Individualizing Your Hydration and Sodium for Ultrarunning with Andy Blow | KoopCast Episode 36

what's going on folks welcome to another episode of the KoopCast a podcast where we explore all areas of trail and ultra running including training hydration physiology psychology as well as have a little bit of fun banter along the way on this episode of the podcast we have andy blow coming to us all the way from the united kingdom andy is the founder of precision hydration and they offer sweat sodium testing and customized hydration solutions for all different types of athletes i initially came to know andy as he was one of the presenters at the 2019 training peaks endurance coaching summit and what struck me about that presentation there is this very practical and pragmatic solution that they are bringing to customized hydration which at times can be a complicated and somewhat nuanced science to study and whenever i find practitioners other coaches and scientists in the field that can blend those simple solutions to complex problems i've always become quite appreciative of that and i think that andy and his team over at precision hydration does a great job with it we cover a lot cover a lot of areas in this podcast including how his company came

to be based off of a personal experience that andy had what uh what athletes are good candidates to get sweat sodium testing how you can find out if you're a good candidate for this and what's the science behind it we hear a lot of conflicting advice in terms of sodium and hydration and we try to cut through the clutter uh in that particular regard i found this conversation uh really fun and as i mentioned earlier what the folks do over at precision hydration i've come to uh appreciate more and more as i've looked at uh what they what they do in an effort of full disclosure there's no financial entanglement between myself uh or this podcast and the folks over at precision hydration i don't receive a you know dime for bringing them on the podcast they have set up a coupon code for the listeners if you are so inclined to go and check that them out that promo code is KoopCast all in caps then you can go over to precisionhydration.com to take advantage of that it is worth 15 off of your first order but i had a lot of fun with this conversation and let's get right into it here it is with andy blow talking about all things hydration and sodium i was thinking about this this morning on my run and actually took a spill you can't see that on my hand um i actually owe you an apology yeah start out with yeah because uh last year we were

both at the training peaks conference yeah and i remember looking up the line looking at the lineup and i was one of the round table presenters so the way that you remember the way the conference works but just to like kind of set it up for the listeners is there's you know maybe six or eight kind of what i would call like main speakers that use like a big conference room and then they had a uh uh and then they had a group of maybe 10 round table speakers and all these things were going on concurrently so it's really hard for the presenters to see some of the presentations and also give their stuff because of all the things going on i think you presented like two or three times right twice i think yeah one on each one on each day i reckon yeah yeah well i i did the same 30 minute presentation like nine times oh yeah oh my god well i mean a presentation is probably it's probably overstating its its value it was really more leading a discussion than anything else but my point with that is i remember looking at the at the lineup and i had to be really choosy with what presenters i actually went to because i didn't have the time availability to go see everything and immediately i knew i knew who you were obviously it's like this freaking bloke andy is gonna just push customized hydration solutions on people in this over commercialized fashion and i don't want to go see this and i don't know what's it i was in a bad mood that day or whatever but then i watched the i

watched all the presentations afterwards because they were banked i'm like shit that was really reasonable like i wish i would have actually seen that live because it was not it was not the stereotypical here's my product and here's why it applies to everybody which is what we see a lot yeah especially in the nutrition space it was really reasonable it was very well thought out so unbeknownst to you i still i've owed you this apology for like a year now that's good to hear good to hear i we did i think one of your colleagues is it um i'm trying to remember his name it's adam adam adam st pierre he adam definitely came and sat in the front row looking for a fight when we you know when we when we did that presentation he actually good and he came up to me afterwards and like had a reasonable conversation so i was quite pleased about that we're gonna we're gonna talk about that a little bit but he did his master's thesis on hydration and so i think that was a little bit of his um a little bit of his bias going in and he did so to explain that story a little bit to listeners one of our coaches adam st pierre has been on the podcast before he's great he's a great coach he attended andy's you know and andy's talk and and and and he describes just looking for a fight on some of the information that that was presented and after the presentation was over he set it up so he could get two sweat sodium tests done correct yeah the second one of which he was trying to manipulate by consuming copious amounts of sodium in between the two

as this like proof point to say we'll see diet can manipulate this it turns out he was wrong and yeah we'll probably discuss why why he was wrong when we get into the technical parts of this but uh he was quite frustrated afterwards because he was wrong let's just put it that way yeah no it was good it was actually i've referenced that little incident with a few people because it was it was interesting chatting with him and you know i've had that because we are we're a commercial company you know we've got kind of a dog in the fight there so it does people's initial impression is sometimes okay well these people want to sell products and yeah we do want to sell products but but the difference is i think we want to sell products for the right purpose to the right people to help them do what they want to do we're not interested in you know selling in gas stations and that kind of thing which has been the industry model yep yep you settle 7-11 eventually yeah i mean that's the that's the that you're right that is the model um okay so before we get too too far into the weeds of sweat sodium testing to kind of like set this up i want to discuss like your athletic background first yeah because this is a story that we see play out in the endurance space a lot where we have athletes that are going through their careers at whatever stage they are competitive collegiately some of them are you know professional to a certain extent and they encounter some problem throughout the course of their athletic endeavors and they decide to solve that take it on their own accord solve it and then they turn it into a business

and that's very much like your story so why don't we go through that first and then we'll start talking about how like where it is current day yeah 100 you're right i i suffered with hydration related problems as an athlete so i started out this i did soccer as a teenager as a young as a young lad and as a teenager like most kids in the uk do but but never really progressed particularly far with that got into endurance sports i'd always swum a little bit i'd done some some running cross-country running and my dad took me along to do swim run and um a bit of biathlon saw the triathlon bikes there and i got into triathlon when it was when it was still relatively young i think i did my first triathlon in around about 1996 so it wasn't a brand new sport by any means but it was really you know it was niche it was it was speedos getting changed in the car park you know and it was all happening at 6am on a sunday that kind of thing and i i pursued that reasonably seriously as a as a teenager and then really seriously when i got to university because i went to university to study sport and exercise science and i chose the university of bath in the uk because it was a triathlon center of excellence and i had a goal which was a bit of a pipe dream but i wanted to go to the olympic games you know like a lot of young athletes do i i wasn't going to make the team for sydney but if i had any chance it would be for 2004 for the athens games so i started on this journey in the late 90s to try and sort of

look ahead to that but my talent wasn't i was not a bad athlete but my talent wasn't there i was good enough to make the squads and things but not not the real teams and so at that point i sort of transitioned from short course triathlon into ironman and exterra racing because that was a that was a psychological next step and it was at that point particularly that i noticed that i went to my first ironman was in the year 2000 i went to switzerland and it was a really hot year as it often is there actually funnily enough and i was in great shape but i did 10 and a half hours for the ironman which isn't you know it's not a horrific time but i was kind of i was punching for nine hours or something like that and it was because i walked a lot of the marathon i'd got i was peeing all the time i'd got my hydration completely wrong and this then became a repeating process over and over i'd get cramps i'd fall apart in long races i got went down with hyponatremia a couple of times and it was it was ultimately that frustration that led me into like then delving into sweat sodium all that kind of stuff and figuring it out or figuring it figuring it out for me initially and at that time were you using like the widely available commercial sports products like the gatorade that was on the course and the power bars and the gold wrappers you remember those yeah bars and the gold wrappers and things like that i used to take those to cut them up stick them to the top tube of my bike and then spend a

