Hydrating with Precision with Andy Blow

Foreign.

I'm charlie redding. And I'm laura siddall and this is the tribathlon podcast.

I'm a severe outlier on the. Like, I sweat a lot and I lose a lot of salt, so I'll lose up to five or eight times more than other people that I know. So my hydration strategy, especially my electrolyte intake strategy, had to be considerably more aggressive.

That was Andy Blow. And this episode is hydrating with precision. Welcome to this week's episode of the Tribeathlon podcast. My name is Charlie Redding. I'm normally joined at this stage by Laura Siddal. However, Laura is currently back in the UK but working training as a reserve guide with the Paralympic team. So we've been trying to sort out times to get this recording done and with her crazy schedule this week, it's just not proved possible. Uh, so anyway, you've just got me this time. So it's back to like the, the old times of the Tribathlon podcast. Except I never really used to kind of do much other than introduce the. The interview. But this week I've. Because I've been meaning to talk with Sid about some of the books I've been reading. I've been reading some fantastic books lately. And so I thought, well, I'll take this opportunity of Sid being elsewhere to cover some of the books that I've been reading, because I think that there's know. I think there's some books that I know the listeners of the Triathlon podcast would value the input of and enjoy reading. And some of the books, or one of the books in particular, is probably the most important book I've read in the last decade. And I read about a book a week, so that is quite an accolade. So I'm going to kick off though with one that's very much in line with what we talk about at Tribathlon, and that is Daniel Coyle's book, the Talent Code. Really good book. Really enjoyed it. It's quite similar to a lot of other books I've read, like Matthew side's Bounce and. And also other books that are now escaping my mind or like a bit like Black Box Thinking, I suppose. It's also Matthew Said and Anders Ericsson's book and Peak Performance as well. So they're kind of working on a similar theme. But I liked the, the approach that Daniel Coyle took to this because essentially he breaks this. You could break this book down into three things and the starting point is all about deep practice. Now, this is essentially a more scientific version of Carol Dweck's book Mindset, which is also an amazing book, probably the most quoted book I've seen. It seems to be quoted in so many books of this type, but it's because it's got such brilliant methodology behind it. So if you haven't read Mindset by Carol Dweck, I'd encourage you to read that. But the element of deep practice within the Talent code is all about how we learn how we develop myelin and how that myelin develops at a younger age. Which is why, you know, for example, I tried to take up. I've tried to take up the guitar recently. My daughters pick up the guitar and they pick it up way quicker than I'm picking it up, just because they can create Myelin that much more quickly in their brains. But we often think that. And this comes back to what Bounce is all about in that we think that people are born talented, but actually talent is created through the art of learning. And so if you understand how you learn, and there was some research done on children where they educated the children as to how they learn and how deep practice allows them to learn. And this was some Carol Dweck research. It massively improved their learning. So that part of the book is really interesting. Then it talks a bit about ignition. So stage two of the Talent Code is about Ignition, which is essentially about motivation. How to spark motivation, how to sustain it, and how to design hotbeds for ignition is what. How Coyle describes it. And then finally there's the third stage of the book is all about master coaching. So, you know, why master coaches are so effective examples of great coaches at work. And he also covers the four characteristics of master coaches. So I thought it was a brilliant book with. With a lot of the sports psychology that, for example, we talked about with Helen Davies on the triathlon podcast Woven Within It. And it's, yeah, really, really good book that I think you would enjoy. A second book I want to talk about is Breath by James Nestor. Now, you know, we focus on so many things to do with our body when it comes to training, but breathing is never been one of them. And actually I was introduced to this book by my wife because my eldest daughter has got an underdeveloped jaw. Not something that the dentists have ever picked up on, but actually a specialist picked up on this. And we would. So we were introduced to this book because actually the shape of our jaw is changing over time, and that is linked to how we breathe because we are. We are as a species becoming more and more prone to mouth breathing and it's causing more and more health problems with our teeth, with our jaw and with other parts of our body too. And so in the book Breath Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices. And Henny kind of looks at more modern applications of this. So Wim Hof features in it. He looks at how we breathe during our exercise. So I for one, I remember reading Scott Durek's book years ago and he talked about making sure that he always breathes through his nose while running. And I'm trying to introduce that. But certainly a number of runners in the book saw significant improvements in their running by breathing through their nose as well as massive improvement. I mean in the book Breath Nestor does an experiment where he essentially blocks his nose and only does mouth breathing for two weeks. He had to cut it short to 10 days because it impacted his health so much and yet so many people are breathing through their mouth. So I really encourage you to read the book Breath by James Nestert. I thought that was very, very good. Another running book that really enjoyed was what I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese author, written lots of books, but this is his book about his running, so most of them are fiction books. I haven't read any of his other books, but this is just a really lovely book to listen to while you're running. It's kind of how his brilliant, yes, it's his story, but it's also how his brain meanders while running and I just really enjoyed listening to that while running. I listen to audiobooks a lot while I'm running and cycling and that was just a really good one to while away long runs listening to. And the final book I said I would share with you what I think is probably the most important book I've read in the last decade. This is nothing to do with triathlon, running, cycling, swimming or anything fitness related, but it is to do with our ability to continue to do that in the beautiful surroundings that most that some of us are lucky enough to enjoy. And it's Bill Gates, his book how to Avoid a Climate, the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need. I think it's an absolutely brilliant book. I think if you only read it to be better equipped to have the conversation at a dinner party about climate change, then it will be worthwhile. But it's really made me think about how we work, for example, within my financial planning business. We've already over the last few years been encouraging our clients to invest in more sustainable investments, investments portfolios that are likely to try and make an impact with climate change as well as getting good risk adjusted returns. So as I say, at efficient portfolio, we've been helping our clients do that for quite a while now. But it just re emphasizes how important this is and how trying to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is vitally important, but also monumentally difficult. And so I really encourage everybody to read that book in particular because I think the more people that read it, I know a lot of the listeners to the tribathlon podcast are of the younger generation and I think ultimately it's our responsibility to try and make sure that these areas are explored and you know, both technologies and also legislation so that we can continue to, to live in this amazing country and world that we live in. Because it's, you know, for example, I'm really keen on my scuba diving. I love scuba diving. But if climate change continues at this pace, we will have almost no corals in the sea. If no, no coral means no huge number of the sea life will die. In fact, actually, if you want to know more about that, watch the documentary Chasing on Netflix or indeed the sea Spiracy documentary on Netflix as well. Both just scary if you love the sea, but also highlight the important role that the sea plays in Planet Earth's well being. So if we lose the sea from a, from an environmental point of view, then planet Earth is in dreadful trouble too. So I encourage you to look at all of those. But anyway, back to the tribeathlon theme, which is what I'm here to talk about. And today's interview is with Andy Blow, who is a sports scientist and founder of Precision Hydration, the electrolyte specialists. So Andy's an expert in sweat, in dehydration and in cramping. And he previously worked as a sports team scientist for the Benetton and Renault Formula one teams and remains an advisor to the Porsche Human Performance center, something that he actually helped set up and something that we talk a bit about in the, in the podcast, in the interview. He was an elite level triathlete in his younger days and he's finished Ironman's in top 10 and 70.3 races as well, as well as winning an ex terra world title. But it was really through his own struggles in these races, particularly with cram and his hydration struggles that led to him specializing in electro replenishment and founding the company Precision Hydration. You know, we often talk in training about fueling and we talk about fueling, we talk about training, we talk about products. But in this episode, Sid and I really wanted to explore the area of hydration. You know, what common mistakes people make and what strategies can we use to get it, get it right so that we can deliver our optimum performance. Andy's fantastic. I know you're going to love this interview and you're going to take so much advice from it as well, as well as there being some free tools that the precision hydration offer to help you get your nutrition and hydration right. And this actually because they're going to be releasing some hydration news, sorry, nutrition news in due course anyway. And also at the end of this podcast there is a discount code for precision hydration, so look out for that. So I hope you enjoy the interview with Andy Blow of Precision Hydration. Andy, welcome to the Tribathlon podcast. And Sid, welcome back. I am really looking forward to chatting you about, chatting to you about hydration and because we've talked so much on this podcast about nutrition and about training techniques and all that sort of stuff. And hydration often gets mentioned but it's never something that we've drilled into at any depth. So welcome and really looking forward to chatting to you on this particular subject. Do you want to kick things off, Andy, because you are or were, I don't know how much you're doing nowadays, but you were a very accomplished triathlete yourself, weren't you? So tell us a bit about your story, how you got into triathlon and how you've ended up creating precision hydration.

