An hour of indoor lifting in air conditioning and three hours outdoors in July are not the same event, and the electrolyte aisle prices them as if they were.
That is the actual problem. Not whether electrolytes work — they are minerals, and replacing what heavy sweating removes is not controversial — but whether a given session removed enough to be worth replacing. That question has an arithmetic answer and almost nobody in the category runs it out loud.
Do lifters actually need electrolytes?
Frequently not. A short indoor session at a moderate sweat rate does not create a deficit that a normal day of eating and drinking will not cover. The case becomes real with length, with heat, and with a heavy individual sweat rate — and those three are what should decide it, rather than the fact that a session happened.
Which means the honest version of this product category is narrower than its marketing. An electrolyte scoop is a tool for a specific kind of session. Taken after every session regardless, it is mostly a habit with a flavour.
How much sodium is lost in sweat?
It varies enormously between people, and the spread is the finding. Published measurements of sweat sodium concentration run across roughly a tenfold range from one individual to another, with commonly cited middles landing near 1,000 mg per litre of sweat. Two men doing identical sessions can lose very different amounts.
So a category average is close to useless as a personal number. It is the right figure for designing a product and the wrong figure for deciding a scoop. What settles it for one person is a measurement they take themselves, and it costs one session.
How to find your own sweat rate in one session
This is the whole method and it takes two weighings.
- Weigh in before the session, without clothes, with the bladder emptied.
- Train. Note anything drunk during the session, in litres.
- Weigh in again after, towelled dry, same conditions.
- Subtract, then add back what was drunk. Every kilogram of loss is roughly a litre of sweat.
- Do it once in summer and once in winter. Two numbers beat any general guidance, permanently.
Multiply the litres by a per-litre sodium figure and the answer stops being a guess. It will not be exact — sweat concentration is not measured by a bathroom scale — but it moves the question from a category average to a personal order of magnitude, which is the useful part.
What about potassium and magnesium?
Sodium is by far the most concentrated electrolyte in sweat. Potassium, magnesium and calcium are present in much smaller amounts, and over a long or hot session sodium is the one worth thinking about first. The others belong in an electrolyte product for completeness rather than because a session creates a large deficit in them.
Any product implying otherwise is arranging its panel around what sounds thorough rather than around what sweat contains.
Is 1,000 mg of sodium a lot?
Yes, and here is the figure rather than the adjective: 1,000 mg of sodium is about 43% of the daily value. That is a deliberate amount, sized for a long or hot session where a real deficit exists. It is also a number anyone watching sodium should know before buying, not after.
We print that on The Monograph rather than leaving it to be worked out from a percentage in small type. A brand that teaches people to add up a stack has to add up its own first, and the sodium in Training Water is the figure most likely to matter to someone who already has a reason to count it.
The read: on a short indoor session it is more sodium than the session earned. On a long, hot, heavy-sweating one it is roughly the point. Deciding which of those is happening is the entire skill, and it is why the sweat-rate measurement above is worth one session of effort.
Do electrolytes prevent cramps?
Not settled, and anyone saying otherwise is ahead of the evidence. Two explanations compete. One attributes cramping to fluid and electrolyte deficits; the other to altered neuromuscular control in a fatigued muscle, which accounts for cramps in cool conditions and in well-hydrated athletes that the first explanation struggles with.
The second has gathered considerable support, and the practical read is unromantic: cramps correlate strongly with unusually hard work, for unusually long, in unusual conditions. Replacing sweat losses is worth doing on its own terms. Selling it as cramp insurance is selling something the literature has not agreed to.
What the research does not show
It does not support a single sodium number for everyone. The tenfold individual spread is the most robust thing in this area, and it is exactly the finding a product page has an incentive to skip.
It does not show that more sodium is better. Beyond replacing what a session actually removed, additional sodium is not a performance variable. It is a dietary figure with its own considerations, which is why the percentage above is printed rather than buried.
It does not resolve the cramping question, as above. Two competing mechanisms, one of them better supported, neither of them settled enough to sell on.
What holds: sodium is the dominant electrolyte in sweat; losses vary hugely between individuals; and electrolytes support normal hydration and fluid balance.* That is a shorter list than the aisle implies, and it is the accurate one.
How Training Water is built, and who it is not for
Training Water puts creatine and electrolytes in the same scoop because they end up in the same bottle anyway. Per 10 g scoop: creatine monohydrate 5,000 mg, sodium as sea salt 1,000 mg, potassium as potassium chloride 200 mg, magnesium as magnesium malate 60 mg, 22 kcal. Creatine monohydrate supports muscle strength and high-intensity exercise performance when combined with resistance training.* Creatine is a daily maintenance job and hydration is a session job; they happen to share a container.
Who it is not for, stated plainly: anyone with a reason to restrict sodium, and anyone whose training is short indoor sessions where the electrolyte half is not doing much. In that second case the creatine still is — and that is a daily store rather than a session tool.
Two more figures we volunteer rather than let anyone assemble. The 60 mg of magnesium in this scoop is not free: running the full AM/PM protocol puts supplemental magnesium at 335 mg against a 350 mg ceiling. And this formula's certificate reports the specification limits it is built to and no measured results — one of two of ours that do, said on its panel and transcribed in full on Testing & Certification.
More in this cluster: whether creatine dehydrates you, measured, and how to read a supplement label in sixty seconds.