact.

I love that. And 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. And I was like just kind of 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 actually is that? It's pretty salty, right? Absolutely. So like the range is probably 200 milligrams per litre is really low salt in your sweat and kind of 2,000 to 2,200 is really high. And 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 saltier than me. But I've now been not, I've been knocked 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. And, you know, you've worked as a team sports scientist for Benetton and Renault, Formula One teams, and you're an advisor for Porsche Human Performance Center. So, you know, you've just been in this space your entire career. And it's really interesting because, you know, 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. You know, when members report having hydrated sufficiently, they see marked improvements in,

heart variability and resting heart rate. So, you know, 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 out incorrect based of my understanding of human physiology. So on that note, you know, Andy, I'm super excited for you to help us kind of set the record straight on what a science-backed framework for hydration should actually look like. And I think, you know, if the goal of this podcast, I think if we can get to the end and kind of give people just, you know, 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? You know, give us a little insight into your athletic background and kind of how you got into really examining hydration and in the depth and level that you have over the years. Yeah, well, 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 and with 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. And triathlon was kind of my main sport as 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 sent me on a journey into Ironman racing, you know, the longer course, triathlon stuff. And that was where my interest in sports science, because I'd 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 in the heat, I could almost look white.

You know, it was like white salt stains in my eyebrows all over my kit. And I would get horrific cramps. I would get all sorts of, you know, problems hypernatremia, which will probably, you know, we can talk about a little bit in terms of the physiology of that later on but really really really kind of poor poor performance and it was it was only after talking to a friend of mine who was 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 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 analyzed you know with an in a cystic 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 and 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 do 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? Well, some of the research that caught my eye early on was really the stuff looking at population data of athletes and looking at the range of sweat sodium loss because the GSSI, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute has published some very good papers on that. A lady out of, I think, Philadelphia called Dr. Sandra Godek.

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. She was looking at two-a-day practices in the preseason and the heat in August. and showing that some players required less than a teaspoon of salt a day to replace their electrolyte needs and other 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 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 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 and kind of the chemistry. Do you want to just do a quick rundown of kind of what's happening in the cells and the tissues when we're hydrated versus dehydrated and, you know, how does that actually impact our perceived effort, our cognition, you know, are in 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 the elderly and that kind of thing. When we're talking about athletes, though, the big lever that moves the hydration needle is acute sweat losses during training sessions and competition. So you can be well hydrated one minute and start exercising and 90 minutes later, two hours later, you can be already really 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 exercise is that ultimately it puts more strain on your cardiovascular system so you see your heart rate and

increase. You see your perception of effort increase. And if it gets really severe, it will, it will slow you down and stop you in your tracks. So, you know, 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, you know, feeling dehydrated or thirsty during performance? That's an interesting one because there's been a lot of research in that

area. Some 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 will suffer. I couldn't 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 it can certainly not be translated across as a universal statistic.

You know, a lot of the 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, or humans in general, when we've got availability of fluid and water in front of us, if we're 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 marathons 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 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 the substantial drop-off in performance at other

times you may only be 1% dehydrated and your performance suffers, but there'd be certain situations where 5 or 6% or even 7% might be acceptable if you started very well prehydrated, if you're doing an activity where you're pushing within your limits, 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 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 thirst instinct is exquisitely maintained in most humans and if you respond to that

you will stop yourself becoming significantly dehydrated and everything will be fine the kind of opposing camp is saying well actually you need to have a plan for hydration because you know thirst isn't always a good indicator and you need to drink to a plan and you need to work out what you're going to take in and 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 university say drink when you're thirsty only some people want to say do you have to have a plan you know there should be a way to meet in the middle but there's not because people's opinions get turned into sound bites and 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 you 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 end and say, right, I'm going to do the Hawaii Ironman triathlon in 85 degrees and 90% humidity, and I'm going to go into that without a plan for hydration intake,

then that's a serious role of the dice. And actually optimum performance is only really going to be achieved in those kind of heavy sweat loss scenarios with a really strategic approach to fluid and sodium replacement. Just as you were talking, I was thinking about, you know, just all the variables that come into play that influence our food levels, you know, and I'm wondering about food intake, you know, 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, you know, maybe just

hit on what are some of the things that actually impact that planning for, you know, even if it's someone going out for a two-hour kayak and, you know, really hot conditions, for example, you know, 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 athletes 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, you know, more is probably going to be better because I'm worried about dehydration, so I'm going to put more in it, and then overwhelming the body a little bit and actually over-drinking and over-consuming plain water and fluid. 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 hit on that again. I'm forgetting the turn hypoetremia. hyponatremia. Natremia, yeah.