Yeah, well, to answer the first bit of your question, Charlie, in terms of how active am I now, it's probably about 10% of what I used to do in terms of training and stuff like that because of business and young kids and all the rest of it is definitely has an impact on your training time. But no, I was another triathlon obsessive at one point in my life for many, many years. Absolutely loved it and I still have a great deal of love for the sport. I got into it as a teenager through my dad was very encouraging of me doing sport in general and because I did a bit of swimming and a bit of cross country running, he took me along to a biathlon swim run event that was run with a triathlon. And I think I remember seeing the bikes with the tri spoke wheels and the fluoro kit and all that sort of stuff and for some reason I thought that looks pretty cool. And that was me then from the mid-90s through to the early mid-2000s, I was fully obsessed.

And where did you take that to? You know, what sort of, what races did you do? What were your highlights? How, you know, what were your greatest successes?

I always, deep down wanted to do Kona because I think I started watching the Dave Scott and Mark Tinley era and all that sort of stuff. I used to get 220 magazine from the news agents and triathlete magazine two or three months late from the US and read all the coverage and that sort of thing. So I always wanted to do that. And I did eventually get to do that at one point. And then sort of, that was towards the end of my racing. And between times I had a bit of a diversion into seeing how fast I could go trying to get good at Olympic distance because the Olympics became a big focus for anyone doing triathlon seriously in the 90s with 2000 Olympics and everything, I sort of. I was at Bath University and trained with Simon Lessing, one of the, you know, people who've been in triathlon a while, will remember his name and had a go at whether I could make a Great Britain team for something like that. And I fell quite a long way short of actually making a team. But I was in the. The wider squad of people training there and so got to a reasonable level, raced internationally a handful of times, got I. I did finish top 10 in a couple of Ironman races and podium of the 70.3 and that sort of thing. So I sort of, you know, boxed my way through it and did. Did a few bits and pieces and. But just really loved it. You know, it's really good opportunity to pursue something to that level.

Is that. Is that when. Because you're at Bath University said, is that when had they sort of started the performance? Was it as they were developing a performance center there for sport, or was it just before that kind of process in development of sport?

Yeah, right at the beginning. So when I went for my interview at Bath, they were still building this swimming pool and I remember standing and looking at the foundations and that. And then when it was, when I started, it was ready. Richard Hobson was employed as the first coach and he had three athletes and I was one of them. And then the center grew up around us, so I was there with them. Someone you probably know, Paul Newsom is the founder of Swim Smooth. And so Paul and I were two out of those three athletes. And then, yeah, the sort of GB squad focus went onto there. Chris Jones came and coached out of there for a while and it was a really, it was a really good environment for a couple of years to. For me to sort of get exposed to training with some of the best athletes in the world.

Yeah. Because now it's one of the. Kind of the main. One of the main hubs for British triathlon, really. You've got obviously Loughborough, Leeds and then Bath. I mean bath for sport anyway. But I know there's a big, big triathlon hub there as well.

Yeah, it's a lovely. It's a lovely place to live. Great, great facilities and all the rest of it, if I'm being totally honest about my time there. And it was as probably as much my fault was anyone else's, is it was a recipe for over training and burnout and I was a big victim of that, you know, in. In later years because the opportunity to train was. And train at a high level was. Was every day. And if you weren't one of the better athletes, if you were making up the numbers like I was, then you could. You would. I had this thing, you know, to prove myself in pretty much every training session, which is a dangerous tendency. And, you know, burnout was a. Was definitely a factor for me. And I think although the really hard training got me to a good level, there was a point at which it almost caused me to get out of the sport, you know, and I kind of went and went through a process of completely changing what I did and finding my way back into it and training on my own a lot more when I left university. And all of my best perform, my really best performances came after that. So that was an interesting period and I think it's something that high performance centres, it doesn't always get talked about quite as much. You always talk about the people who do really well out of them. It's like football academies and things like that. There's a lot of people that get a bit beaten up by them and not that that's been sports competitive and I don't want to. There's some great people there and I don't think anyone was, you know, particularly at fault, as it were. But that environment is. Is a tough environment to train in every day.

So was precision hydration born out of your experience in being a triathlete? You know, was there some, you know, disastrous races as a result of hydration and did that kind of create. Tell us about those and tell us about how precision hydration was born.

Yeah, it very much was born out of that. My frustrations as an athlete because as I started doing longer and hotter races, I found that there was this. There was a sort of an artificial limit on my performance because, like with any sport, you can, you can take your 800 meter running time and almost make a vague prediction of your marathon time from it based on various charts and tables and things. And, you know, it kind of holds true with triathlon, especially if you take an Olympic distance athlete who's good, you can extrapolate up to what they maybe could do at an Ironman. And my performances kind of got. My first performances at Ironman got nowhere near what I should be doing, if you like, for as to my fitness level. And it was down to cramping and sort of problems which appeared to be like hydration related. And it took a few years and a lot of frustration. But a friend of mine who was a doctor pointed out to me that my symptoms were very much like those of someone who was suffering severe electrolyte depletion. And so he worked with me to correct that. And I actually had a sweat test in a hospital because they weren't sort of commercially available for athletes. Then I had my sweat tested in a cystic fibrosis department of a hospital, got a result which showed that I had very high levels of salt loss in my sweat. And that sent me down the path to making changes, you know, to my, my hydration. And because of how much of a night and day change it was for me when I started taking in more sodium and getting my electrolyte balance right, eventually when I stopped competing, was working with other athletes, it's sort of a light bulb went on and I thought, yeah, this is something that is going to benefit other people as well, so it's worth exploring.

Fantastic. And you were, you were running precision Hydra. In fact, you might, I think you maybe still are running precision hydration whilst work. Running while working in another job, working for Porsche, I think. Is that right?

Yes. Yeah. We. So I set up a business with another guy, another triathlete out of Bath, called VO2 coaching, and that's Elliot Chalifor and that still runs a facility called the Porsche Human Performance center at Silverstone, which is. So the sort of quick recap as to why that is is when I was at university, I did a work placement with the Benetton F1 team and started working in Formula One when I left university as a sports scientist. So we developed some connections in motorsport which eventually led us in a roundabout way to working with Porsche drivers and Porsche as a brand. Then we set up a Human Performance center to work with racing drivers and endurance athletes. So the sort of precision hydration sweat testing started off as a service out of that lab and then gathered enough momentum over the first three or four years of its existence that I could transition almost full time into it. And then since then. So it started in 2011. I probably went full time with it in about 2015 or so. 2014, 2015. And we're, we're now 10 years old actually. Next week is our. I just looked it up the other day because I knew it was coming up and we're now 13 people strong. So we've just had sort of like steady growth over those 10 years.

Random Sidetrack for the moment. Then racing car drivers then obviously they're sweating a lot. I'm assuming that's kind of what you were looking at. Do they have a. This is probably going to sound a really stupid naive question. Do they have a drink system built into their helmet? They must have, otherwise they're going to be.

Yeah, they do in most. So Formula one drivers do. In most cases they have a little pump which, with a, with a pipe that feeds them with food. They don't have a lot in the car. I think when I was working with them it was usually about 6 or 700 ML available and quite often they wouldn't empty it but, but then they're, they're racing for a long time, you know, hour and a half, two hours or whatever. But it's not super long. So you go in well hydrated and they just need enough to stop themselves perceiving that they feel really thirsty and it distracting their performance. We did a lot with rally car drivers as well and actually that's probably more demanding from a hydration perspective. If you go to the Acropolis Rally in Greece or something like that where it's 40 odd degrees in the car and they've got to wear all their fireproofs and things and there's a big challenge on thermoregulation and hydration. They have bladder systems in the car but they also have lots of repeated back to back stages and stuff. So kind of working on hydration and that with them was interesting.

Was it quite a new area to look into at that stage? Had there been a lot of science, performance science done in that sort of the car rally industry was are you coming into it? And like no one had really looked at this, this area.

There was definitely a few pioneers in that area. Some of the, there's some Italian, some there was like an Italian business that specialized in motor racing and a few others. But I guess the guy I worked for was Bernie Shrewsbury, who was an ex British special forces guy, actually an ex top triathlete as well, from the sort of 80s and 90s. And he was one of the first like real human performance guys in motorsport and he set up a proper setup. So we had me as a sports scientist, we had links with a doctor, we had a full time physiotherapist and a training center. So it was kind of the earlier days of sports science entering motorsport. Before then, the more of the model was that each driver would have their kind of trainer, their individual trainer that went with them, who's a bit of a jack of all trades, who might have been like a sports masseur or might have been a personal trainer or a coach or a nutritionist and they sort of looked after everything. We took a bit more of a multidisciplinary approach into it, which was interesting times to be involved in that.

Brilliant. And how did your kind of your race disasters play out in terms of the hydration fails? What happened, what symptoms did you get, what happened to your performance? But also what do you know now about what was happening there?

