How are sport drinks supposed to hydrate you more than drinking water?
In: Biology
I have an undergrad degree in nutrition, and masters in exercise physiology. I taught college level nutrition and exercise phys for over a decade. Here is my 2 cents:
If you are not exercising hard for at least 45 minutes or more at a time, you likely don’t need either the electrolytes or the sugar. If you are exercising hard ( and I mean HARD), for ~45 minutes or more or just sort of hard for a longer period of time, drinking a sports drink while exercising will certainly improve performance. But if your goal is weight management or similar rather than performance, you can do without the sugar. It is typically a couple of hours or more before you really need the electrolytes, as you’ll replace them when you eat food. But I can see people who do construction work or similar and sweating in the heat needing electrolyte supplements. If you exercise a bunch without replacing electrolytes, you can get hyponatremia- or low salt levels in your blood, and it can be deadly. This happens occasionally with inexperienced exercisers doing something like a marathon and drinking water only with no salt. But it happens to the slow people, because the runners finishing in sub 3 hours don’t have time to GET hyponatremia and and dilute the salt in their blood. If you go to the gym and ride the bike for 45 minutes. You don’t need sports drinks, and if you aren’t exercising at all, they are a really bad choice. It really sucks they way they market these sugar bombs to uninformed people.
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