Kurt Bovnik shares a simple prehydration formula for heat training: mix 3/4 teaspoon sea salt per 500 mL water, drink 10 mL per kilogram of body weight over 60 minutes, finishing 30 minutes before you start. Add sugar if you want better taste and absorption.
Hey there, it's Kurt Bovnik from Vancouver here. It's our first really hot weekend of the year. We got a little mini heat wave going and a lot of people are going to be heading out this weekend, training in the heat, going for the long rides or their long runs. And I wanted to share with you a really simple and effective method to pre hydrate and sodium load before we head out on those long training sessions. Now, if you're going out for a short one, you don't have to worry about doing this. But this is designed more for those, you know, hour and a half, two hour training sessions or longer in the heat. All you need is some salt. So I've just got some sea salt that I've ground up and water. Those are the main, those are the two ingredients. And then you need some measuring spoons to accurately measure the amount and a measuring cup again to actually accurately measure the fluid. So we're going to use 500 milliliters of fluid, maybe more. But we start with 500 milliliters. So that's two cups or 16 ounces. And what you want to do is take three quarters of a teaspoon of salt, dump that into the water and mix it in until it's fully dissolved. So it's three quarters of a teaspoon of salt to 500 milliliters of water. And you can put that in the fridge and cool that a few hours or overnight. Now, you may want a bit more of that because the amount that you want to drink to calculate that is take your body weight in kilograms and multiply it by 10 and that will give you the amount of fluid you want to consume in milliliters. So in my case, I'm about 80 kilograms. I want to drink about 800 milliliters of this fluid before I head out for a long training session or in the heat or a race. Now, it is going to be, not surprising, pretty salty tasting. What you can do is add maybe a quarter or half a teaspoon of sugar for every 500ml of fluid as well. And that'll just help cut that salt taste a little bit. And it might help a little bit with the absorption of the water into the bloodstream. And you want to take this about starting at 90 minutes prior to your training session or your event and over the next hour. So finishing 30 minutes prior to your event or training sessions. That's. So take an hour to drink that starting at 90 minutes before your training session beginning or your race beginning. Okay, so you don't want to drink it all in one gulp, you want to split that out in equal amounts. So depending on how much you're drinking, you know, like I said in my case, 800 milliliters, I want to split that up and taking Drinking some fluid every 5, 10 minutes would be good in about equal amounts. So this is just one of the strategies I talk about in my personal best nutrition course. You can find out more information about that@corning.com but it's a course designed for endurance athletes to really teach you optimal fueling and optimal hydration strategies as well as how to eat better for optimal performance and for health as well and for weight loss if that's one of the things you one of your goals. So check that out on Coreine.com Anyway, give this hydration strategy a go before you head out training in the heat and hopefully it works well for you. Remember, try it in racing. Try it in training first before you do it on race day because you always want to experiment with something in training before Dulan race and have a great summer racing season.