Well, when I did sports science at Bath in the late 90s, the message around hydration was very clear and unambiguous in the athletes needed drink more. If you weren't drinking more, then you were not drinking enough. You should always be drinking more because dehydration is going to kill you otherwise. And so everyone was wandering around with bottles, you were drinking all the time. And. And I definitely suffered with this sort of philosophy of like, more is better when it comes to hydration. So if it was good to drink a fair bit when you're doing a short race, clearly it was going to be advantageous to drink as much as you could during a long race. And then I remember doing my first really long hot race in Switzerland at the ironman in around 2000 or so, maybe 2001. And just like being paranoid about dehydration, drinking so much on the bike, I was peeing on the run and cramping and having all the classic symptoms which are now, now related to hyponatremia, which is where you dilute your blood sodium levels down. And in my case it was more problematic because not only was I drinking a lot, but I was sweating out a lot of sodium. And when you think about that equation, when you've got, when you're bleeding out a lot of a mineral or electrolyte and you just put in plain water in, your rate of dilution is increased in the body because you're basically losing something, you're not replacing it at all or in very small quantities and just diluting it down. And when you dilute sodium levels in the blood, it's it, the body goes into a bit of a panic. And first of all it makes you pee because it's trying to get rid of water. But you can overwhelm the kidneys, especially when you're exercising to the point where the body has to do something else. And it shunts fluid from the bloodstream into your cells, causes them to swell up, so you kind of get a bit puffy. But it can also affect your brain because if your brain swells up, you lose cognitive function, you start to get disoriented, you feel quite sick and lethargic and eventually if it really gets bad, people have died of it. And there have been numerous cases unfortunately in marathons and Ironmans over the years where people have drowned themselves in water and died of hyponatremia.

I think I've read in a book, I can't remember which one it was. It might have been Alex Hutchinson's Endure. I might be wrong, but there's more cases of people dying from over drinking than under drinking. I think in long distance event, in endurance events. Is that the sort of research that you've seen?

I believe that to be true, yes. There's like there are documented cases of hyponatremia and people dying. And because of, and the reason that people don't die of dehydration in long distance events is because of the availability of fluid on the course. So if you, if you get thirsty, we've all been thirsty at times and if you get thirsty, it's a pretty powerful urge, you know, to drink. So if there's fluid available, although you might dehydrate to an extent that could negatively influence your performance, when there's bottles of water by the side of the road every few K, it's very unlikely you're going to die of dehydration. So therefore what. But what people have done is this. There was. And Tim Noakes, who's a famous South African physiologist, wrote a book about this called Waterlogged, you know, explaining how the sort of in his way blaming Gatorade for promoting the idea of over drinking. And although Tim notes are very extreme in his views and I have to say having like done a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, a lot of work in this general area, I think his views are extremely extreme. So possibly if it's not too much of a pun to be taken with a pinch of salt. You know, they, they, they do point in the direction, which is true that, you know, because I grew up through that era that we were sold this sort of, like, myth that athletes just needed to globally drink more and there was no limit put on that. Whereas actually, like with most things, the body, when, when you look at endurance exercise, it's fundamentally a battle of homeostasis in the body. So homeostasis is like keeping the body balanced. And when you exercise, you challenge homeostasis in tons of ways. You know, you burn through energy stores, you increase core temperature, you damage muscle f fibers, you sweat, so you lose fluid, you lose blood volume. And all of those things mean that if you don't keep homeostasis together, you will eventually have to slow down or stop because your body will start to break down and sort of. Therefore there's a Goldilocks amount of everything. There's too little fluid, there's too much fluid, there's too little salt or sodium that you're sweating out, there's too much salt, there's too little carbohydrate energy, there's too much carbohydrate energy. And what you're trying to do is kind of hit the. The sweet spot for those different things. And what I found was that for me, maybe I wasn't always looking in the right places, but it didn't feel like there was enough education for athletes around the Goldilocks, finding the Goldilocks point for fluids and electrolytes. And part of the reason for that, I think, is because individual differences are so vast, because what's right for me isn't right for everyone else.

So how do we find out these correct ratios for us as individual athletes?

Normally, people find it out by trial and error, because whether they realise it or not, they go out, they drink and eat different things and they modify what they do based on experience. Some people, we all ask the fastest person we know in our club, don't we, as well, and see what they did or read something on the Internet or back in the day in a magazine and copy it. I read Dave Scott's triathlon training manual till all the corners were bent over and copied what Dave did with some of his stuff. And I suppose it then comes a bit of a crapshoot, really, as to whether it works. And because we all exist on a bell curve, don't we, as humans, in terms of lots of characteristics like height and things like that, Most people are most blokes are somewhere in the region of 5 foot 9, 5 foot 10 tall. You get a few outliers in the NBA at 7 foot 2 and you get a few people at the other end who are probably 4 foot 3. But you can group most people in the middle well with your nutrition and hydration intake. In races, a lot of people's needs are relatively homogenous, but there are outliers on either side and the further. And I found. So my hard won experience was that I'm a severe outlier on the like, I sweat a lot and I lose a lot of salt. So I'll lose up to five or eight times more than other people that I know. So my hydration strategy, especially my electrolyte intake strategy had to be considerably more aggressive than those people in order to perform. But that deviated a long way from what the textbook message was at the time.

I think I'm right in saying from listening to other interviews that you've done, once you know your own figure, that pretty much stays consistent, doesn't it? It's the fact that you and I actually, I know that. Well, I don't know. You can tell us about the online sweat test. I know from that that I'm a high sweater, but because of COVID I haven't been able to do a sweat test. So talk to us about how you would find out these, these, these ratios for you. How should we find out as opposed to how have people done it historically?

Yeah, well, I think you can attack it in different ways. Practical experience, especially if you've got quite a bit of practical experience as an athlete, is a good way to start actually, because you can look back at what you tend to eat and drink in races and break it down and start to see, especially around races that work really well for you, say, okay, well what did I drink there? What did I eat there? And we try to encourage people to think about it in a very simple way that we call three levers, which is the amount of carbs you take per hour, the amount of fluid you take per hour, and the amount of sodium you take per hour. And what you find out first off talking to most athletes is that only, only a very few of them will actually know those numbers or even know how to figure them out. Because I remember going back in the day, I would look at, I thought electrolytes were some kind of magic pixie dust where you just needed some of them. And it was like, I didn't. The dose response thing didn't really come into it. It was Just like put a bit, make sure you've got some going in and then don't worry about it. And actually just understanding that, for example, I would say based on my experience in an Ironman, if you're going to take a low amount of sodium per hour, it's 200 milligrams an hour. But if you're going to take a high amount, it could be 1500 milligrams per hour. And that scale between those two is pretty wide. So really, you know, that's why we developed the tool that you referenced, our online sweat test, because it helps to start to ask you the kind of questions which put you in the zone of being, are you a low, medium, high, or a very high sort of person? Likely, because then you can constrain the playing field in which you have to partake in that trial and error. And moving on from that, we obviously do like a sweat test where you can actually measure the sodium lost in your sweat. And as you said, Charlie, it's relatively stable for you as an individual. So once you've got that marker, it's kind of one of those things where then you can again tailor your trial and error around that number. And hopefully there's always this element. It's like having a bike fit, I would say, is a way to describe it that most people would understand in that that the computer plus the person can set your bike up for you kind of optimally inverted commas. But then you're still going to go and ride it up and down the street and go and do some time trials and things and take your own Allen keys and make a few tweaks. And so we always try to badge our advice, as it were, for electrolyte and fluid intake as getting you close to where you need to be. But the last few hundred yards is down to you because you've got to try it out. And although your physiology is relatively stable, the environment, the pace you're going at, all those kind of things change from day to day. And so you've got to learn to operate within a sort of slightly chaotic environment and roll with it.

And with. So with the. I was intrigued by the online sweat test. I thought it worked really well. And the advice that then came directly through that was really good. But you obviously will be comparing those online tests to the actual sweat tests that you're doing. How accurate is the online sweat test? Really accurate? Or do you find that you can kind of hone it that much better with the sweat test?

I think for an inexperienced athlete, the Sweat test is potentially more useful than for a very experienced athlete because the more experienced you are, I think the better inputs you can have to the questions and therefore the better output you get at the other end. So in other words, it's another way of saying, like, experienced athletes know their bodies, so if you steer them with the right questions, they can often, they often come up with the right answers. And even if they don't, didn't previously understand the exact concepts that, you know, you were talking about, like milligrams of sodium, they would tell you that they would eat more salty foods before or after races or whatever, just because they've kind of intuitively learned that that feels right to them and seems to benefit them. Because humans, we're pretty good at learning what works and what doesn't on a subconscious level. Where we tend to trip ourselves up is when we start to overthink things. You know, like, the over drinking thing is a classic because in order to like, substantially over drink, unless you've got a really rare medical condition, you've got to override your body's thirst signals and drink way ahead of becoming thirsty. So, so we are in the game of, in a way, helping people to understand their own bodies a bit better and read the signals that they're giving them and understand them. Because I didn't understand at the time when I was suffering on the bike in Ironman, Switzerland, it was hot and I visibly see sweat pouring off me. I'm drinking more and more because I'm thinking the logic is saying you must need more fluid. But actually I'm making the problem worse because what I needed was more salt, not more fluid at that time. And it's only with hindsight that you recognize that now and then as I adjusted that, everything just seemed to click back into place because you're giving the body roughly what it needed.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And so with the salt levels, we can check that through the sweat test or the online test. Is that likely to also give us how much fluid we need per hour for an endurance event? And, and also you mentioned that carb ratio as well. How do, how would we work that bit out?

