Zero Nutrition for a Few Pence

I am a great believer in training on no calories. We all carry plenty of them in our fat stores so providing you teach your body to efficiently utilise fat you do not need to take calories before or during training, if the intensity is moderate and the duration reasonable. I cannot be more specific than that because the degree of intensity and length of training you can endure without calories will depend on the individual and how well adapted they are to burning fat. If you train at a level where you are having to use muscle glycogen to sustain the effort then sooner or later you will bonk. However, endurance athletes should be doing most of their training below this intensity. So the fact is a lot of rubbish is spoken about the need for calories during training. The key is to teach your body to become able to use fat at higher and higher levels of effort.

So to the point of this blog. I do use those tablets shown in the photo for hydration and salt replacement, but for a long time have considered them ridiculously expensive. All they need to contain is water and salt and we know how cheap those products are. So £7.00 for twenty tablets is ridiculous and adding unrequired vitamins to the tablets in an attempt to somehow justify the price is deceiving. A well known supermarket chain does sometimes sell a cheaper version, but still overpriced for salt and water.

I decided therefore finally to come to my senses and work out how much salt and water I need to make my own. Sweat has about 70mmol/l of sodium in it. This may fall in the trained athlete. The tablets shown above contain 30mmol/l and 20mmol/l depending on brand (one says to use one and the other two per 500ml water). In fact therefore if you use them you will not be fully replacing the sodium lost in sweat.

A mole of a substance is the atomic weight in grams. So a mole of sodium is 23g. Salt is sodium chloride and the atomic weight of chlorine is 17. So a mole of salt is 40g. Therefore, if you put 40g of salt in a litre the concentraion will be 1mole/litre or 1000mmol/litre. To achieve a concentration close to that of sweat you will need 40 divided by 1000 x 60 grams of salt, which is 2.4g.

Now there will be other fluid losses when training; the main one being water vapour from the respiratory tract, which will not contain sodium and therefore overall replacement will need a concentration of salt somewhat less than sweat, but higher than 30mmol/l. The other issue is the concentration of salt in the drink that is palatable.

When making the replacement drink it would be annoying to have to weigh the salt out every time you go training, so I have worked out that to give a concentration close to sweat, using table salt, (sea salt and others will have a different volume) is equivalent to about a quarter of a teaspoon per 750ml bottle. We have a cooking measure that is a quarter of a teaspoon size, so that is easy. However, as I have said above you need a concentration somewhat less than this to allow for respiratory losses, so perhaps this amount of salt in a litre would be about right. That will give you about 50mmol/l.

You need to experiment with what tastes good to you. Do not go above a quarter of a teaspoon per litre or I suggest below that amount of salt in 1500ml. At the lower concentration it will be similar to the expensive well known brands. Then add a little squash to taste and you have zero nutrition for a few pence!

Give it a go, save money and at the same time improve your bodies fat burning efficiency; "job's a good'un and a win win"!