Vigorous exercise drops your blood volume by 8-10% in minutes. Drink 3,000-4,300 mg of sodium in a liter of water before intense activity to counteract it. NASA developed this for astronauts after re-entry; athletes use it before NFL games and UFC fights.
So essentially when you start exercising, you're now shifting blood to working muscle, the skeletal muscle, and then you're also shifting blood to the skin to then dissipate heat and you're losing volume when you sweat to cool off. So there's not only a true drop in volume because you are, you have to sweat water to cool the body off, but there's now a shift in blood that used to go to the heart. That is now having to go to the skeletal muscle. So there's a relative drop in blood volume now feeding the heart. So there's this massive just depletion of blood volume within 5 to 10 minutes of 8 to 10%, essentially when you measure it in the arterial supply, cuz it's now going into the skeletal muscle, into the skin. You have to boost blood volume by 8 to 10% so you don't get the drop that occurs within 5 to 10 minutes. And the way to do that is to take salt and fluids in a fairly high concentration, essentially a concentration that's very similar similar to blood, which is ironic. And we actually learned how to do this through astronauts. This would— there's a really interesting story here on, on hydration, and it's when we send astronauts into outer space for several days, because there's no gravity, their blood volume drops. So when they, upon reentry into the Earth's atmosphere and the gravity, they have this low blood volume. It was causing astronauts to pass out. So NASA had to figure out how to boost blood volume 2 hours before reentry. And really a lot of the data actually comes from that. It's kind of interesting. Wow.
And basically the fluid that is in something like this, 32 ounces of water, and I put one of these packets in there, will do that. In essence, is this kind of, you said it's like getting the ratio down to what blood is to some degree. It does not taste like blood, but in essence it gives you the same. It's almost like a transfusion, right? Is that what it? I mean, it sounds like we're vampires here, but is it like a transfusion? Right. It really does give us that edge.
It 100% does. This is again to acutely boost performance, but essentially between 3,000 and 4,300 milligrams of sodium per 26 to 33.8 ounces respectively. So 33.8 ounces is a liter of fluid and 4,300 milligrams has been tested as probably the best way to boost blood volume. That's now pretty high. A lot of people would say, wow, that's really high. You don't have to do that though. Before regular typical exercise. This is okay. I have an NFL game or I have a UFC fight. You want to be consuming the 3,000 to 4,000 milligrams of sodium in that amount of fluid and adding glycine to that can actually improve the absorption of salt and decrease core body temperature as well.