Yeah, the fluid bit is a bit more up and down because. And it, it sort of moves in parallel with the, the sodium level. But a lot of the, the amount of fluids you need is driven by the environmental conditions as well as your sweat rate. So I would say as a general rule, if you think about it on a continuum, if you've got colder events, if you put These factors together and say if you've got a colder event of a shorter duration with a more experienced athlete, etc. That all pushes you down the lower end of hydration. Fluid needs and means that acting on instinct and just like having a bottle and going with your feelings on the day is probably acceptable. So Alan Hovda, who's won the Norseman a number of times, he and I have good friends now, we've corresponded a lot because we had an interesting conversation online once where he'd claimed that like all you needed to do was that approach, like drink to thirst, drink. Then he went to Ironman Texas and did that after he'd won the Norseman, doing it in cold conditions, went to Ironman Texas and ended up in hospital because he was so, you know, ruined by it. By it. And we had a chat about all of that and started to modify what Alan was doing. And he now has a brilliantly flexible approach where I would say, you know, shorter races or even long races in cold conditions with experienced athletes don't require as much of a rigorous plan of how much fluid, volume and stuff to take because you can listen to your body when you go and do Ironman Texas and it's hot and you're going to be out there 10, 12, 14 hours or whatever. I think you do need a plan because if you just go on instincts, you can be very dehydrated and very depleted very quickly early on or the other way like I was, you can just kind of ramp up your fluid and electrolyte intake or whatever willy nilly and go overboard. So it's having an appreciation for where those limits are and then tweaking the.

Dials on the go and the hydrate. And this is something I've kind of been brought up to, to do with my training and racing is that separation of carbs versus hydration because as you said, and please correct me on this because I'm probably gonna butcher it, but in those cold conditions you don't need as much or you can drink to thirst more. And in the hot conditions you need to drink more of the right substance. However, your calories that you need doesn't change as much.

Great.

Yeah, you need to be taking calories on per hour. And so this is where if you mix, putting them together full, let's say for long endurance events, I think is probably the, the key here. It's always a risk when you're mixing your, your, your hydration, your electrolyte with your calories because you can't then adjust to the heat conditions is that.

Yeah, definitely. And you've hit the nail on the head, really, is that those three things, it's like whatever it is, the base, the treble, and the fader on your hi fi thing, you need to be able to adjust them independently because otherwise it's just volume, isn't it? You know, and if you just turn up the volume on a hot day, you end up with three times the calories that you end up with on a cold day. And so where you'll probably end up, not if you were drinking your calories on a cold day, you'd end up okay for fluids, but light on carbs. And on a hot day, you'd probably end up. If you take enough fluids, you'll end up way overdoing and having bad guts because you've had too much carbohydrates. So to a degree, separating the different things out. And the electrolytes is kind of in the mix there because they move a little bit in parallel with the fluids. Like, as you generally, as your fluid requirements escalate, so do you. So do your electrolyte requirements. But the carbs thing, you're dead right. Is far more static. So on a cold day, on a hot day, it's more based on your work rate. And it's also the limiting factor for most people for using carbohydrates is absorption rate. So the more you can get in, within reason, the better. Which is always a dangerous thing to say to athletes because they then just go crazy.

But like a competition, then.

Yeah, but there's some pretty solid science and some good anecdotal evidence around the idea that for anything up to a couple of hours, you know, 30 grams of carbohydrate an hour is adequate because of the muscle glycogen stores that you can burn through. When you go beyond two hours, kind of 60 grams becomes useful for most people, intolerable. And then beyond three or four hours, if you can tolerate it, like 90 grams, or even in some cases, 90 grams plus per hour is a good amount if you. Because you are going to rinse through your glycogen stores. So the more exogenous carbohydrate you can put in, the more of that substrate you can burn, and the better you can, because when your glycogen levels drop too low, your brain starts to put the brakes on. So. And we've all had that feeling, you know, on a long ride or a long run, when all of a sudden you can feel that someone's kind of just Pulled the plug out and it's a long road home, isn't it?

The piano just dropped on your back.

Yeah.

The other thing with that hydration as well, um, is a lot like again, I'm talking long course races, but for instance, you know, some of the Ironman New Zealand for an example, it happens in March and in the morning it's super cold and actually you can be in fog and mist for the first hour on the bike. And so it's having a hydration. And this is where you guys are knowing your numbers is key of going, having a hydration plan that actually. And again, correct that first hour again, you might not be needing to drink as much, but you need to know as the day goes on, when you're on the bike and it's, it's gonna get, it's gonna get hot and it probably gets windy, you're gonna have to be able to adjust to then take on more electrolyte. Is that, is that work through with athletes as well?

Yeah, it's a big feature of ultra running as well because that's a similar sort of thing. You often start really early in the morning, finish really late at night and go through, if you're in doing it in California or whatever, you go through 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of the day. So you sort of scale your, your fluid and electrolyte intake based on what your needs are. But that all of that comes down to it. It's almost exactly like the ability to pace. So you go into a race if you. Very few athletes these days with the devices we've got available, I would say go into races without a vague sense of how they're going to pace it, how many watts they're going to hit on the bike or how minutes per mile on the run or whatever your metrics are. But you also know as an experienced athlete that there's, there's times when. And you'll have, you'll have had this numerous times, I'm sure, where you come out the water and there's a gap to close and you're gonna have to do 400 watts for a bit because.

There'S always a gap out the water. With me, it's always gonna be the answer.

Yeah. So you might have to stomp the pedals a bit harder than your pacing suggest because tactically there's an advantage to doing so. But you know, you also kind of know that you're rolling dice a bit there. And I would. And, and I would say like with nutrition and hydration there's two things there's going into it with a flexible plan of saying, right, I know that roughly I'm going to be. This is a 60 gram an hour race for me on carbs and this is a half a liter per hour on fluids. But be very willing to then test and adjust on the fly. And the biggest thing I encourage, well, I encourage all athletes to do it, but particularly pro athletes that we're working with, is I talk to them about a mental ledger which is keeping track of the last hour or two of you know, what your. What you've eaten and drunk, comparing it with your performance. Because if things start to unravel, as they often do in long races, you want to be able to go back over the last couple of hours and think, well, have I eaten less than I thought I should or more? Because if I've already eaten more than I thought I should, maybe the place to go looking here is not more food, it might be slowing the pace or it might be drinking more if I've not drunk as much as I thought I would. But if you. And again, a lot of these things are related back to personal experience. But when I look back at a couple of races, I did nice triathlon when it was long course world championships, it was super hot. And again, instead of once I was drinking probably like well over a litre an hour. I just was piling in more when I was feeling rubbish, thinking there must be more. But quite clearly I'd have been better off stopping drinking because I was making the problem worse. But if you're not keeping. If you don't have an appreciation of what you might need per hour and then you don't also have a ledger in your head which is telling you how much you have had, then you aren't able on the fly to adjust. And I think that's what it comes down to.

And would you suggest that sort of plan would be a specific number or is it more likely or would you be better off saying, well, actually this is my upper limit and this is my lower limit and kind of I'll do what I feel. What feels right within that Would that.

Yeah, it's like a range. So if it was a. If it was, it's like a T shirt size. It's like knowing whether you're a small, a medium, a large or an extra large. It's not a tailored suit, which is, you know, you don't have to have a totally bespoke number because I have had a lot of athletes over the years send Me spreadsheets of their, their great plan for the race, which is always good. But then what I tend to encourage them to do is say is like treat those numbers. If those numbers look plausible and they stand up to some rigorous testing and training, then. Then try to sort of give plus minus them by whatever appropriate amount. With the carbohydrates, it's probably a relatively small amount that you would tolerance that you would give them depending on how experienced you are. But then with the fluids and electrolytes, you're going to give them a lot more latitude to go up if it's a bit hotter than you thought or you're working a bit harder or you might actually go with less. Because they're all. Because as much as these things are follow patterns and there are upper and lower limits and things, we've all had exceptional circumstances where it shouldn't have worked, but it did. You know, I know athletes who've done entire Ironmans on liquid calories only and done really well. I remember doing really well at a half Ironman once where my. I had two bottles on the bike setting off one with all my, you know, like fuel and stuff in there and it bounced off the bike coming out of T1 over a speed bump. And I chose to leave it because there was like a group of us and I was like, I'm not. I rolled the dice and I got round on half the calories I thought I was going to need. So sometimes if you. Your tolerances are really wide, sometimes they're not so much. So this, it's like, it's a frustrating thing for athletes, but there is a lot of art as well as science to getting these things right. And again, I keep saying this and apologies, but like where I look back at my own experiences is I didn't even have an appreciation for the ranges of some of these numbers early on. And I think that's the place to start is most people will, Most athletes will tell you. Well, they will all tell you what shoe size they are, what wetsuit size they are, what bike size they are. They'll know their ranges for power and things like that. They should know their ranges for nutrition and hydration. And I don't think they do.