week jet washing it afterwards to get those are so gross man they're so gross it was the options it was the options we had but yeah i would i would just and i at back then for me hydration was the mantra at the time you know you've talked about this with with previous guests on your podcast you know in the 90s the mantra was you know more is better when it comes to fluid so ultimately as a sports science student at that time if i was having a problem in a race i was probably in my head not drinking enough so i'm then drinking more i'm drinking you know dilute sports drinks or water piling more and more fluid in i was aware that it's obvious anyone who's trained near to me understands i have a very high sweat rate you know this is just a visible fact i will be soaked as soon as i start exercising but so i'm thinking more fluid and i'm taking i'm thinking i've got i'm taking electrolytes because at that point electrolytes for me were like a magical little element you just needed a little a little tinkle of that in your drink and that took care of it you know there's no genuinely no insight as to what the level of electrolytes were or anything or even what the electrolytes were you know it's just like this this term so i thought i'm taking electrolytes and yeah it was then it was then actually kind of going going back to the drawing board it was a friend of mine who was a doctor who i'd complained vigorously about my problems too and this friend of mine said he said well i've seen photos of you at the races you know you're covered in salt you sweat a lot this could be everything you're describing is like what i see in hospital patients when we've got massive electrolyte imbalance

so let's get your sweat tested so it's like why the hell would you do that okay and then we start this thing of and i start googling then even though i'm on a dial-up modem you know trying to find stuff online and i actually found most of the useful information online back in the early 2000s was in ultra running forums on the the early ultra running forums on the web yeah the ultra listserv yeah i'd find these these guys and i'd read every thread in every rabbit hole that had the word sodium or sweat in it and i start to piece together there's these people and there's some people that i'm reading about that are taking a phenomenal amounts of salt in races especially in the u.s in the heat and that kind of thing and i'm like i talked to my friend the doctor dr jutley he gets me sweat tested we find out that i'm losing like a high amount of sweat and i'm also losing a very high concentration of sodium in my sweat so like to give that some context probably close to 2000 milligrams in every liter that i sweat out which is about in you know the terminology about 85 90 millimole of sodium and and he says to me right well a lot of people lose way less than that so you are basically excreting loads of fluid loads of salt and then you're just diluting and depleting your body 2000 milligrams per liter is i'm going to use a really technical term here it's a shit ton yeah of sodium in your sweat and to contextualize that for the audience that hasn't listened to a

few of the other podcasts we're going to get into the ranges a little bit but many of the commercial many of the good commercially available fluid replacement products out there so cliff bar has one uh osmo has one scratch labs has one they all kind of fall into the like 450 milligrams per liter to like maybe 600 milligrams per liter of fluid you're four times above that yeah just based on the sweat sodium testing and i think that and that's now when you were getting when you were actually getting that test in the early 2000s the sodium concentrations of the commercially available products were 200 or 150 milligrams per liter yeah yeah it was i was basically i was underdoing my sodium intake by probably about a factor of 10 roughly you know when i when i worked it out over the over the duration of the event and gradually with with a bit of reading on these forums with some confidence instilled in me but the fact that my you know dr jutley is a medic the guy's a heart surgeon so he knows his stuff you know he's saying to me this is we should try taking this amount and i'm like well do you see how much that is he's like yep let's try it let's try it and so you know we like turning up the volume on this turning up the volume and eventually you know trial and error you get there but it took me even at that point probably took me four or five years and you know long story short for me on that it ended up that in the heat i was like a thousand to fifteen hundred milligrams of sodium per hour guy on the bike in

an ironman and then i could get off and run a strong marathon you know and it was night and day for me the difference was unbelievable when you initially got sweat sodium tested and just to time frame this you says mid 2000s right yes like early probably i wish i knew exactly i guess i would have been tested around 2004 i did kona in 2004 and had a horrendous experience and so it would have been soon after that where i really kind of was like if i'm going to do this again i'm going to do this right were they using the absorbent patches at that point you you could get that done but we went actually we just went to a hospital and got a uh a cystic fibrosis oh okay so the same one the same one that you guys that we use now okay we're gonna we're gonna get into that a little bit because there's different types of tests that people can go out and that people can go out and get i didn't know that that was i mean it's obviously available at the time but it was just so specialized not a lot of people had access to it so kudos to you for thinking outside the box on on i had to get that done yeah that was a combination of a bit of you know a bit of good fortune some good advice and then what actually then happened part of the story of how precision hydration came about is that we bought cystic fibrosis testing units to use with athletes and of course the company that builds those is going who are who are these like weird people in the uk who are buying our technology and doing loads of testing who are clearly not cystic fibrosis doctors so they were fantastically supportive in

in encouraging us to say well if this if the athletic and human performance market needs to understand sweat sodium then we have the technology will you help us take the technology to to that market so that was that was the that sowed the seed for you know putting the business together i'm fascinated by this because once again this is a story we kind of see play out every once in a while in endurance sports where somebody has a personal experience and they turn it into a business or a product or something like that i mean entrepreneurs have been doing that for you know decades and decades but in your case you have this personal experience and you combine that with the fact that your personal experience is anomalous fair statement uh i would say not now that we've got a lot more data there's there's probably 15 to 20 percent of the people that we test have high or very what we classify as high or very high sweat sodium losses so although it's although it's we i'm in the i'm relatively high end of the the range we test people every single week now who are in that range now our data set may be a little skewed in the fact that people come to us because they may be perceived they're having problems or whatever but we've tested we've sweat tested now over 10 000 people wow so we got some big data and we're actually crunching the numbers to look at publishing some of that at the moment but the range is basically we've seen people down at 200 and some milligrams of sodium per liter

and we've seen people up at nearly 3 000 milligrams per liter so my crown is the kind of saltiest sweat guy was taken quite a few years ago i'm in the mix i'm at the higher end yeah i'm not i'm not on the podium okay but it's still at the edge of the bell curve and i'm glad i'm really glad that you contextualize the data set that you have at precision hydration with you might be getting people that are just having issues because when you look at it in the literature if you look at the bell curve of people's sweat sodium concentrations it's probably shifted a little bit to the left where like the bulk of that bell curve is 400 500 600 milligrams per liter or something like that your bell curve might be shifted a little bit to the right if i'm imagining it correctly i would say actually looking at the big data set so not independent of ours so gatorade have published big data sets and there's been control studies for cystic fibrosis um tests because they take healthy populations well the average sweat sodium level is nearly always around 950 milligrams per liter that's the middle of the curve i would say that what people below a long way below 600 is relatively getting more unusual you know like six five 600 is is definitely lower lower side and above 1200 1300 is is higher side you've got a really big group in that you know just either side of 900 basically the vast majority of the you know a lot of data sits within there okay so let's get back to

