SODIUM Truths & Myths | Wellness Force #Podcast

If you've gone in a sauna and you get lightheaded afterwards, you're low on salt. You're literally low on salt.

You're low on salt and water. And this is. I maybe skipped this in the beginning. Somewhere along the line, hydration became synonymous with water, but it is not, if you look in a textbook of medical physiology. Hydration is water and electrolytes and the electrolytes in specific ratios. And if you just add water, you end up in a hyponatremic state, a low sodium state. And this is actually a beautiful bridge for like the, say, like your hand swelling and stuff like that. Most people will be familiar with, like going hiking and they drink water. They drink water and they're sweating. They've got a backpack on, so you're sweating. Like, even if it's cool outside, you're sweating like crazy. At that interface between the backpack and your body, what do your hands do? They swell like crazy. And it's because virtually no one supplements with sodium. We are actually getting into a hyponatremic state. And when our sodium levels are low, we will tend to get edema and swelling. This is where the feet will swell, the hands will swell and the brain will swell. This is what kills people when they over hydrate. Like whether it's, you know, a fraternity or sorority, like hazing event where they have to drink a lot of water, or a people are doing marathons or triathlons and they're mainly hydrating or, you know, consuming water or inadequate electrolyte levels, these people can get sick and potentially die because the potassium levels get out of balance with the sodium. And we start getting water infiltrating into the tissues and this is where we get edema. So this is one of these really easy experiments. Like if people are used to doing a hike or a run and they hydrate just with water and they get some hand swelling. The next time, do pickle juice, do element, do something like that and notice how your hands don't swell. So this is that, that inner, you know, where we go from like hypertension and the mechanisms that are going on there and then take a bridge over to this kind of edema and swelling that we experience from really doing too much water and too little sodium. I could make the case that in general, people would be better off just not consuming water or being much more conservative in consuming water. If they don't have sodium or adequate electrolytes around, you will disorder the electrolytes less than what you would otherwise. And also, one quick aside when we sweat, we mainly excrete sodium. We don't really excrete potassium, we don't really excrete magnesium. There is a little bit, but it's orders of magnitude different. So in that high sweat scenario, a sauna, exercise, ruck, marching, stuff like that, you need to mainly focus on sodium. This is where over the time course of a week or a month, yes, we need sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphates, bicarbonate, all of the electrolytes. But in that time course of like a hard physical event or sauna, the main problem is the rapid and significant loss of sodium. So that is another reason why you really have to target that.

I love that. Everybody rewind that. Listen to that again because question that came up for me was is it matter pre peri or post when you take in the sodium? Like let's say you are going to do like for example on the, on the Vision Quest, Rob, we did the Native American sweat lodge and it's like hours of praying and singing. I mean we are. I definitely needed some element there. We weren't allowed to have it because it was traditional. Right. But it would have been amazing if I could have had some, some element in the sweat lodge. Does it matter preparing or post the timing of the salt for recovery?

It does, and for kind of different reasons. So interestingly, there's a lot of benefits for sauna in general and they're very parallel to exercise. Like one of the interesting effects is if the sauna is adequately warm, you know, like 180 degrees. And some of the infrared saunas can, can produce similar effects, but it's an elevated heart rate. Like the heart rate can be 141.

It's cardiovascular health as well.

It is, it is doing low intensity cardio without physical exercise. And there are clear cardiovascular benefits to this that works only if you have adequate blood volume and electrolytes to allow the heart to pump at a reasonable rate. When the blood volume drops too far, then the heart rate spikes and that's where you're done. Like you're, you're, you're absolutely done. You get that panic response and you've got to get out of there. So like if you want an effective sauna, you want to be well hydrated, which means body fluid and electrolytes because they're inseparable, you got to have both of them. So if you really want the most bang for your buck out of a sauna session, which is mainly being able to stay in there longer and longer periods of time because we get more of the heat shock proteins and we get more of that cardiovascular training effect. You want to be properly hydrated so that you can stay in there as long as you possibly can. When we do physical activity, if we want a training response, we need to be able to stay in there as long as we can and to do as much work as we can at as low of a stress response is what we can manifest. So again, that's where like the pre hydration, the pre event, you know, getting adequate sodium and electrolytes is critical. The backside of that is really interesting and you know, we've just only recently been getting some studies looking at this. But adequate post training or post stress sodium dramatically enhances recovery. And there's a ton of different, you know, mechanisms for why. But one of the things that that sodium, adequate sodium levels, what it affects is cortisol release because it's less of a stress. If our body's getting adequate sodium, it's kind of a signal that like we're cool, we're getting adequate nutrition, we have the resources we need to be able to recover. So that, that pre event is really important. Depending on the duration of the event, being able to stay on top of that and stay properly hydrated, which again, can't emphasize enough, isn't just water. It's water and electrolytes. And then on the recovery side, you know, we're definitely looking at that too. You know, adequate sodium and electrolytes is a critical feature of this whole thing. And I'll give folks maybe a practical example. When I go to jiu jitsu, I have a pretty good sized tankard. I think it's 36 ounces of water. And I do two elements in that. And that is what I drink going to the gym. And that's what I drink during the hour of technique work and drilling, which will vary in intensity. It's usually, it can be pretty intense, but it's usually kind of variable intensity because there's Q and a and whatnot. But I'll work my way through that, through the drive there and I'll try to finish that by the end of the first hour of class. Then the second hour of class is open mat. And then in that second hour of class, I have about an 18 ounce mug that I, I put one packet of element in and I will hammer maybe a third of that immediately before rolling. And then maybe every third or fourth roll, every 15 to 20 minutes, I will go over and do about another third, another third. Got it. And, and that will usually then get me home. And I'm almost 50 now.

And, like, that's hard to believe, man. You don't seem like you're 50.

They keep dipping me in formaldehyde, you know.

Young soul.

Yeah. But when I was trying to do training like this 10 plus years ago, I was just crushed. Like, I was absolutely smashed, you know. And it was. I think it was mainly because I wasn't properly addressing electrolytes, you know. And the other part of this is for a variety of health reasons, gut issues, blood sugar regulation, I do best at a lower carb intake. And so if I was eating more carbs, I maybe wouldn't need as much supplemental sodium because my body is retaining more sodium. So my. My sodium needs might not have been as great, but because I was low carb and high motor, like, it was a huge deal. I would be laid out for like two days after a training session. Whereas now, like, I was rolling with Andy Stumpf, you know, the retired Navy Seal, the cleared hot podcast fame. He's a big, strong dude, and he just like, murders me. And I definitely feel it that day. But I play with the kids where, you know, the rest of the day I'm functional. Whereas 10 years ago, if I did a session like that, I was done. Like, I couldn't get off the couch. I was totally laid out. So this pre peri and then post supplementation is really important to. To be on point with if you want to optimize the whole. It.