And I seem to remember when I was interviewing Ruth Astle, she said that she took in one of her events, she took on too much salt and had a load of problems with her load of GI problems. But so what's, what's the likelihood of taking on too much salt? I mean, for example, when I, when I did my Ironman Italy. I hadn't even thought about other than electrolytes in my drinks. I hadn't thought about salt or taking extra salt. And literally in the days before, somebody said, my coach said, oh, you might want to throw a few salt tablets in the night before and. And during the race. But I had no concept of whether I was massively overdoing it or not. Can you, can you overdo salt? And what's the issues?

You can. I think there's probably two ways of overdoing it. If you have it in diluted drinks, it's unlikely you'll overdo it because if they would taste offensively salty, if you sort of really overdid it and then you wouldn't drink them, you'd throw it away and drink something else. So salt tablets or capsules, although I really like them and use them because if they have other benefits, they're an easy way to overdose because they don't taste of anything. So you swallow them down. And if you don't know how much sodium you're getting in them or how much. For example, the ones we make called sweat Salt capsules have 250mg of sodium in each one. So the usual recommended dosage range is like one to three an hour, something like that. Along with other products, some people might take four or four or even five if they're really heavy sweaters, you know, or losing a lot. But you just need to know what those kind of ranges are. For example, the other, the other danger is the kind of. The cumulative effect of lots of sports nutrition products put sodium in them. So you might find some gels will only have 20 milligrams of sodium, but some will have 200. And all of a sudden, if you're taking three gels with 200 milligrams of sodium in each per hour and not really factoring that in and having an electrolyte drink and having soul capsules, you can easily be accumulating a couple of thousand milligrams of sodium in an hour, which is a lot for your body to process and could give you some GI trouble.

So is it, realistically, is it only GI trouble that you're likely to get, or can you kind of overdo it worse and do yourself more damage?

Not, not with sodium, particularly you. You would reach. I'm pretty sure it would make you have diarrhea and sickness before it does anything more serious than that. I mean, potassium is a. Is more dangerous, which is why you can't buy potassium supplements because it affects the heart rhythms and that sort of thing. And although sports nutrition products often have a small amount of potassium in because you do lose some in your sweat, it's not as key for hydration as sodium is. So you would have to go, I mean athletes. You never say never because athletes do crazy things and take lots and lots of certain supplements or whatever, even when they maybe shouldn't. But I would say it is a sweeping statement. So I need to caveat it. But I would say perhaps in my experience anyway, in long hot races, more athletes would under salt than over salt. But you, but you could probably find people who disagree with that. I know that for instance, the organizer at the Western States Ultramarathon, they claim that they see a lot of people over salting in the race and retaining a lot of fluid. But I think, I think you could probably pull examples to support both hypotheses and say that, you know, what's more important is if most people try and get it in the middle, you know, where closer to their sweet spot.

And does how your fuel. I mean, obviously if you're drinking liquid carbs, that will impact your hydration. But does if you're, you know, if you're having energy bars as opposed to energy gels, will that impact it? Clearly, if gels have got, I suppose have got, you know, isotonic ones that will. But should that be factored in everything?

I mean, I think going back to that, that main point about the three components like water is important. And it's easy relatively to figure out how much of that you're getting because of the volume of bottles that you're drinking, whatever's in them, even a carb drink is predominantly water. So you know, you drink a 500ml bottle, you're basically getting 500 mils of water. The if you can work out the amount of fluid that you're getting, the amount of sodium you're getting in total from all the products that you're taking in, and if you can work out how many grams of carbohydrate you're getting, then you've just. The whole game is keeping those three things in reasonable levels. And the reason it's a bit difficult is twofold, I think. Well, it's threefold. Individual variation between people is relatively large. So the actual targets that people are trying to hit are quite disparate. So job number one is figure out what your individual targets are, not what your mates targets are or your coach's targets are. What are your targets once you've Established that it's like, okay, where is that going to come from in the race? What kind of formats work for me? And on the bike it might be that you can stomach solids that you can't stomach on the run, for example, because chewing an energy bar when you're running at four or five minutes a K is a lot more difficult than it is cruising down a Hill at 20 mile an hour. Not pedaling, you know you can, you're not breathing as hard, so you look at like, what's the best format? And then the, the last sort of thing is then making sure that those three things, this, the salt, the fluids and the calories are. You're not double dosing yourself from any of those products because you might look at a gel, like I said, and say, oh, that's carbs, but just make sure it's not.

It's not.

Also electrolytes, tripling up your electrolytes as well. And so my preferred option, given everything else is like drink water or electrolyte. This is for long races. Drink water or an electrolyte drink so you get that ratio right and eat calories, be that in the form of gels, bars, chews. I don't honestly think it matters which format you have. I think you have your preferred format. And in a long race, we all know it's probably quite nice sometimes to mix it up at least a little bit because you do get a bit bored of chowing down on the same thing for numerous hours.

And does caffeine impact that?

Caffeine again is like dose dependent. And that's another one where people sometimes just don't read the labels, isn't it? And they end up taking caffeine from three different products when they only want to take it from one. And it's just another thing that you should know your numbers for.

But, but does it impact the hydration? So if you're having caffeine gels, it won't, it won't impact the.

No. Okay. No. Not at all. Not when you're racing. I mean, there is the argument that caffeine's a diuretic, but I think you get, you release antidiuretic hormones when you're, when you're exercising. And it's been relatively robustly proven. I think if you've got any sort of normal tolerance to caffeine, then it won't impact your hydration.

There's another theory that gets put around in races again for long distance, that you know, once you've started on that caffeine gel, you need to continue. Is that myth or is that truth to some extent? What is individual?

I think it's a bit individual. I would say it's, it's perhaps a little bit overplayed, but then I'd be using my own experiences predominantly there to say like I'll take it or, or not. And I tend to use a bit of caffeine in races and it, I'm, I'm almost on the fences for me whether it's like a placebo type psychosomatic effect or not. But I'm a habitual coffee drinker and I do use caffeine so it kind of seems sensible. I've never, I don't consider myself to be someone who's like dramatically affected by caffeine, but it's not ineffective on me as well. It might be the case that if you are quite sensitive to it, that you ought to be more pre planned in your approach. But I think caffeine is one of those things where sports nutrition is very excited about it because it has kind of quote unquote proven benefits which you know, the studies and experience seems to hold up for. But, but more and more so what we're seeing is this, this kind of, even with caffeine, the inter, individual reaction to it is vast. And that's what the studies tend to hold up is like the, the average reaction and the average dose that seems to work which, which are always good guides, but they're only general guides, they're not prescriptions for you as an individual. And if you, the best athletes always work same as the dose response relationship of your training, you know, we can all see what the best athletes are doing in the world for training, volume, intensity and all that kind of thing. But there's always an individual component to optimizing it for you. And I do think that we've been doing it for a number of years and it sounds quite pretentious to be saying we're like ahead of the curve. But I do think individualization and personalization of nutrition medicine, all that sort of stuff is obviously the next frontier. And it's where all these things are headed and certainly where on practical experience working with athletes in the last few years we've had a lot of the biggest wins, is usually what you end up doing with an athlete if they've got any level of experience, is taking what they're currently doing and then just iterating it and getting it to work a little bit better rather than throwing it out. Because what I remember doing races, nutrition would go Badly and then you change everything for the next time, which is just sort of like chasing zeros the whole time because you don't know what.

You've not kept anything the same. Yeah.

It's not science. Yeah.

And we've talked a fair bit about nutrition and particularly hydration during the event, but not really so much before or after. So what. So for somebody like me who's, who came up high but beer.

Exactly once I don't know what the issue is.

That's it. It's a dehydration strategy. Is there anything particularly with the bit, the post race beer in mind, is there anything that we should be doing prior to a race and after a race to kind of help prepare and.