Yeah, so you're exactly right that when you overdrink, you start to dilute the blood plasma, your kidneys kick in and obviously you start to urinate and you start to pee. And I'm sure you will have been told as an athlete, you know, look at the curve 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 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 large glass of water and a coffee you know 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 and electrolytes through your system and there's there have been some interesting studies before ultramarathans one in particular the guys took some blood samples of athletes at the start line of the spartath on in Greece, which is a, I think it's a 150 or 170 mile running race in the heat. And sort of 10 or 12% I think it was of the athletes on the start line were showing signs of hyponatremia in their blood. And the researchers 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.

So 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've all aggressively pre-hydrated with water only and diluted their systems and given themselves hyponatremia. And that's a really bad way to be starting an endurance event in, because it only gets kind of worse from that point on. So, you know, to the point about prehydration, I'd say a lot of athletes, you know, neglect electrolyte intake when there's plenty of evidence to show that very strong electrolyte drinks, you We're talking about kind of 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. You need to do that about an hour before exercise. That is a really good strategy and one that we, we employ, you know, with quite a few of the athletes that we work with in all sorts of sports because universally, I think, you know, athletes want to be on the start line or be at the start of the game or the competition, whatever it is, optimally hydrated. And I'll give you, you know,

one 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. They didn't know why. That seems to be a regular event in NFL. I'm like, is happening with these people. Well, I think some of it's, I think some of its hydration practices. Yeah, got to be. 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, you know, 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 kind of try this out and modify the strategy what do you know the cramping went away overnight and he's he's like you know and so i think you know pre-hydration in itself is is a huge is a huge is a huge huge deal. And that if that's something that athletes can get right, you know, it gets you started on the on the front foot, especially in hot conditions. On the cramping front, you know, I talk to a lot of different CrossFit athletes. And these are just, you know, folks who are doing an hour workout or whatever and, you know, might be on a keto type diet, let's say. And again, I just, and I want to

understand, too, just how food might impact hydration strategies because I feel like there's potentially a lot of confusion there. But and so, you know, not doing huge. volumes, I guess, and not maybe sweating a ton, but are, you know, find themselves in the middle of the night cramping. You know, what might be happening there? Yeah, keto diets is a really interesting one because when you, 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 you're, 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 effectively, for 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, you know, becoming dehydrated or sodium depleted. So if you know you're kind of that person, what would be the exact kind of protocol you would

recommend? For that individual, it's 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, you know, Well, between smaller people, maybe eight 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 are usually of a duration where you just kind of drink to what you feel you need. You know, it might be more on 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 eight to 24 ounces depending on your body size of something

which is a you know electrolyte tablets are usually good because they're if you're on keto there they're a 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 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, myself now included, like I, 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's a diuretic. So what that means is it encourages the kidneys to produce more urine. So it means that your urine output 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 long.

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 diresis. 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 drink three or four in a day, I feel like I can become progressively dehydrated because the diurecist just kind of carries on. And I know that from experience of, you know, doing a lot of crossing the Atlantic, being jet lagged, relying a little bit too much on coffee, you know,

to pick me up in the afternoons and things and then finding it progressively over a few days with that and some air travel and air 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're using it for short activities taking three to six milligrams of caffeine per kilo of body weight about an hour before is a is a fantastically well validated protocol to boost performance because that caffeine takes you know 60 minutes to peak in your bloodstream it's then 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 dioresisis 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-exercise 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 i 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 has probably been worsened, at least where we perceive it would have been worsened by caffeine used during exercise because of that antidiarractic 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 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 my, it doesn't seem like my performance levels will suffer that day, but it seems. 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, if any individual exercise session is 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 stepwise 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 you yeah you definitely digging yourself a whole progressively that's certainly like that is classic for what happens to me if I if I fly from the UK to the US two three days in if I've not absolutely nailed my hydration on the flight, you know, stayed off alcohol,

so they minimise 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 has taken, my body's has 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, you know, are starting their typical workout on Monday, you know, how do those folks

need to think about their Sunday to get back to neutral in order to, you know, not suffer terribly or suffer less on Monday? Yeah, yeah, it is a good, good and common question. definitely I'll put my hand up and say I've got a little bit of experience from time to time because I just asking for a friend no just kidding yeah exactly yeah yeah so a few a few things are you know I guess an obvious one is you can if you if you know you're going to a big celebration a big party and you are just accepting the fact you're going to have a few drinks and you want to just take the breaks off and not worry about it you know having treating it almost like a workout in some ways you're going to because what you're

