263 | Electrolytes: Worth It Or Hype

Your water bottle might be working against you—or it might be the missing link. We unpack how sodium, potassium, and magnesium actually drive hydration, muscle contraction, and nerve function, then map those fundamentals to real training lives: long runs, hot studios, desert heat, and the everyday desk-to-gym grind. No fluff, no extremes—just a clear path to smarter hydration.

We start with the physiology and a high-heat deployment story that shows why plain water can leave you woozy when sweat pours. From there, we pressure-test popular sports drinks, zero-sugar blends, and high-sodium packets against what your body really needs. You’ll learn when electrolytes improve performance, how to spot overhyped formulas, and why dose and context matter more than brand. We also tackle blood pressure worries with nuance, showing how both too little and too much sodium can backfire and how to use a simple home cuff to personalize your intake.

If you train longer than 45 to 60 minutes, sweat heavily, or eat low-carb, you’ll hear practical ways to benefit—like a DIY salty lemonade with adjustable sodium and optional coconut water for potassium, plus separate magnesium for cramps and recovery. If your workouts are short and your meals balanced, you’ll learn why water and salting food may be enough. By the end, you’ll have a simple framework for choosing, dosing, and timing electrolytes without overspending or overdoing it.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Trendy Or Useful? Setting The Stage
• 1:47 What Electrolytes Do In Your Body
• 2:56 Extreme Heat And Deployment Story
• 4:50 Water Alone And Overhydration Risks
• 6:47 Sports Drinks And Label Reality
• 8:36 Who Benefits And When It Helps
• 10:44 Salt, Blood Pressure, And Personal Data
• 13:12 DIY Salty Lemonade Approach

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Electrolytes, are they actually worth it? Or just expensive flavored water? Okay, so electrolytes have been quite trendy. I think there's been a lot of fitness trends, and if you're not maybe super involved in the health and fitness space, you may not realize this. Um, but I think there's been a couple things that have come into play. Things like running, um, running marathons, ultra marathons, the highrox training, that has become popular recently. So, with that, I believe uh education around electrolytes because you are sweating for longer durations, so replenishing your electrolytes not only with just water, but the nutrients and the minerals like sodium, potassium, and magnesium is important. So these are important, but as with everything, there comes a little nuance because I don't know if you saw, but there's also a couple news stories about people drinking too many electrolytes to the point where they get hospitalized because they were taking too much and they didn't need it. So I'm going to educate you today to see if, based on your current, you know, lifestyle and fitness regimen, if supplementing with electrolytes is worth it for you, um, or if you can skip it. Alright, so let's get started. So, like I said, electrolytes, what are they? They're basically just minerals like sodium, potassium, and magnesium that keep your body balanced. They help regulate hydration, nerve function, and muscle contraction. And let me give you um an example on the extreme end of the spectrum for people who would need electrolytes. This is a personal story from my husband. So we kind of heard the one end where the this woman, I remember specifically, I don't remember the actual details, but this woman was drinking electrolytes like as her only form of drink, and she ended up being hospitalized because she had like too many electrolytes in her system and it was dangerous. But on the other end of the spectrum, for people who need it, so when my husband was deployed to the Middle East, it was over 120 degrees in the desert where he was at, and they had to wear, you know, full gear. Uh they're made of this thick canvas, not super breathable. You're wearing a helmet, you're carrying all this stuff, and you're walking around in that heat. And the water they had over there was actually not plain water because if you just drank plain water, your body flushes everything out, right? When you drink water, you're you pee, it helps you flush out excess salt and minerals, um, well, and it flushes out all your electrolytes. So if you're not replenishing them, you actually get more dehydrated from drinking too much plain water, um, and it can make you feel like crap. So that can actually be something because there is that trend of um, you know, drink water, drink water, drink water. And I feel like we were drinking like a lot of water there for a little bit, but we weren't thinking, like, are we peeing out too much of our electrolytes? Um, but, anyways, back to my husband, he uh all the water bottles they had, they had this uh electrolyte solution in it. He said it did not taste that great, but whatever they put in there, they did it because you're sweating so much that it just it kept you at bay, it kept you from not passing out, it replenished your electrolytes, replenished your fluids. Um, and a very simple form. This is kind of why you see like the Gatorade ads, you know. And Gatorade actually, compared to a lot of um electrolyte blends nowadays, is not that great. When I look at the back, it's uh you know, very minimal salt and very minimal sugar. And if you get the sugar free, you're not even getting the sugar, which again, this will also depend on your individual needs. There's different blends of electrolytes. So if you did want some sort of electrolytes, you can actually get it based on your needs. I'm going to drop