Help to recover prior to the race is a key time for sure. Because again, lots of athletes do things wrong because of nerves, because of the oh, I better just have an extra bottle of water is the classic one. And then it becomes two and you end up over drinking and you know, diluting yourself before the race. You go to any race expo and if you got a pound for every person you saw carrying a massive water bottle around with them the day before, you know, you leave fairly wealthy. It's that over drinking before the race is something to avoid. We've actually got a pretty substantial blog on that on our website which we could link to from your show notes, which would be worth a read because it just explains the sort of. The rationale. You can obviously top your hydration levels up a little bit and some extra electrolytes before can help. But we're not talking about going mega overboard. It's just like a little top up is all that's needed. So I think pre and obviously for, for fueling carbohydrate loading. I mean there's, there's all the chat in the last five or ten years about low carb, high fat and this and that, but carbohydrates are still, you know, 99 out of 100 athletes that we interact with who are at a high, high performance level are eating a lot of carbohydrate. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just not glad not to give up my pasta and things like that. Although I've had to cut it down since the volume of training's gone down. But yeah, so get. So the pre, the pre fueling, pre hydration is big and you know, again there are limits. You know, it's like you need a little bit extra but with the fueling you're probably tapering your training down in the last few races the last few days, especially if it's a big race, so your energy utilization drops. So a little, I always say, as a rule of thumb, like for me it was. It's an extra portion of carbs with meals in the last 48 hours. So maybe if I'd have had like porridge for breakfast, porridge and toast for breakfast and then I might have extra potatoes or whatever with lunch and that sort of thing. But it's not going suddenly going crazy. You know, you just top it, you're just topping up your glycogen stores. The sort of data suggests that I've seen in lab studies. I think I remember seeing the figure quoted that about. You can store about 150% of normal glycogen stores before a race if you're well trained. So you can super compensate and get about 50% extra on board. But even that's not, it's a big amount for performance point of view. But it doesn't mean eating pasta only for a week or anything like that. It's more subtle than that.

And with the hydration. So you guys have different levels of, of sodium in your, in your products, don't you? So that you can count, you can tailor it. Would you be so pre race, would you be having the sort of higher level typically, so you're not having to drink lots of fluids or how would that work?

Exactly? Yeah. So we have a drink which is pH 1500, which is 1500 milligrams of sodium per liter. And that's, that's about three times as much as a standard electrolyte drink. And the idea is that pre race that's good because you, you, when you drink it, the sodium gets pulled into the bloodstream, it pulls more fluid in with it and expands your blood volume a little bit so you, you don't run the risk of diluting the blood down as much. And, and it's not a big amount. You have about half a litre of that the evening before and you have another one the morning off. And the one on the morning of is arguably the more important one probably. And that sort of like gives you a top up.

So that was what you'd be sipping before you got in for your swim, as opposed to sipping water and kind of undoing the good.

Yeah, exactly. I'd go a little bit with taste. I'd always have a bottle of water lying around just to wash my mouth out because nerves do funny things to your taste buds and you, you always feel like having a little swig of water and I would try and finish that electrolyte drink 45 minutes an hour before the start. Because what you want to do is do it before you go for your last sort of nervous pre race P so that you.

Your last 10 nervous pre rest.

Exactly.

And coming back to after the event. Can. Can. So A should we be doing something similar afterwards and B can we use this in a similar way for the hangover the following morning?

Exactly. Yeah. That's the best use for it. Because. Because I think post race like Laura said, you know, you just. Most people, if it's a big race you are, if you're into it, you're going to go and have a couple of beers and that sort of thing and your top priority there is having a good time, not optimizing recovery or anything like that. You know, definitely the off Label use for pH 1500 is a hangover cure or not. If not a cure then sort of it takes the curse off it. But, but really you know, post race where it's different. It's kind of like post hard training session when you've got to get up and train hard the next day or post a small race where you want to get straight back into training then reversing it. Yeah. Having a strong electrolyte drink as well as all of the, you know, getting some energy down you quickly and that sort of thing is good practice because there's a strong correlation between the amount of sodium that you put in a drink and the amount that gets held onto in the body. You rehydrate faster basically if you, if you put more sodium in your recovery drink.

Fantastic. And what's the worst advice you hear with regards to hydration?

Anything which is like a snappy one liner, you know just. Or a one side like just drink to thirst. It's like. Well yeah, some of the time that's good advice. Some of the time it's appalling advice. So anything that unfortunately can be distilled down into a sound bite is usually wrong for at least some of the people some of the time.

Okay, brilliant. And what about. I always ask people for any book recommendations. I know you've got. You've obviously got a sports science background. Are there any particular books that you find yourself recommending or find yourself, you know, just kind of referring back to that have been really helpful.

The you mentioned Endure by Alex Hutchinson which is kind of getting cliched to recommend that one if you're in our orbit of the world because it. But it's such a good book. It's such, such A brilliant book in terms of like getting under the skin of all the different topics that affect endurance performance. And he has a very good and balanced chapter on hydration in there.

It is a really good book.

Yeah. So that's, I mean, other stuff I read, I read a lot and I'm just trying to think of what, what I've been reading recently that's been interesting. It's not really so much like, it's definitely not on the performance bent, but it's at the top of my mind because I've just finished reading it. There's a book called Burn by Herman Poncer, who's a evolutionary anthropologist and he, he is all about metabolism and how your body's metabolism works. There's a chapter in that, in the latter stage of the book, all about the gut and athletes and how your metabolism especially related to over training and reds, you know, relative energy deficiency and stuff. It's like if you're into performance in the human body, it's a fascinating read in general. So I'd say look that one up if you want to broaden your horizons.

Brilliant. And did you say that was called Burn?

Burn B U R N. All right. As in the. Your metabolism burning?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. And what are you excited about looking forward with, with precision, Precision hydration?

Well, apart from leaving the county of Dorset when we're back out on the road, I think I'm looking forward to. We've got, we've got some exciting new developments with some, some online stuff to help people calculate energy needs. Some energy products not too far away now. So looking at fueling as well as hydration and kind of tying that full picture together because as, as our discussion highlighted today, you kind of can't talk about nutrition or you can't talk about hydration exclusively without straying into fueling. And what we've learned in the last 12 months with being in lockdown a lot of the time, we've been doing a lot of zoom calls with athletes, one to one, talking to them about hydration and planning for their return to racing and stuff. And inevitably those conversations have kind of cruised into the okay, well what do I eat with these drinks type things. Which made us think about all of that and has led to us going through a year of development and stuff. So professionally, that's our next big exciting thing which should be happening in the not too distant future.

Fantastic. And so what products are you bringing out in that, in that range we'll.

Have a little range of different energy type products to the type of stuff that most people are used to. So kind of energy gels and chews and bars and drinks and that sort of thing. But the key thing that will tie them together is the calculators that we're building to work out to help you work out how many grams of carbs and things you would need per hour. Because we very much see that as the secret sauce. A lot of products are marketed in such a way that they have a hydrogel or a Superstarch or something, some key ingredient that is going to supercharge you. And there's always often a bit of decent science or at least biological plausibility behind what these things do. But the reality is we think the basics are important. It's a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You kind of need. Need to take care of the basics first. And the basic one with fueling is like how much you need to take per hour. So we're going to be working with people to, to figure that out.

So is there going to be a similar on time online tool to like your sweat test to, to kind of develop all of those, those three elements?

Absolutely, yeah. That's. So we'll have a couple of different calculators online. We'll have a very quick calculator just to get you started and we'll have a more in depth one for actually planning your entire fueling strategy for a race at some point. So we'll start with the quick calculator and we're building the fueling calculator at the moment.

Fantastic. And will that. And obviously we've talked a bit about how temperature impacts that. Will you be. Will it take. Go to the extent of saying, well, you know, is it a hot race or a cold race? So it'll bring all.

Yeah, yeah, it's going to, it's going to try to bring in all of the elements that might affect either your fluid and electrolyte consumption or your calorie consumption and give you some suggestions on then like, like I said before, getting that sort of trial and error getting, getting you a suggestion offline. So this sounds like the kind of amounts that should work for you. So go off and try it, you know, and tweak it from there.

Fantastic. And one final question was how did the. Unless. Unless Sid's got another question. Oh, you got one.

Okay.

I was going to ask about how you, how you got on with launching your new product of, of the, of the dog hydration, the muddy puddle and the toilet bowl and the shower foot. Tell us how they have Gone.

Well, that, that went. I think that went down on April the first, pretty well with, with some people. And it also. We did have 30 people, I think, unsubscribed from our mailing list that day. So, you know, so we got. We definitely got a few people annoyed with it, which is. Which is good to see. But I think we had a lot of lovely emails, actually, because we don't normally do such jokey stuff. And Dave, who's our marketing director, did put together a funny little campaign there because we have a lot of, obviously a lot of athletes, our dog owners, and we have a few people occasionally asking us and saying, when I go out running, is it safe for my dog to have a bit of this drink because I don't want to carry another bottle or whatever. And it is, apparently we found out, you know, or so we've been advised, you know, by a. By a vet to say, okay, well, yeah, it's not going to hurt the dog drinking that. So we thought we'd launch a range and just for a few hours.

I do actually wonder, like, when you. When I've got friends who've got dogs and we go running with them and we've all got hydration on us, so we've got a, you know, a water bottle or whatever, but the dog, the poor dog hasn't. And then also when you get back from your run, you're instantly refueling and the dog has to wait till the end of the day before they get fed. I'm like, what is this about?