the the dialogue that we're going through in terms of translating this to a widely available product so you've got your your your test case which is i i categorize as anomalous but you're still at the at the edge of the bell curve or towards the edge of the bell curve and then you couple it with this technology that is not meant for athletes yeah right it's meant for cystic fibrosis patients how do you then take these two things your personal experience which is you know which is kind of out like kind of outside the norm but it's still going on and then technology that's not meant for an athletic audience how did that eventually kind of get alchemized into something that is useful in sport what we started off doing was i first of all i needed to satisfy my curiosity that you know my reading wasn't totally out of the out of the ordinary and so we did a little pilot study where we just took all the athletes that we knew and we just invited a load of people in and gave them sweat tests and started to build up our own mini data set and then off the back of that we started to to play around with different advice off the back of it because you know data is one thing but what you want to do with the data is like provide something actionable that's impactful for athletes so we were like okay can we take a data point can we then give athletes to change their strategy and see if it has a positive impact and we were doing that and starting to see that certainly with a proportion of the cohort that

we tested we could have a dramatic impact on improving performance or recovery or whatever the thing was and then what really kicked it into high gear was then we started to get invited by professional sports teams a couple of people you know heard what we were doing and one of the very early adopters of this was the england rugby team which is a you know which is a sort of a basically a big deal in the uk it's second the england national rugby team would be second in profile to the england national soccer team and they wanted to get their squad tested and we tested a bunch of players there and we got three or four guys on the high end and then a lot in the middle and some on the low end but what we started to learn with the team sport environment is like a team will want to assess their players to see if they they can learn something and be impactful even if it doesn't materially straight change the strategy of what they do with 90 percent of the players if they can positively influence you know four or five key players who who do turn out to be at the higher end the squad benefit is massive or the team benefit is massive so then we started to dive into okay well let's start consulting with more teams and and doing this because the testing is like a screening process and that the results from that plus any sort of symptomatic stuff that you can collect by talking to athletes who gets cramps you know who suffers in the heat who perceives they've got problems around this then you can you often end up screening and testing a lot of people and finding out that they don't have huge changes to make in what they're doing but the few that you do it's a game changer

right and so that's one of the reasons why i think what you've identified in the way we try to present what we do is that most people if you're if you come at this from a purely if you come at any commercial idea from an entrepreneurial angle you want to maximize the available audience for your products or something like that and sometimes that gets bastardized into we're going to sell this to absolutely everyone that we meet and we'll find a way to make it sound like it's necessary for them what we've always tried to do is try to say look there's probably a group of people at the at the high end for whom this is like for me without putting too fine a point on it like a life-changing thing because if you're serious about your sport and if this is t-boning your athletic career this can change it like a great example of that is um ashton eaton the decathlete you know he had a sweat test with our test center in oregon because he was cramping up in the summer and having all these problems and he has high sweat and sodium losses you know so for him this was like career and game changing this was a huge deal but then for every one of those you get a bunch of people for whom it might make a marginal difference it might help their understanding it might tweak what they're doing and be an incremental improvement and then you accept there's a bunch of people for whom this information is interesting to know but ultimately doesn't result in any meaningful change and so that's how we try and you know view the starting point for what we do is like we got to identify part of our job is to identify who this could be really really useful for and then pursue

working with them supplying them with products or whatever and advice rather than just kind of trying to dish it out to everyone but before we dive too far into who these tests are appropriate for and what they're going to learn from them let's like paint a scene of the mind a little bit for what your test specifically looks like because there's going to be a lot of listeners out there that's like i don't know what you do you collect the sweat off of their skin like you have them pee into a cup and somehow you figure it out that way they could because the the technology that you're using it's not a lot of athletes wouldn't guess that this is how you could collect sweat so so yeah so describe like describe the scene when you bring somebody in for sweat testing and there's a video that's on the precision hydration website that i'll also link in the show notes that uh has some athletes that are that are getting tested but for those of the those are the people out there that are just listening just describe what it looks like so the the sweat test that we perform is actually done at rest which is the thing that catches a lot of people out because you expect you're going to have to exercise to produce sweat and that is the traditional way so normally if you want a sweat test you go to a lab you sit on a bike or you run on a treadmill they collect sweat in absorbent patches from different sites on the body squeeze them out or centrifuge them out run them through whatever analyzer they're using to identify composition and you get a result the test that we do uses a process called a pile of carpine iontophoresis

which is basically a stimulation of the sweat glands in your arm so we put a pair of electrodes on your arm for five minutes we stimulate we put a current through them and that current puts chemical into the skin and that chemical is an analog for acetylcholine which is what causes your sweat glands to produce sweat and then you start sweating in an area which is about the size of a quarter on your arm quite vigorously and we collect that sweat into a little sealed container tube so you just basically you sit there we induce some sweating we collect that sweat and then it gets run through a desktop analyzer so end to end the process takes between you know 10 and 25 minutes depending on your sweat rate and we can then get a good idea of what your sodium concentration looks like because that's the key thing that we're we're interested in and when you get that sodium concentration it's obviously just from the site that you've collected it on when they do sweat sodium testing using absorbent patches i know sometimes they uh they like to run it through an algorithm depending upon where it's collected because different areas of the body can have different sweat sodium concentrations are you also going to that length are you just taking this is where it is on the arm and here's how we're like translating it into a hydration solution yeah it's a good question you they do use regression equations for different body parts the forearm and the calf tend to be the closest off the bat to global whole body

sweat composition we run a we run a small corrective equation on our samples when we put them through but it's it's our own um that's based on our own algorithm because when when we've looked at the other algorithms they've been they were published a few years ago they've been challenged recently because sweat rate changes the the composition of sweat and also what we've tried to increasingly do is take the focus away from the exact number into actually saying well the forearm is a good representation of total body sodium loss it may not be exact but based on all of our data we know from that number whether the reading is low medium high or very high and what we're doing everything that follows is based on categorizing you like that so in that regard we're we're trying to work out if you we're trying if this was a t-shirt we're trying to just figure out if you're a small medium large or extra large because that's the resolution that is helpful to an athlete because we're not you know to give my example which you know as you've pointed out is a relatively extreme one i was i was wearing a small when i needed a double xl you know and so if you if you like need a medium but you've got a large not so much of a problem but but what we're trying to do is get you in the right bucket get you in the right zone that that's a smart analogy so you we already went through one caveat right which is this which are the sites yeah and before we kind of skip to like the end result too much where you're putting people in these