some of those things here in a second. So let's kind of go into the pros of electrolytes, okay? Because I listed some pros here. So they can help if you're sweating a lot. So we kind of covered this a bit. So if you're somebody who is a big sweater, um, you know, you're going to be running a lot, doing longer-term exercise. Um, usually, if you're exercising over like 45 minutes to an hour and you're sweating a lot, it could probably benefit like regularly to do a little bit more electrolytes. Also, it can be a one-off thing if you're a little bit sweatier that day and you want to just get that boost of a little bit of electrolytes, that could help as well. You don't have to drink it and consume them every single day. Um, I know for me personally, I was actually worried with electrolytes because you know, you always hear, oh my god, a lot of sodium is going to make your blood pressure higher. And that was one of the big concerns for me with electrolytes because I always I have normal blood pressure, but I think I get white coat syndrome and I'm always like borderline. And I was like, oh man, if I have extra salt, like my my heart rate's gonna go up even higher. Well, me, I I am a big sweater when I work out, and I'm teaching at least three to four classes a week. I'm always dripping sweat on top of my own workouts, so I was like, okay, and and also my diet, which is something else you can think of, I don't add a lot of salt to my diet. I I eat, you know, healthy foods. Of course, I go out to eat once or twice a week, and that probably has a buttload of sodium in it. Um, but for the most part, my sodium intake is low. And laugh at me if you want. But what I did was I actually chatted with Chat GPT and I said, This is what I eat every day, and feel free to do this yourself. This is kind of what I eat. Here, here's the general foods I eat. How much sodium am I intaking? And this is my activity level and my height and weight and everything. And again, take with a grain of salt, no pun intended, because you know, chat GPT can be wrong, you gotta fact-check it. But it did break down how much sodium I was taking in, and it said for me with my thyroid, which again I fact-checked all this. Um, you do tend to need a little bit more sodium if you have thyroid issues, and and due to me sweating more, moving more, not salting my food intentionally, I could uh benefit to consume more salt. And there actually is more research out there saying that if you under consume salt, that can also raise your blood pressure. So you gotta kind of find this sweet spot. Now, if you're somebody who has pre-existing conditions, you know, you're prone to high blood pressure, um, any heart issues or things like that where you do need to limit your salt intake, then yes, follow those guidelines, follow your doctor's advice. But some people, it could be the reverse where you need a little bit more. Um, so me personally, what I started doing, I'm gonna share my little salty lemonade concoction because here's my individual story that maybe you can relate to is when I see the big brands like Element, um, liquid IV, they have crazy amounts of sodium. I think they have like a thousand milligrams, maybe a little bit more. I felt like I didn't quite need that much. So, what I do is I take a true lemon lemonade packet. It's 10 calories, uh, one gram of sugar, no salt. It just tastes like lemonade. I put that in my water, and then I take a fourth of a teaspoon of salt. It took me a while to get up to that. I've been using a little bit of a pinch. Then I found the fourth of a teaspoon, which is about 500 milligrams of salt. So definitely more reasonable. And I mean, if you use element or something, you could technically just use half the packet. I just like it simple. I liked the salty lemonade. Um, something else that I did that's really cool. I haven't shared these yet, but I think it's McCormick. They came out with these finishing salts that I love. So that I also do this too. I have a brown sugar one, or brown butter sugar, or salt, whatever, and then I have a watermelon lime one. And you're supposed to literally just sprinkle it on top of like food or whatever. So when I have my pancakes in the morning, I put brown butter salt on it, and then the watermelon lime salt, sometimes I'll use that as my fourth of a teaspoon in my lemon water for a nice little like lemon watermelon lime twist. And it's so good. I love it. Um, and what I did, I've been doing it for a couple months now. Uh, I feel good, I feel energized, I have good energy. I got my blood work taken at the doctor's office, it's still normal. I have an at-home blood pressure cuff. My my blood pressure has not changed, so my little experiment worked. So that's something that you could do as well. Maybe monitor your blood pressure. Um, you can get a cuff really cheap off Amazon, or if your local like pharmacy or grocery store has it, you can check it out there and see where it's at. Start adding the salt in regularly after you know six to eight weeks or so. Take your blood pressure again. Is it still the same? Then you're probably okay. And and the goal here too is to make sure you're hydrating enough with water as well. Because remember that one woman who was just like straight electrolytes, like in the hospital, right? We want to we want to balance it with a lot of water. Um, you know, maybe just your first drink of the day should have a little bit of electrolytes in it, and then the rest could be plain water, right? So just some things to think about there. That's my personal experience with it. Um, some other pros to electrolytes is it could be useful if you have a low-carb keto diet since your body flushes sodium more quickly, and it can actually