But it seems a bit mean. Well, with the hydration, it is interesting because one or two people did point out to us that obviously dogs don't. The dogs sweat a little bit. They sweat through their paws and stuff, but they mainly lose heat through panting, so they don't sweat a lot. So they're. Although they have hydration needs, they're not as severe. And if you do take a dog running, as you know, they'll stop and drink out of a muddy puddle if they need to.

Yeah, I know from experience of my financial planning company that April Fool's jokes can backfire. I did one a few years ago and up to 12 months afterwards, I was having the odd client saying, did you ever resolve that issue? And, yeah, in the end I just started saying, well, yeah, we kind of managed to kind of iron it out because it became embarrassing telling them that long afterwards.

I think. I think people are so on edge at the moment. Like, it's really like some people just want that instant laughter and relief because Everything's so stressful and up in the air at the moment and other people are so on edge that it's just so serious that they just can't see anything outside of that. I've got a couple of questions, actually. When you were starting precision hydration, your color scheme for your brand, was that inspired by when you were a kid going to that triathlon race and seeing all the fluoro Lycra suits?

No, it could have been. We have the. It's on all our hats and they become quite a signature thing for us actually. And it was my brother who designed this hat for us, which is. Which has become really iconic in our little world. And it came from the fact that we had, we did something different with our drinks. So we had a low medium, a high and a very high strength drink. And we tried every way we could think of to differentiate the products. And traditionally in food and hydration products, obviously different colors offer different flavors. But. And we tried, for instance, having the green color, which is probably our most prevalent color in like a faded through to a very vibrant color. But it was really hard to display it on screens and things like that. So the designer who helped us put it together said something fairly radical at the time and said, let's just do different colours, let's have different. And still now, although all of our drinks are the same flavor and they always have been, we still do get people who say, you know, the thousand one is orange color. And they'll say, well, I'd much prefer the orange one to the lemon, which is because that they taste the same. You know, the suggestive power of the color of whatever the cap is that you pop off the product and put it in. It led me to. This is another good book recommendation, actually. It led me to read this book called Gastrophysics, which is all about the sensory, the sensory way and the way the brain works with regards to dealing with different flavors and textures and how they use it in food science and in the restaurant business to kind of improve foods or improve your experience and that kind of thing. And the power of like a color of a food is so powerful in terms of what your brain tells you it's going to taste like. And so we do have people who say, I like the berry one, which is the 1500 or like the orange one and they're all the same flavor.

That's so brilliant. I didn't know that. So I do remember. It's funny you say that because did. Do you remember when they brought out tomato ketchup in the uk. But they made it green.

Yeah, vaguely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was again that like sense you're going, this tastes like tomato ketchup Heinz, but it's green and it's completely kind of blowing my mind of what it should taste like.

So this is why there's a restaurant in London where you eat in the pitch black, don't you?

That's right. That's talked about in that book a lot. Is it? Yeah.

So you eat in the dark. I bought the experience. One of my team actually. I don't know. I don't know what this is. You've been and done it because it was not long before COVID But yeah, you go, you, you have I think the way all the waiters are blind and they. So they obviously can kind of navigate around and yeah, you eat completely in.

The dark so you don't have that preconception of color.

Yeah, that's what amazed me. And that is a bit of a digression quickly. But what amazed me in that book was even they've done studies on, you know, when you go to a very nice restaurant, they have very heavy cutlery and that sort of thing. Like Michelin star restaurants. Restaurants would always have like super heavy silver cutlery and things like that. Apparently that has a dramatic effect on the sort of perception. They've scientifically tested it. If you serve the same food with like horrible plastic cutlery, people will massively write it down.

The same is the case with wine. If you drink out of an expensively shaped and quality crystal wine glass. All research says the wine suddenly tastes better. You can put, you know, Asda's own in an expensive wine glass and suddenly it gets way better ratings.

Yeah. Maybe we should make like a crystal water bottle.

You can have a really heavy water bottle. I don't think that'll go down well with the triathlete.

So it'd have to be carbon, wouldn't it?

Well, at least we wouldn't be putting more plastic into the world and we don't need any more plastic.

Yeah, go on, Sid.

You look like another question.

Yeah, I have a. I have another question which is again now we're going off on tangents. So I did read somewhere that you did coast to coast, New Zealand and I think was it in 2012 or something like that? Tell us about somewhere back there. It doesn't really matter what dates. So I normally spend half my year in Christchurch where it finishes. And the last couple of years have been down to the finish line and it's definitely A race on my bucket list. I haven't decided whether I want to do the two day event in a team or the. I think eventually kind of the one day event, but I just can't kayak or paddle yet. So. Yeah, but you did it. Tell us kind of about how did that come about and how was the, how was the race?

Well, do you remember Trans World Sport on a Saturday morning? Yeah. Yeah. So if you probably. What, what do you reckon? If you're more than 30 years old and listening to this or 35 years old, you might remember Transworld Sport. We used to watch all these crazy things and I remember seeing Steve Gurney win the coast to coast race and seeing him paddle across the, you know, paddling down the river in this cool looking boat and it was biking and mountain running and I was like, this is cool, this is really cool. I want to do that one day. But like you, I was like, can do the running no problem, do the biking no problem. Paddling down like serious grade rapids in a tippy kayak for 70km didn't seem like my thing. But when I return, when I stopped doing Ironman, I actually injured my knee quite badly and ended up having surgery. And so I was, I was sat on my backside for quite a while and bought a kayak and started paddling with sort of half an eye on thinking, well, if I get back to doing stuff, it could involve boats and adventure. I've always fancy to go adventure races. And then I went on a kayaking course in Sweden because bizarrely in Sweden they have a very similar type of river to what you get in New Zealand. It's called a braided river, which is on like pebbly sort of thing. And the river goes off in lots of different fingers and sort of rejoins. And that's just like the one in, in New Zealand that you paddle down. So I went on this course which is run by a New Zealander out there, which is preparation for learning to paddle that kind of water. And I've got my little certificate for doing that and everything and then thought, you know, eventually I'm going to go, go do this. And when it had a go and it is a mega race.

Did you do the one day, the longest day?

Yeah, yeah. And the logistics is savage. You know, I put a message back on a message board, an extra message board in New Zealand, just saying, can anyone help me? I'm going to fly in from the UK and like I could do with a hand in this absolutely amazing bloke with two guys, John Crombie and Mark Frisby, who became really good friends of mine, jumped in. They'd both done the race before and John was like, yep, we'll crew you. They drove me around. They did the. They drove my girlfriend and I around and like showed us the river and took us over the mountain run in the days before. Stayed at his house for a few days and such lovely people. And it was like one of the best trips I've ever done in my life.

And where. And where do you. Where do you go from and to you start.

I forgot the name of the beat. I should know the name of the beach where you start. Grangemouth, I think it. I think it might be. Yeah, Grangemouth. And you finish in Christchurch. So you literally start on the beach virtually with one foot in the ocean. You do a tiny little run of about 4k or something, then it's about.

60K on the bar at breakneck speed at sprinting someone who's it off the start line from what I've heard.

Well, I did a. I did a classic there and was pretty keyed up and I was running quite reasonably well and I thought I'm going to try and make the front group on the bike and because there's always usually a little splinter group that goes off and so I was running in the front group, running along and it's in the dark because you're starting really early. And I got there and I was in amongst Richard Usher, who's won it loads of times. And these are the guys I thought, yeah, I'm going to be able to get in this group and go. And then in the dark ran straight past my own bike and just like ran all the way up to the end of the bike start to turn around and go back and ended up in no man's land. And I was actually probably. I'd bitten off more than I could chew anyway riding with those guys because they beasts anyway. But so I ended up in the second pack on the bike and sort of went on from there. But it was, it was still. You know, it was a. It was a. It's a huge day out. It's.

Did you have the. The traditional typical headwind on that long straight road and the final bike back.

On the bike ride. Yeah, we had a bit of. Yeah. To contend.

Longest straightest road in New Zealand, I think.

Yeah. And I just. I remember just having my head down and trying to. I was trying to get warm because I'd got so cold in the boat actually.

So to give. To give come. So I Think it's. I'm just. I've just googled Kumara Beach I think is right.

Yeah.

And so like this. So yeah, like we said, it goes from the west to the east coast of New Zealand on the South Island. You have a short couple of K run, then you jump on a bike which is a rope. This is for the one day event. So the first bike is road bike.

I think time trial.

Bike time trial. But you can ride in a pack, can't you?

That's right, yeah.

First bit.

Yeah.

And it's. I'm gonna say 40k or something like that.

I think it might be. Yeah, my memory is bad. But it might be 40 miles or 60k or something like that. It's in that zone. A couple of hours of riding basically.

And then you get off the bike and then you do the mountain run over the pass which again is. It's just shy. Is it 30K? I think it's just shy of a marathon.

18 miles. Yeah.

Rocky. Navigating rivers still, all that sort of thing. Then you jump in the kayak and.