small medium large extra large or double extra large in your case categories there's also another caveat that you that we kind of glossed over that i want to go uh that i want to uh explore just just a little bit more and that is the rate of sweating affects the sweat sodium concentration as well as well so you guys once again to paint the picture you're collecting sweat at rest you're running it through an analyzer which gives you a sweat sodium concentration yeah you're then um i'm gonna somebody somebody in your uh company is gonna yell at me for using this this phrasing but i'm gonna i'm gonna use it i'm gonna use it anyway you guys are fudging that number to a certain extent for whole body sodium sweat yeah and potentially the rate because the rate changes the amount of sweat or or am i not so much because the so the basic principle with sweat rate and sweat sodium composition is that if you take a a sweat sample from a certain part of the body whatever part of the body at a low sweat rate you will probably get a slightly lower sweat sodium reading than if you take this a sample from the same site with a very high sweat rate so there are papers that show that that with an increase in sweat rate you get an increase in sodium loss because per unit of volume so it's not that net net losses go up because you're sweating more or sweating faster but also the concentration goes up and the theory is

that that's to do with the time of reabsorption in the sweat gland so right the sweat gland doesn't have as much capacity to reabsorb as fast the that that's definitely a thing but for me when you get and and for research purposes you've got to get into the weeds of that sort of stuff but on a practical level you know when we test athletes when we do it our way with a electrical chemical stimulation of the sweat glands we get a pretty high sweat rate you know it's it based on all of the testing i've done in exercise and antiphoresis testing there's it's the when we time the time it takes to fill one of these collectors it's often quite similar from antiphoresis stimulation to what it is when you're in a heat chamber exercising really quite hard so the sweat rate is pretty high so we're tending to predict i think a relatively high rate of loss for that person and to be clear as well i think the magnitude of difference between what might be considered high and low like if i sweat slowly and we collect the sweat the composition might drop a few percentage points but it's not going to drop to low you know it's it's that's why i sort of always say to people that that stuff is in the noise it's like it's a thing but it's it's statistically significant but maybe not clinically significant okay so so the take-home message for the listeners here is that you feel that you're at rest procedure for collecting sweat sodium concentration is analogous to what you would see in the field underneath real conditions i

think that's what i'm trying to yes relay here because they're all i i appreciate the way that you mentioned the research the research caveats there are all of these research caveats that if you talk to the the the sweat experts who study this clinically they'll say well you know this is slightly different under this condition and that's slightly different under that condition you're kind of trying to find the best non-invasive way to do this and put people into these big these big is a is a relative word here put these into these put put people in these medium large extra large whatever types of categories from a practical perspective yeah 100 because i came at this this this wasn't any great you know eureka insight this was just the fact that i came at this from a purely practical angle it was just that you need to know as an athlete i believe if you're doing long hot endurance events it's very useful at least to know whether you sweat a low medium high or very high amount of sodium in your sweat whether you then want to drill into like how many milligrams per liter and how many liters or milliliters of sweat and that kind of thing there's a level of detail that that is just unnecessary to make a practical difference it's like saying i'm going to you know mark out this football field and i'm going to measure it you know i'm measuring this by pacing it out in you know a few strides and yards and i'll probably you know make a reasonable size football field the researchers that we often you know work with or come up against they've got they've got a millimeter rule you know and they're going

along and theirs will be way more perfect but will it allow for like a better game of football you know i don't i would i would question that in in practical sense i think both of those things have and that's not i'm not dismissing that that work it's important but it's it often muddies the waters for athletes because it confuses athletes into how important is this stuff yep i'm with you there okay so let's get into the t-shirt sizes to use your analogy the small medium large extra large double extra large because you so you now have this sweat sodium concentration from an athlete yeah and you have solutions products to to fit that once you go run through like the range of what those are and why you picked kind of the levels of sodium that you picked in each one of those products because it's a it's it's not like you're throwing a dart at the dartboard right you just don't make this stuff up there's a reason why there's a reason why they're formulated the way that they are and just to give a little bit of a rant you can probably appreciate this as well it irritates me to no end when i see athletes like deliberately over concentrating or under concentrating the beverages that they're trying to that they're trying to consume especially during ultra marathon it's like that's formulated a specific way intentionally yeah like it's but anyway so what are what are the categories what are the t-shirt t-shirt sizes we so we looked at this and we decided that there's a reason why most sports drinks are

formulated in that kind of zone that you mentioned and we'll call it the sort of like roughly 500 milligrams per liter zone and that's because that's a that's a reasonable level of sodium replacement for people doing you know shorter activities or the or and and also it's compatible with like a good tasting product which is what you know which is a really important factor for a lot of people who make sports drinks well for everyone who makes sports drinks because you're going to make it appealing and and also there's this whole thing where if you're selling sports products into retail and that kind of thing you've got to be a bit careful about sodium levels in there because the general messaging to the public is you know less sodium so if you're going to start sticking no one's going to buy a product in it in there which is high sodium you know that's like that's that's not what people are looking for in in the on the day-to-day shows so we looked at it but we thought right if the if at the lower end we're looking at five five hundred or so milligrams is kind of a standard one then we we felt that we needed a product in that zone to cater for an alternative just one of our alternatives for people that have normal or low sweat sodium losses the thousand milligram product which is our sort of mid to high or medium high product was was designed to then cater for this this uncatered market which was the people who have higher sweat sodium losses and people who are doing longer activities so the people for whom the the standard sports drink is a little bit on the it's a little bit undergunned

for them and then the we the 1500 we wanted to go relatively as high as we could go without causing something which tasted awful and upsets people's stomachs and gave gave people like me who have a who have really high losses or doing really hot sweaty activities over long periods the highest sort of comfortably universally tolerable level of sodium and so we we experimented around that and slightly above that and settled on those kind of three as nice round numbers a nice kind of understandable system so we call the products 500,000 1500 and then we thought about going higher to do like because i know some of the other companies have done sort of specific pre-hydration products which are really strong like 3600 milligrams per liter and that and i played around with those a lot because i thought they would be really good for me but i found that the trade-off of going significantly above 1500 milligrams a liter was a high risk of you know stomach upset gi upset diarrhea those kind of things and we felt that we would we would stop there because there are a couple of papers that have shown you for instance those products designed for pre-loading before activity but there's there's some studies that have been shown that actually 1500 milligrams a liter is a pretty good preload with the caveat that it's also that that level at which almost everyone can tolerate it without significant gi distress so that was where we landed

and and you know then it was a bit of you know test and adjustment of formulation like what kind of compounds do we use to make them taste better so we so we settled on sodium carbonate so then citrate citrate that kind of stuff rather than lots of sodium chloride because you put 1500 milligrams of sodium via sodium chloride in a drink and it tastes like seawater so you know you have a bit of a problem okay so you're still screwed though right because you've got 2000 milligrams per liter coming out of your sweat and you make a product for 1500 milligrams per liter so do you like personally i'm just trying to like create a personal anecdote here do you make up for that with tablets or uh other sports nutrition products when you're going out there well i think the interesting thing is for anything other than you know really long and and higher intensity activities like for like replacement isn't usually the aim or shouldn't be the aim you know so for me 1500 milligrams per liter is adequate to replace the lion's share of what i'm losing and therefore maintain performance so what i what you also tend to acknowledge as well is that people don't use these products in a vacuum you know they'll use them with gels that have a bit of sodium in an ultra marathon you'll probably eating real foods which contain some sodium and stuff as well so i think that's the other danger of going very high on really high on sodium in drinks alone is that you fail to adequately compensate for all the other sources of sodium that are coming into you into your mix in terms of nutrition