going to do alcohol is diuretic it's going to make you pee and you're going to lose a lot more body fluid. And having 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 going to, it's not like a cure-all because if one of those existed, I think people would have found it by now, but it can help. You know, 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 going to try and go out and work work the hangover off as it were. The other thing to do was

we would chat and we've been chatting with an interesting company that's making some things like non-alcoholic 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 the race, the ideal ratio of maybe having like two alcoholic drinks to then one non-alcoholic beer or something like that because what's changed massively in the last few years I think is the range of like interesting because 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 coat it's like that or 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 route in between yeah They're actually pretty good at hydration. You know, if you are in a social situation, it can feel a little bit less awkward because, you know, you're still, still for, you know, Pete, it still looks like you're having a drink if that's what matters or, and it's certainly they taste, you know, 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-alcoholic beer is a really nice thing to drink is in recovery. I suppose those kind of things, you know, rather than trying to be preachy because 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 what you can to manage you.

You know, obviously we've talked about electrolytes just kind of loosely, but I'd love for you just dig in. What is an electrolyte? When do we need it? You know, I think we've outlined some times where electrolyte, you know, supplementation is got to be helpful if we're having caffeine, if we're experiencing cramping, you know, for 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, intracellular fluid and extracellular fluid. Things like

the things that people will have heard of is sodium, calcium, calcium, magnesium, chloride, potassium. They all perform different roles. A lot of it is to do, a lot of their roles are 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're 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 intracellular 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 and 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 and 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. But fundamentally, one of the biggest factors that's useful 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 supplementation 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's critical, but it's locked inside the cells. 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 2,000 or 1 for 2,000 milligrams of sodium. So that's kind of why sodium's got this outsized 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 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 a 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 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 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 taken in a lot of, 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, 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 you're fasting, can be, is just to drink lots and lots of water. It 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 ever drink water, are 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 or 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 caloric. You know, and 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 pet peeves 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 and 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 case studies 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, you know, got that stuck into today. And also caffeine, which we have talked about a little bit, is in there. So if people want to sort of, I think as an athlete, I'd have massively valued being able to. to look at the case study 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 studies. You've got some really world-class athletes, as well as some age group athletes and amateur athletes. And they're doing marathons, ultramarathons, 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 short-cut 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 talking to other athletes at races. Some of it would be contradictory. You kind of pick up on the bits that you want to hear and discard the bits that don't jibe with what you want to think.

And whereas this is a, 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 fuel and hydrate during their hardest, biggest efforts? Because I think if, you know, I'm sure whoop people in general want to improve their performance. I think that's a, 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 fuel. fueling in that regard. I feel like we've been nervous not to talk more about glucose, but the blog is wonderful. Those articles are beautiful. And 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 with 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 we were working with for hydration, saying, okay, we've got this, you know, we're getting this nailed now. What do we eat alongside it? And we went back to the science. We went back to our own personal experience as athletes and sort of said, okay, 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 shortings. 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 were really elite endurance athlete pushing the limits in long races. We've since seen, we've got case studies 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 carbs. stuff and all of which is phenomenally valid in 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, where 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 that those things for me are again where where we're trying to fill a gap in the market side 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 nutritionists 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 fueling is a, it was the piece that was missing from our puzzle until a few years ago. And it's, and it's now becoming, you know, baked into what we do. If 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. That's exactly it. Lean on the knowledge that other people have, you know, have gained out there. That's certainly what we're doing and pulling it together. And ultimately, you know, we all do sport. A few people do sport because it's their living or because they want to be the best of them. 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, you know, dragging your backside home, you know, feeling sorry for yourself. You can finish with a skip and your step. Where's the best place for folks to find you? Yeah. So for the, for the company, it's precision F and H is our handle across all the platforms. You know, we do a fair bit on Instagram, on Facebook and Twitter. Precisionfuelanhydration.com is the website. If you hit 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 um do that or just email us at hello at precision fuel and hydration.com 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 sports scientists or elite athletes so if someone's if something that we've talked about today is kind of piqued someone's interesting want a bit of more individualized, 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 the invite. 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 at Woop at Will Ahmed. Email the WOOP podcast, podcast at Woop.com, and we'll answer your questions.

You can also call in at 508-443-4-9-5-2. That's 508-4-4-3-49-2. 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. You know,