You do another bike ride. First there's just 20. There's a 20K or 15K. Another bike. Yeah. Then you. Then you're in the kayak and you're.

In the kite for about 70k down the river. And then you have to. Which is about. I'm guessing, I'm thinking for the pros it's still about four hours of sitting in that kayak. Kayak. And then you get out and you have again a kind of. Oh gosh, what is it, 80k or something like that? Yeah, and that's TT non drafting again for the one like right to the finish and.

Yeah, and like a 50 yard run just at the end.

Yeah, yeah. And. And I don't know because. Did you finish in Sumner when you did it, were you in New Brighton? Yes. So now they've changed it. They've changed the finish to New Brighton and they've put sand onto the car park area, which is fine. But the last. And people can't see this obviously because it's audio, not zoom. But I'm pointing up to the finish line now is this steep sand hill or bank. So not only have the athletes just done all of that, they get off their bike still in their shoes because there's something about multi eventors that leave their helmets on and their shoes on when they get off their bike running through the sand down the finish line and then have to go up this like literally wall to the finish line. But It's. But it's epic. Yeah, it's super good. Would you go back and do it again, or is it.

You know. In a heartbeat. I'd do it again. I mean, not, not to. Not for competitive reasons, but just for an excuse to go and. Yeah. And get involved. Yeah. If you get the chance, you should definitely do it because it's. It's mega.

I think I want to go and. I think I want to go and crew for somebody doing it. So you, like, you get. Because like, like we just said, those logistics of moving equipment around and that sort of thing, and then. Yeah, probably give it.

Do you know. Do you know Dougal Allen, who's based out there? Yeah, I thought you might do, because Dougal actually uses our products. He's a. He's quite a lot and because he's. He found them really beneficial. But Dougal won it in 2021. He's won it a couple of times and he's. He's a monster. But he'd. Yeah, he'd been a man to teach because you have to learn a bit about the river and even on the run, there's like, different routes you can take.

Yeah.

Local knowledge is powerful.

Yeah. Yeah. I definitely have to get back out there and spend some. Get. Get Dougal and even Brayden Curry, he's another. Another multi eventer, triathlete and stuff. He's raced it and get them to. Yeah. Teach me how to. Teach me how to kayak.

This sounds like. This sounds like a race that's going on my bucket list as well. Like, it wasn't on there before, but it sounds fantastic.

Fantastic.

And, and it's like you said, it's just, oh, I'm massively biased about New Zealand. But like you said, your experience, you put a message up on the board of saying, hey, we're coming over. Can anyone help? And a couple of Kiwis. They're so friendly and they just want to help show you around and support you race.

It's brilliant. Yeah. Charlie, get it. Get it on your list for sure.

Well, it's an amazing part of the.

World, isn't it, when we can travel again. When New Zealand decide to open their borders.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

Which might not be anytime soon. They're quite protective, aren't they? Andy, it's been an absolute pleasure. I've learned huge amounts on this podcast, so thank you so much for your time. Where's the best place for people to find out more about you?

And all the usual stuff, just precisionhydration.com go onto the website you can contact us. We're a small team, there's 13 of us. We answer every single email. We do a bit on social media, all the usual places. We usually apply precision hydration. I think on Twitter we're at the Sweat Experts. Just because you can't fit Precision hydration on a Twitter name and people. The best thing is if people got questions email hello@precision hydration.com because that's what that's JP our head of customer service and the team are on there all around the clock and doing a great job, you know. So if people have got questions and want to interact with us they can do that and they can book video calls as well. So if anyone's got questions if stuff, that's. If stuff's kind of like resonated with them in our chat but they think I want to know about what I should do then book. I'd say book a one to one video call with us. It's free and there's sort of kind of no hidden obligations or anything. You just have a chat with us and we'll see if we can help you out.

And I really thought that the online sweat test was very good but I've also haven't talked about at all. But I also did your training Peaks University course. So if people want to learn a bit more then I can put a link in the in the show notes to that which is. Which I thought was really useful. So yeah. So Andy, it's been an absolute pleasure, thank you so much for your time. Great for you to join us as always Sid as well. And yeah, I look forward to hearing more about these exciting new products that are going to come to market soon.

Absolutely. Looking out in a letterbox near you soon Charlie, I reckon.

You can find out more about Andy and precision hydration@precision hydration.com and if you use the discount Code Tribeathlon at the checkout then that will give you 15% off your first order of electrolytes. So that's the discount Code Tribeathlon at the checkout and you'll get 15% off. They also do free one to one calls so you can book a Sweat expert call. That's the details for that is again at Precision Hydration but I'll put the link in specifically to that in the show notes. There's some really interesting blog articles on their website as well. Things like how to start hydrated and why that's so important. Why do athletes suffer from cramp? Are you a salty sweater? Some of those. So you might Want to check those out@precision hydration.com and then finally, if you. I mentioned the on demand Science of Endurance hydration course with Training Peaks University. If you use the discount code podcast15, you'll also get 15% off that.

So, Charlie, that was fascinating chat with Andy, but what did you take away from. Away from that?

I thought it was a brilliant chat with Andy and I took loads away from it, I think, as I said right at the start, you know, we. We speak a lot about nutrition and we speak a lot about different aspects of training, but hydration is such a fundamental part of everything we do when it comes to endurance events, and yet we talk about it very, very little. And I really love the part where we talk getting a better understanding of the ratio between carbs, fluids and salts and understanding how you can. How that needs to change over the course of different events. You know, if you're doing, as he said, if you're doing Texas versus the Norseman, you're going to need a very different strategy for the. For the fluids and the salts, but not so much for the carbs. And so I thought that was really interesting and I really, I'm really keen to go and do the proper sweat test because I think the online sweat test is really good. But what I struggled with that was really understanding, you know, like, am I a high sweater? I think I am, but I've never really monitored anybody else's sweat, if I'm honest. So therefore it's quite difficult to know whether. And that probably comes back to what Andy said, actually, in the sense of the fact that the more experienced and athlete you are, probably the better the online test is, because you can answer those questions better than some muppet like me that doesn't really know what's going on. So I thought there was loads to learn. And I'm also really interested to see and try their fuel products because of this approach of kind of, you know, being more scientific about that ratio. So I'm really keen to see what that online product looks like. But what did you take from the conversation?

Yeah, I think, like you said, like, that you know, the difference between what you need for a. A cold race versus a hotter race and how you adapt your training, but also then what you need for a short race compared to that long endurance race. Um, and actually, I, I was only thinking of it about it from a triathlon perspective, but the fact he talked about those in ultra endurance, you know, the endurance runners who are through, you know, probably starting in the morning, and it's Cold going through heat of the desert and then back to like really sub zero temperatures potentially and how you change your hydration strategy around that. And I, but I think the key message for me is, is just, and very much like training, there's no one answer. Like there isn't one answer. One size fits all. It is very individual and it does take a little bit of time and effort and a little bit of understanding to, to do the sweat testing or to understand your body to trial. And er, because even I think when what he was saying that, yeah, the sweat testing will give you a result but you've still got to tweak it. You know, I liked his analogy to the bike fit. You, you can get the bike fit and the numbers and the eye of the bike fitter will give you a position but you still got to get outside and ride that and just make those adjustments and tweak it and then be able to run off the back of it as well kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I, I remember when I first started cycling so long before I did a triathlon, somebody said to me having electrolytes is almost more important than eating. So all I did was just, you know, I've just always had an electrolyte tablet. But there's been zero science to the approach. Whereas, you know, I kind of think back to some of the podcasts that we've done with so like the interview with Laura Penhall and also the one with Dr. Emma Ross and it was all about, you know, trying to be more specific to the athlete bespoke plans as opposed to one size fits for all. You know, I can't remember where I heard the joke, but the average person has one testicle and one ovary. But that doesn't mean that it actually there is ever a person wandering around with that. So. So actually kind of being much more specific to your own sweat and your own kind of salt loss and then kind of designing a plan based on that makes a huge amount of sense to me.

Yeah, no, it was great. Really good.

So lots to learn and some experimentation I think to do to find out whether I, yeah. Whether I'm using the right strategy or not. But great to chat to you as always, Sid. Keep up the amazing training and for everybody else, yeah, keep on training too. And remember, this podcast is brought to you by Brits Superfoods. You can find out more@britsuperfoods.co.uk but if you use the link in the show notes or you use the Referral code of Tribeathlon, you'll get 10% off your orders. You'll get a free bag of juices worth £15 with every order. And those will happen forever as long as you buy from BritSuperfood. With that having started with that referral code, you'll get those forever. In addition to that, you'll also benefit from that 110% money back guarantee. So if you don't see the value in it, then then you can. They'll give you your money back and an extra 10%. So go check out the link in the show notes or go to BritSuperfoods.co.uk and use the referral code Tribeathlon and you'll get that 10% off free shipping and free juice on every order. And don't forget to download the tribathlon app for more amazing podcasts, but also to help you train, compete, and to build your tribe.