but we do we do have one or two athletes we had one very memorable guy who had sweat sodium losses of nearly 3000 milligrams a liter and we had him using the 1500 with salt capsules as well you know sweat salt capsules and taking probably what was closer to 2000 to 2500 with every liter and that got him round out ironman florida when the previous three attempts had seen him in the medical tent or in the hospital every time yeah the like for like replacement um has been a little bit of a fascination of mine recently i mean i think you've heard the podcast that it did with uh stavros kovaros yes and there's another one that hasn't it'll be out by the time this podcast is released but it's not out at the time that we're recording now that i did with alan mccubbin yeah out of australia and he and i we discussed this this concept uh as well of okay if you know you're losing a thousand milligrams per liter a thousand milligrams per hour however you want to however you want to define the rate should you actually replace that much a like for like type of replacement and the consensus was like we don't know like we don't know if you need to replace 100 of that or 80 of that or there's some people that'll say you don't really need to replace any of it because you have enough body reserves um but i think in ultra marathon which is going to be our our audience it's you'd be well served to replace the vast

majority agreed yeah i would say that's that's a sensible aim and that's why having a handle on the numbers and you know just sort of trying to figure that out you the great thing is when when i work with and i get to work nowadays with a lot of like really elite athletes who are doing very well and what with the first thing we do with those people is like rather than try and reinvent the wheel with their nutrition and hydration strategy is analyze and break down exactly what they're doing yeah and the outcomes it's having and you often find that that they've they've trial and errored their way to figuring these things out and that what they use is a combination of hard one experience they might know their numbers a little bit but they sort of they certainly can tell you what they take and you can work out what's in it and then when you compare that to what their measured losses are they use a combination of that of that prior planning but also a lot of testing and adjusting on the fly you know it's like they'll be able to tell you when i feel x y or z when my muscles start to feel tight or i start to feel twitchy then i know i'm low on sodium or high on fluid and i change the ratio i take some extra salt or when salt tastes good i'm taking that versus when plain water tastes good and i'm kind of because we've all had those feelings you know when you you drink an electrolyte drink it tastes like garbage because actually what you're craving is good old plain water because probably what's happening there is you're becoming hypernatremic because you you've lost a lot of you've lost a lot of fluid and maybe taken a bit too much salt so i think that for me i do

get asked this quite a lot and it is hard to generalize but if people say how much should i aim to replace i would say you know if you want if you want a ballpark to shoot in like between 50 and 75 percent of losses throughout the duration of an event is often is often good much below that or much above that you you may stray into problems but you know so if you want to if people want an idea of where to start looking i think you've got to replace more than half but not as not as much as 100 yeah a little bit of it is duration dependent too like i mean if you're going out for a two-hour marathon you could be at 50 or maybe even less but if you're talking about you know the badwater ultramarathon is going to happen in the next few weeks here they're exposed to 120 degree temperatures for you know 20 hours of the race or something like that 10 hours of the race you could make the case that that you need to err on the upper end of that percentage versus the lower end of that percentage simply because of the duration and the total and the total rate but i think the point the point that the listeners can kind of take away from this is to get in the ballpark first versus trying to trying to split the hair too finely on well you know i'm a 627.5 milligrams per liter person and you know this person is a you know 613 milligram per liter person that that those are the same people

at that yeah exactly and i think what's really important to mention at this point is the interplay between you know we talked about sweat rate and sodium but what the what we try to do in our in our algorithms in the way that we take the data is you need to take into consideration someone's general sweat rate and sweat rates obviously very variable between individuals but also within an individual in different environments and their sweat sodium concentration so we might advise someone with a very high sweat sodium concentration who has a very low sweat rate to take a weaker a small amount of a smaller amount of a weaker product than someone who's got an average sweat sodium concentration but an incredibly high sweat rate because you're you're you're ultimately what you're trying to sort of work out with people is is net losses over the duration of time or whatever it's not it's not always as simple as like you know like or concentration replacement per the concentration of your sweat if you've because the the third factor that comes into play is absorption rates and absorption capacity because if you're like for me if i can i can sweat two two and a half liters per hour quite comfortably but i can probably not absorb much more than one to 1.2 liters per hour so sometimes i need to up the sodium content a little bit more aggressively in order to retain as much of that fluid as possible and kind of make it work harder because you can't keep going north with the fluid right right um

i want to get into a little bit of this pre-loading strategy that you mentioned but but but before we do that you know you mentioned that there are all of these different ways that sweat sodium rate uh can change within an individual and one of them is just through normal heat acclimation summer's coming around we just off air we were talking about how you know nice the weather there is in the uk and people are flocking to the beaches and things like that is that something that when you've been working with an individual athlete on their hydration plan and they go through a heat acclimation protocol yeah do you see the need to change their hydration plan like after going through that protocol either because they're sweating more or their sweat sodium concentration has changed so much that you need to tweak it out a little bit i've i've done quite a bit of that testing because we've we became interested in it because the the literature suggests that you know you see a dilution of sweat with heat acclimation but a lot of those studies when you when you read them were performed on military service personnel or less you know people who weren't well-trained athletes and they were reporting up to 25-30% reductions in sweat sodium concentration sometimes that was accompanied with a moderation of sodium in the diet as well and what we see with athletes if you give athletes free reign on their diet if you take them and train them even in relatively extreme conditions you i've never seen a

particularly dramatic sweat sodium reduction in an individual you know not over a sort of like two three four week period i don't i can't speak for the like if you go and live somewhere different although what we have done is we've tested we tested a lot of nfl players in um in green bay with the packers and a couple of them got traded to miami to the dolphins and we ended up sweat testing them there as well and even after you know a year of being in those conditions and training in those conditions we got very similar sweat sodium numbers so my one of my personal theories on that is that with athletes who complete a high level of training anyway we're already partly acclimated and you know to the heat a lot of the time already from general training load so i think the the variation in sweat sodium as a particular metric with with heat acclimatization has less room to move than it does with with less well-trained people so i don't if if we measured it twice and saw a significant drop then we would um then maybe there might be a case for making some adaptations but we just did this with um a couple of riders at the sunweb pro cycling team because their nutritionist was was interested in that very question and they did a big heat heat training camp earlier this year in australia and they were convinced they said to me we're going to see you know want to see how much these sweat sodium levels drop and and i wrote them an email i said look i think you'll be disappointed i think you won't see much shift in these people but let's see and true to form you know they saw five eight percent reduction in sweat