reduce muscle cramps or fatigue for some people, which is true. It's particularly the magnesium, um, which I take a magnesium pill for since I'm just using the salt part because we did talk about potassium and things. Um, I have a multivitamin, I eat a banana every day. I haven't really had issues with muscle cramping since I have been doing this, um, especially with the magnesium. But getting back to the different brands that you can look into, you know, again, they have different blends of vitamins and minerals. Like, for instance, body armor, which I really like, is considered an electrolyte drink. But what I like about it is I recommend that to people who want to limit their salt because uh body armor, at least the light versions, I think the regular versions are the same way, they don't have any any sodium in them, but they have other vitamins and minerals. Um, again, proceed with caution because if you take a multivitamin and the body armor, depending on how big of a drink, because they have a ton of different sizes, you could be getting too much of a certain vitamin or mineral. So just make sure to cross-check it with whatever you're taking. But like, if you don't take any vitamins and your diet's kind of like meh, like having a body armor could be potentially helpful, right? I like it, it tastes good, um, it's easy. There's so many now coming out. I feel like it's starting to get a little bit gimmicky, like people are hopping on the trend. At the end of the day, you know, just evaluate your needs and see ultimately what you need, like exactly kind of like what I did. I was like, I don't, I'm not a marathon runner, like I'm not doing two-hour-long workouts, I don't need like a thousand plus milligrams of salt. Um, I just want to have this little boost because I feel like I'm undergetting it in my diet and things, and it works. So that's what I do. Um, and then let's kind of go into the cons of electrolytes, okay? So if you're just somebody who's like a casual workout person, you don't sweat a lot, you're just you know working a desk job, maybe maybe you don't even have a s a steady routine, you just work out maybe a day, a week, and then two days a week, and it's whatever. You probably don't need it unless you were eating a super low salt diet, like very bland foods, like unseasoned, unsalted, potentially it could be beneficial. Um, but you probably don't need it, okay? And then some drinks are of those pre-mixed ones, are loaded with sugar, fillers, or the unnecessary extras. So that kind of gets back to the body armor. Um, I don't think it's a bad drink, but for the wrong person, it could be. Um, like there's a good amount of zinc in there, and you can actually consume too much zinc, and it does have potentially negative side effects. There are some vitamins and minerals that, like, if you quote unquote overdose on them, you just pee them out, but there's others that build up in your system. So you have to kind of do your research there and see if you're really interested in taking electrolytes to do what's best for you. Um, at the very least, though, I think for anybody who's interested, I would just mix your own blend because then you can control what's in it. Like, you could just do a little pinch of salt where you're probably only getting like 100-200 milligrams of salt. Um, you know, you can add coconut water for potassium and additional electrolytes. Like they have a ton of little like cocktails out there that you can look up uh to make your own tasty little drink. Okay, so that would be my recommendation if you're you're sketched out about getting maybe a pre-mixed one. Okay. Um, and then the other thing is they can be overpriced. When when water in a balanced meal might do the job, right? Like salting your food and eating enough potassium and magnesium, you can get all of these things through your diet, right? But again, the drinks there for the convenience, and me too, personally, I just like the salty lemonade. Like the taste encourages me to drink more water, so it works for me. And this always goes back to evaluate your current situation, look at your body and your needs, and see what works best. Um, and if you're actually really confused, I have no problem. If you want to shoot me a message like on Instagram, you could drop it in the podcast here and and kind of give me a rundown of your lifestyle, I'd be happy to kind of give you some recommendations and guide you in the right direction with that to to kind of help confirm, hey, you probably could benefit from this, or maybe you don't need electrolytes, right? But I'm hoping that this podcast episode alone will definitely help. But what what do I think the verdict is, right? Are electrolytes worth it? I think at the end of the day that it's worth it if you're someone who trains hard, you sweat a lot, um, or you're on a lower carb diet and maybe don't get as much sodium in your diet. I would skip it though, if you're doing a light workout, you're already hydrated through food and water, you have a balanced diet, you don't have any issues, like you're not feeling any fatigue, um, blood pressure's good, all that stuff. I I wouldn't stress it, right? So, yeah, that is my thoughts on electrolytes. Me personally, I love using the electrolytes in moderation. I make my own concoction. I have tried all the brands, I've I've experimented, and at the end of the day, I always come back to my salty lemonade. So if you find something that works for you, um, whether it's through diet, whether it's through drink, I think whatever you're gonna be able to stick to and fit your needs is the best option. So thank you for tuning in, guys. Uh, that is it for today's podcast, and I will catch you in the next one.