Author Interviews, Exercise - Fitness, Salt-Sodium / 14.03.2015
Some Athletes May Need Salt Supplementation During Endurance Events
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Juan Del Coso Garrigós
Profesor CC. de la Act. Física y del Deporte
Responsable del Laboratorio de Fisiología del Ejercicio
UNIVERSIDAD CAMILO JOSÉ CELA
MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: From a scientific point of view, it is well known that salt (either in capsules or included in a drink) can improve physical performance and several other physiological factors such as plasma volume maintenance, thermoregulation, etc in endurance activities. These effects are more evident when the amount of salt ingested during exercise matches the amount of salt lost by sweating. By using only sports drinks, it is impossible to replace all the salt lost by sweating because they only contain a relatively small amount of salt in their compositions (between ½ and 1/3 of the amount of salt lost by sweating).
In fact, some of the investigations that determined the effectiveness of ingesting salt in sports have been financed by most popular sport drinks trademarks. However, sports drink companies only include a part of the salt lost by sweating because for them, taste is elemental for their markets! I suppose that, if they include more salt in their commercially available drinks, they would be more effective to prevent dehydration and performance decline, but at the same time, the taste of the drink would diminish the amount of beverage ingested worldwide.
In this case, in the sport drinks market there is a well- established balance between taste and physiological effectiveness.
As an example, most “salted” sport drinks contain 20-25 mM of sodium while it is well known that sweat sodium concentration ranges from 20 to 60 mM (salty sweater can reach 100 mM!!). This is not a regulatory limitation, because UE considers sports drinks to carbohydrate-electrolyte solutions that contain sodium between 20 and 50 mM.
Our main finding is: To ingest salt capsules, in addition to the habitual rehydration routines with sports drinks, improves performance in a triathlon. This ergogenic effect was mediated by better maintenance of body water and electrolytes balances.
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