sodium concentration but when you when you work that out in terms of order of magnitude over a five hour ride or whatever it's like negligible yeah what about diet back to adam's uh anecdote where he was trying to manipulate your tests by drinking the copious amount of uh copious amount of sodium from one test to the other within i think the time frame was like two hours or something a couple of hours yeah i think so at the extremes you can see some level of manipulation of sweat sodium with extreme changes in diet so the again the very old literature where people completely sodium depleted through very extreme conditions they went into a house locked themselves away boiled their food sweated after a few days they saw reductions in sweat sodium levels because they depleted their body so severely of sodium but interestingly what they saw initially is within a few hours of stopping sodium consumption you see almost the you see a complete reduction in sodium loss in urine but sweat is laggy it takes a few days to catch up and that's only at the extremes i think what we'd have found we weren't able to do this but what i said to adam at the time was you know if we tested your urine like three hours after you've done this incredibly strong so we'd see like a massive dumping of sodium because your kidneys are going to control for for dietary intake predominantly but it's not going to have an effect downstream on your sweat not until you get to the real ridiculous extremes so for free living people who who consume a reasonable amount of sodium whether it's like even relatively high or relatively

low i don't think that that has a meaningful effect on sweat sodium because the primary regulatory mechanism in the body is the kidneys right so is it a is it a fair statement to say that in trained athletes athletes that have been training for years they have a high training load they're you know not change they're not changing their training or anything like that the genetics is the driving factor of their sweat sodium concentration yeah we can move it a little bit over here if we manipulate things to the extreme variable if they underneath they undergo a heat acclimation protocol maybe it changes by five or ten percent or something like that the price is is the primary driving factor genetics that that would be my assessment from what from all my personal experience plus what i've read the i think so because the there's been some interesting biopsy studies where they've looked at sweat gland function in particularly in cystic fibrosis patients and people without cf but people who have high salt loss in their sweat and they see like you know reductions in cftr channels which are the bits that are around the sweat gland that reabsorb sodium so basically the assumption is that you know you have less functional and less availability for reabsorption of sodium at the sweat gland and that leads to higher sweat sodium losses and so the genetics takes care of the lion's share of intra-individual difference and everything else is like tweaking so precision hydration so so for that i'm not gonna i'm not trying to put you out of business or anything but with that maybe precision hydration 2.0 is not a sweat test it's

just a genetics test like you can get anywhere now you spit into a tube or swab your cheek and send it off and you find whatever you know genetics is correlated with it and there you go could it could actually be i think the interim step for us which we are working on pretty heavily is is wearable tech you know so so like some something that measures sweat in real time and and actually gives more of a an up-to-date reading because that's going to answer a ton of questions about like how does because we don't know how someone's sweat sodium concentration changes like five hours into a 10 hour ultra or something and that's i've done tests on people during events and during training sessions like tested before during after that kind of thing and seeing it's been relatively stable but that doesn't mean we know we don't know enough yet so that's the next phase i think that that's fascinating because of just what i've seen play out in ultra marathons um it's just such a complicated thing to study because i mean how many research subjects can you get to run on a treadmill for 10 hours or something like that like it just becomes limiting just from the logistics piece of it um let's go back to the sodium loading piece yeah um because i originally when the world championships in doha happened and then the olympics in tokyo looked like before they changed the venues for the racewalk and for the marathon those two those two venues were going to be hot doha was super hot they got a lot of criticism for how

hot it was and originally the marathon and the racewalking venues for the tokyo 2020 olympics now 2021 olympics which is just weird to say um was supposed to be hot as well before they changed the venue and i think a lot of the ngbs and the sports scientists that work with the teams were kind of like gearing up for their like hydration and heat acclimation strategies and things like that and it looked like there were some there were going to be some novel strategies emerge yeah and one of them was going to be menthol which is you know you just start chewing on hall's cough drops or a fisherman's friend or something like that we're not going to talk about that but i think it's neat um but the other two in terms of in in terms of um sodium loading or uh hyperhydration pre-event are using a high a high sodium concentration drink or glycerol and kind of where your wheelhouse is is the high sodium concentration drink and you're using the 1500 milligram version 1500 milligrams per liter version of your product to do that our experience with that and using it kind of commercially at our camps we've used um osmos preload product which is i think it's three and a half grams per liter yeah it's about it's yeah it is 3600 i think yeah so so over double what that is and personally i've also used the scratch hyperhydrations and i think we've used that at our camps a couple of times but it for the normal athletes that are

going out there they're training their butts off at camp at these camps where they're you know doubling or tripling their volume and normally it's a summer camp so it's super hot for over half of them it kind of ends up being a game changer yeah because they can just tolerate the heat a whole lot better now we haven't run into the gi distress that you mentioned earlier and i wanted to dig a little bit more into that like is that something that you commonly find when you put people on these like hyperhydration solutions that they just can't tolerate it for whatever reason yeah i've seen that more more pre-race because i think when you get into pre-race situation people are people are more nervous you know you've got you've got all sorts of like weird mess up of your sympathetic parasympathetic system and yeah you've you've you've tapered your training down you're already relatively well loaded on most things or you should be so it's different because i've drunk um i've drunk a whole liter of like the the really strong there's some of those really strong products when i've come in from a super hot run and it's like when your body needs that stuff when it's receptive to it when you've physiologically primed that it's going to help you can absorb it like you know like that it's fantastic so maybe in a heavy training load scenario we've we've been cautious by going to 1500 now yeah there are a lot of athletes that i work with and i do it myself on occasion is i'll mix that because you talked about people like over mix or mixing things strong i'll mix mine a little bit stronger based on personal

experience for preload only i don't tend to do it when i'm exercising and and honestly we it's one of the things which is a bit of a it creates a bit of tension our end because in the one hand we want to individualize and we want to tell people if you need it a bit stronger go a bit stronger but we also want to get we want to we want to make sure that people are conservative because we'd rather that you kind of preload a little bit less effectively but definitely didn't have gi distress because that can be horrifically bad and really spoil your race so the theory behind those is all the same though and essentially obviously any sodium the extra sodium load pulls more fluid into your bloodstream increase your plasma volume and i think that if i was you know working with athletes for doha i've been working with a couple for tokyo we're going to try a lot of times in training and small races and stuff going basically going as strong as you can go but it's just a little bit individual yeah when we so when we uh kind of first introduce that to athletes at our camps a lot of the times we'll cut it in half so it ends up being 17 1800 milligrams per liter or something like that and part part of that is just to like be a little bit conservative on the sodium dump that we're giving them so they don't experience those that that gi uh that gi distress uh but a little up a lot of it to be honest with you is just the taste i mean they're not the greatest tasting beverages out there you do have to like you know pinch your nose and chug them down like a little bit

better cold i don't have a problem with them because i just chug it all in a couple of seconds but but anyway i i found it i found it interesting that you're using or that you would also advocate for that 1500 milligram as a potential solution for the hyperhydration and then we also have this experience where we were at times we've like cut those traditional hyperhydration beverages in half which ends up being kind of the same concentration yeah as i say i think that's the lowest that's the lowest concentration that seems to be reliably effective and kind of in the zone for being the highest that's universally tolerable but definitely it's one of the few areas where we would encourage athletes to maybe play around a bit stronger but that's always just a dangerous game to get in with athletes because if you say more a little more is a little better you'll always find someone who do five times more yep yeah ultra ultra runners are notorious for that if one is good two is better and 10 is the best exactly well endurance athletes i mean you grew up iron man stuff there they're pretty notorious for that as well um okay so how what athletes are candidates to get this stuff done because there's a lot of people out there that are going to go you know what i've just i do you know i drink this drink and it works for me and you know i don't have any issues and blah blah blah but there are other athletes out there that either want to tinker with optimizing their hydration or optimizing their sodium intake or have the experience like you have where for whatever reason they're at the edges of the bell curve in the in the most of the most of the mass commercially available products

just kind of aren't meeting their needs how does it how does an athlete kind of like fit like figure that out like figure out the step that hey this is a viable test for me to get i think i think that the the the first obvious ones are people that feel they have very high sweat rates or experience severe problems in the heat particularly especially if they they see visible salt marks or get cramps or have any of those symptoms where if there's a big disconnect between your performance in cooler more temperate conditions where you could feel like you can perform at the level of your fitness ability and you feel that heat puts an unnatural dampener on your performance so we i'll give you an example of a we we work with a pro tour cyclist who has won classics and kind of you know belgian races and big time stuff in the in the colder months who is consistently massively underperformed in the summer in the heat and when we tested him his sweat sodium level was like 16 1700 milligrams per liter things started to come together and for him it was it was it was the test he was looking for even though he didn't know he was looking for it because because of that simple factor he was like underperforming massively in the heat so that that's a big sign like i said i mentioned cramping because although cramping is a whole nother controversial topic on its own but there's there's no smoke without fire in my in my view there and there's a significant correlation and a lot of anecdotal reports you know of people who do

who experience cramping along with electrolyte disturbance so if you kind of a chronic cramper this could be a place to go looking and i think if you just have a very very high sweat rate because although that doesn't necessarily indicate a high sweat sodium concentration when we've when we've worked with athletes that do really well in hot conditions routinely quite often they're not always the ones with the kind of they're certainly not the ones with the heavier sodium losses often but they're also often not the ones with the highest sweat rates because although you need a level of sweat rate for cooling beyond a certain point that becomes a disadvantage so if you're if you're you know disadvantaged by your sweat rate then it can be a useful part of an investigation the other the other group of people for whom it's really useful and we see a lot of these in the uk is okay i'm doing i live in a cool climate and i'm paying a ton of money to go off and do a race in a hot climate and i've not got an opportunity to go and do loads of acclimation camps and this sort of stuff it's like well we better kind of triage that so the marathon day sables is a is a big one for us we get a lot of people who are relatively for whatever reason relatively novice ultra runners who decide hey this looks like a nice week's holiday in the desert you know and they go and do mds and we do a lot of sweat tests before them in the uk before they go because we can sometimes flag people it's like actually you're going to really have to pay attention to electrolytes here because you're on the heavy end of losses so so that's probably another group and then the final group would be people who are serious

and transitioning from short distance races to very long races so you if you're jumping if you've been like a marathon runner or a half marathon runner and you're jumping straight in there at the 100 miles or the you know the 100k type thing if you're not it it can potentially be helpful for those people because it helps shortcut the experience that they're going to build up through not going and failing in one of those because they didn't understand this so yeah the the length the length allows for less opportunity of error yes yeah basically yeah um when so when you have people you get this big data set now you said 10 000 athletes how do they generally get how are they generally stratified between your 500 milligram product or 1000 milligram product and your 1500 milligram product that would depend i don't i wouldn't be able to give you an honest breakdown of that data because what i've seen to date has been the the data on the sweat sodium concentration not the sweat sodium concentration plus the sweat rates so that would influence the product recommendation right what i can tell you though that is not particularly you know sensitive in terms of commercial information or anything is that the 1000 milligram product and the 1500 milligram product sell a lot more in our range than the 500 milligram one okay and it could be a ton of reasons for that but but i think that for for most people if when we're recommending something off the bat which we don't like to do but with very little information if we have to make a recommendation to someone the 1000 milligram product is a relatively good

catch-all because it's it's a bit stronger than average and if you're doing long and hot stuff you know a little bit more electrolyte it's probably less harmful than taking way less than you need and so it's the 1000 milligram strength is probably the the biggest you know component but that might also be because it's it's also slightly differentiated from the rest of the market yeah because you've got a ton of choices if you want a weak sports drink you just you know go to 7-11 yeah and that's what i would guess because your 500 milligram product as we've mentioned earlier that's in the range of everything else that's it's there's no product differentiation at that at that at that point there is at a thousand like i can't think of a commercial product that's out there that's i mean i guess scratch labs would be the closer to that they're like 800 milligrams or about 700 i think yeah so noon and i think noon is maybe about that as well seven yeah but anyway i mean that that's where your product differentiation is is in the in kind of in those upper ranges so that um well that totally makes sense to me and i'm i'm as a take-home message for the listeners i'm completely on board with slightly overshooting what you think you need versus undershooting because your body has compensatory mechanisms to kick out excess and in particular with a really long ultra marathon the error of being hyponatremic is the thing that you want to avoid the most so taking in too little sodium throughout the course of that big long

ultra marathon is that's that that's the thing that you want to avoid the most yeah i'd agree with that and i i listened to your your podcast with stavros you know where he talked about the the spartathon in greece and one of the most interesting things in that was that 10 of the starters turned up hyponatremic i know right because because they presumably because they'd over drunk yeah in the in the days leading up and that's a classic one that we see and that's where the education around the pre-loading and not neglecting sodium intake and also just as importantly not overdoing fluid intake in the in the days probably we it harks back to something we did years ago when we did a little pilot study in our lab and we told people they're going to come in for a heat chamber session we're going to draw some blood and just turn up turn up well hydrated yeah and like 50 of the it was only eight participants but 50 of them were hyponatremic you know it's hilarious and then so then we rewrote the protocols it's like okay if you tell people to turn up well hydrated what they're going to do is turn up hyponatremic yeah it's hilarious how that happens time and time again in nutrition studies it's the same thing with just general nutrition tracking like you know when people go they're going to like log what they eat for three days or whatever they're going to under consume calories compared to you know nobody's watching them essentially um okay so we've got this situation now right people are listening to this podcast and they're like okay maybe i fit in one of these categories that andy mentioned earlier you have this test yeah that it requires a pretty sophisticated piece of equipment to operate in this thing it's i mean it's the size of a small suitcase yeah sits on

a desktop you know it's not like you know they're sitting at every 7-eleven or anything like that how do athletes go about actually getting the test done if they think they need to get it done we've on our website we've got a find a test center page which is kind of in the footer of the thing and if but if people want to shortcut the process the easiest thing to do is email us which is hello precisionhydration.com tell us where you're based and we can direct you to the nearest center where there's a precision hydration sweat test and we have a number i think we have like 30 or so across the us now we have them in australia we have enough we have lots in the uk obviously where we are and we'll always endeavor to kind of hook you up with someone who can do a test and if you can't do a full test on our website is a link to an online test which is like a questionnaire based test which is you know not nowhere well it's i wouldn't say nowhere near as good as a full test it's better than doing nothing and it's it's based on it's based on a lot of questions that we've developed and refined over the years that tend to point towards whether you're more likely to have a you know low medium or high requirement for electrolytes and then it'll recommend some strategies and that's free to do people just you know click click the button and try that and do it in two minutes have you guys taken any steps to like validate that questionnaire versus what people actually come up with in an actual sweat test yeah in in one of the in one of the papers that we published a couple of years ago we looked at the questions that we'd asked the athletes before they

were tested and we actually then compared in that case one particular question you know how much salt do you think you lose in your sweat low medium high or very high amount and we found that there was a strong correlation between this was with professional athletes it needs pointing out but these professional athletes were able to a lot of there was a good correlation between them saying they had a high or very high sweat sodium loss and as actually finding that in a measurement so a questionnaire is never going to be perfect and we wouldn't pretend that it is but it's it's a good pointer in the right direction and actually recently one of the things that we've we've done because we've all been you know when we're recording this we've all been you know kind of at home and locked down or in various states of house arrest for for a few months we've been doing a lot of video calls with athletes and that's a service that we're going to continue and it's totally free you know people can hit the website email hello at precisionhydration.com or whatsapp us through the website and we can set up a free 15 20 minute video consult with you to kind of take your online test results and then talk you through it in a bit more detail and answer some specific questions the testing centers that you guys have set up are those your like that is that your equipment that you've just sent around and they're just sitting somewhere are they are they affiliates like how does that work test test centers generally tend to purchase the equipment from us along with training on how to use it and they use our software to generate test reports and we we work with they're kind of like partners and trusted people that we've we've met and work with over over the years yeah so it's a

combination of like we have them in a lot of like sports science clinics and we have them with some medics we have them with even in some like bike fit places specialist running stores that kind of thing that's a that's a i'm surprised that that that broad uh that broad spread distribution of 30 locations around the us like that's that's a lot for a company you guys size yeah i think it's just it been you know it's just grown steadily we've been at this for 10 years now and you know we've just gotten around a bit spoken to people and you know people get interested in this especially i think nowadays when the idea of customization of everything is is the thing isn't it when i started riding bikes you know however many years ago you just set your bike up yourself and some guy at the bike shop like looked at you and was like yeah we'll do this do that now it's all computerized it's personalized you have your right cleats you have your right inner souls everything is optimized and there's an individualized and and i think people like this this idea quite rightly that you know nutrition hydration that's the next thing to individualize so what's after that we mentioned like some of the genetic testing or potentially some of the wearables is that what eventually is going to come down the line like people are wearing a wearable and it's literally telling them you need to take product x over the course of the next hour or something like that what's next i i think it will go in that it will go in that general direction what i would hope is more realistic is that we'll have like wearable type

technology where athletes can go and simulate things or take collect data in races and then we can use kind of big data so data on there because we can measure a lot of stuff with athletes now in real time so you can measure heart rate you can measure speed pace elevation or humidity temperature if we can measure sweat rate sodium loss performance all of those things we can run that in you know in ai and that kind of thing to start to look at trends and what can we i think that we'll start to see trends one of the theories with the sweat composition thing you see is that as your plasma volume decreases and becomes more concentrated electrolyte levels are effectively rising in your plasma and is that reflected in your sweat sodium or sweat metabolites so can you kind of detect dehydration a little bit earlier and that's the type of thing that i think realistically come about i also think linking it with pacing core body temperature sensing those kind of things are all becoming a lot closer to being accessible to athletes at all times and so you you will have a lot more yeah a lot more data that will include sweat metrics coming through your your watch coming through your phone and i think there will be companies the way it's simply you're sweating this you need to drink why you know what we want to do is be a bit more real world than that and you know it might suggest that at times you need to drink certain things but more realistically it's like well how does this you know competing in an endurance event is a very complex interaction of lots of factors and you know you want to you want

to get information from the body to the person or if it's in a tour de france to the team car to then allow tactical decisions pacing decisions and whatever else so i'm i'm quite excited about sort of getting involved in in that as it as it transpires you know yeah the the wearable area is going to be cool to see where it goes because i almost kind of feel like there's going to be this line that eventually gets crossed where we're collecting things not too many things but too many things that too granular of a detail yeah right that's and and going back to you guys's solution to having a small medium and large fit for sodium it's collecting that granular and for collecting that granular of information can sometimes just be overkill but who knows if we get to that stage or not and i think that's part of the the clever bit is going to be maybe you're collecting the data in a really granular way but how do you present that right exactly you know and how do you present it to the coach and i would see maybe certainly in the early iterations i would see it more useful in planning and debriefing than in on the fly changes yeah 100 all right we're going to leave it there see what the future holds maybe by the time this podcast comes out somebody will have a wearable that collects sweat sodium concentration and you guys will be like the first adopters and be able to integrate it into your business um before we let you go where can people find more about you and about precision hydration and what you

guys do um precisionhydration.com is definitely the best place and feel free to email us hello at precisionhydration.com and we we love talking to athletes genuinely so get it get in touch and we're a small team there's 10 of us in ph so you talk to a real human and yeah that's that's the best place to find us awesome appreciate your time andy appreciate your knowledge and keep doing what you do in the space i uh i mentioned from the from the onset of this podcast and i also mentioned in the intro that i i appreciate the solution that you're bringing to this problem because it balances the correct amount of scientific vigor that you can put into the problem with the practicality of athletes actually exercising and working out and racing in the field and whenever i whenever i can encounter practitioners and sports scientists and coaches that can blend those two i'm always very i'm always very appreciative of it and i think you guys do that really well no thank you and we we we really appreciate the opportunity to come and come and chat to you on this because you have a great you have a great podcast that we're all listening to in the office now and yeah it's cool to be on it awesome awesome appreciate it and there we have it folks that was chock full a lot of good information i definitely learned a lot throughout the course of that conversation with andy andy appreciate you a ton we will definitely

connect once you can fly back over to the us and we can get some running in along the way appreciate all the listeners out there thank you for tuning into this podcast if you are so inclined give this podcast a like or review on apple podcast or you can share it with your friends the community that we have built here with the KoopCast it's a really good one i have been quite impressed and very humbled with the feedback that i have received both personally and through social media outlets so thank you all for listening appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you and we will see you out on the trails