"Start drinking your intra-workout fuel in the first minute of training. The first step. The first stroke. The first pedal stroke. Right away.

Start right away, or even a moment before you start activity, just to 'crack the seal' so to speak. This practice sets you up for better recovery long-term, and much better training quality becuase of optimal hydration and optimal blood sugar levels throughout every session."

The custom product page is where you can create and curate your own list of products, food items, custom beverages that you want to consume during training. It's like a pantry to pull from for all your recipe-building exploits in the future.

"This is your chance to fine tune your fuel plans and the strategy the app takes when it's writing your fuel & hydration.

The two most popular things to tweak are the max carbs slider and the satiety setting. Just tap each setting to find out more within each page of personalization options.

If you ever have any doubt about how to set things up, your intuition is always the best place to start. You can also contact us any time from the ""Get Answers"" option in your main menu."

"Saturday is here to make your life simpler, and there is a simple answer here:

1. Roughly average the intensities you'll experience throughout the session to choose your intensity.

2. Use your intuition.

3. Don't overthink it.

Really and truly, you don't need to do all sorts of complex calculations. Our testing has shown that Saturday users that just honestly go by feel and intuition tend to do very well selecting their workout intensities how Saturday intends them to, and end up performing well in training, day in, and day out.

How is this possible? Saturday was designed to meet you where you are, and there is a ton of complex science and math built into the app to enable you to trust yourself.

You're human. You have intuition, hunches, feelings, emotions, complex thoughts and feelings that can't always be expressed through rational calculations. It turns out that just rating your training how you intuitively think you should, and intentionally NOT making up any algorithmic mathematical rules for how you're going to calculate which intensity to select, works better, in many cases, than figuring it out mathematically.

The reason why it works so well, and even better than complex mathematical modeling? Humans are wildly inefficient machines, and we happen to burn through carbs at lightning speed when we experience a workout with surges or sporadic high effort in it. The more sporadic and spiky our effort is in training, the more our intuition improves as the guiding deciding factor for intensity selection. Our intuition picks up on things like rapid glycogen burn, and acid accumulation in your legs, and you don't need complex math to tell you that it's going to be a more intense workout."

"The Saturday app provides you the total amount of sodium, carbohydrate, and water you need. Once you're given those numbers, Saturday helps you figure out how to build a recipe to match the recommendations.

Most users do some combination of their favorite powdered beverage product plus a little modification with kitchen ingredients. We call those kitchen ingredients Speed Nectar. And yes, you could use just those. But we think it tastes better when you add Speed Nectar to your favorite product(s).

If you want to be a little fancier, you can add solids and gels too. Just tap ""add product!""

Tap the plus & minus buttons for each of your your products and watch us do the math for you!

We adjust Speed Nectar ingredients all the way down to zero to balance out your recipe, so that at any point, you could take everything listed on the screen, and dump and go.

Once you've got your recipe arranged in Saturday, it's time to pour it into your bottles. You can split it up evenly among all your bottles or do what Alex & Michelle (Saturday's Founders) do, and make at least one of your bottles contain only fresh water, while others are a bit more concentrated. Chasing with fresh water is good for your teeth. :)"

"Saturday was made for you! To access the triathlon feature, tap add activity on the home screen. Then, if you see big white button with a swimmer, a biker, and a runner on it, give it a tap! If you don't see that button yet, then tap the 3-dots button, and you'll see the triathlon button appear.

From there, just follow the steps and do what Saturday tells you to. It will help you every step of the way. Get ready to crush your big day!"

"If you're using at least 50% Speed Nectar for your fuel, you're guaranteed to fall in the optimal range of 2:1 to 1:1 glucose to fructose ratio.

If you're on the nerdier end of things, and you want to target a very specific glucose:fructose ratio, like say 1:0.8, stay tuned for features in the future that help you dial it in even further, with all the specificity and ease of optimization you can dream up!

Maybe you can even join our beta testing user group and be one of the first to test that feature and many more, as we roll them out.

In the meantime, if you want to get closer to 1:0.8, or 1:1, use a great proportion of plain sugar. (or, yes, you can add fructose too, but that's unnecessary complexity and cost, in our humble opinion.)"

"First, it sets a hard cap at how much carbohydrate per hour Saturday will ever recommend for you.

Second, it helps scale carbs upwards or downwards, because we know that folks who don't mind 130 grams of carbs per hour are probably the same folks who want to consume a bit more carbohydrate for most activities in general.

And if you decide to set your carb max slider to 80 grams per hour, we'll trust that sometimes you want much less than that when it's less important.

We don't always prescribe the maximum, because there are actually only a few very specific scenarios where the maximum hourly carb intake a person can handle, is ever recommended."

"The fueling concerns are your way to tell Saturday ""this is something I'd like you to pay special attention to."" You can select them because they're important for you to focus on, or because they represent problem areas for you in the past.

Each of the fueling concerns you has a specific effect on your fuel & hydration recommendations. Sometimes, they're imperceptible, and other times you'll notice things like ""oh, Saturday recommended I drink a bit more water and consume a bit more sodium than normal"" because you selected something like ""heat tolerance,"" for example.

Good, sound fuel & hydration recommendations will always be the foundation for Saturday's recommendations for you, but this is your place to tell Saturday a bit more about what you'd like specific help conquering.

If you notice that you change a setting, and nothing seems to be happening to Saturday's recommendations for you, it might just simply be because Saturday has determined that you're already very well covered for that specific concern, and that no fueling changes are needed in the specific cases you checked. Some concerns matter more at various durations, intensities, and sweat levels, so just rate things as honestly and intuitively as you can, and Saturday will take care of the rest!"

"The Performance selection basically unlocks all the features of Saturday that mean your fuel and hydration will be optimized to help you go faster in training or racing, and not merely ""be able to complete it."" It might mean a little higher carbs, a little more sodium, and a little more water, to better match your energy burn and sweat rates.

Selecting Performance as a concern tells us that you care about your training and/or racing outcomes. You're here, at least in part, because you'd like to go faster. You're not purely in this for the experience or the health of it. You also like optimize things to perform your best.

What it doesn't mean is that you're willing to sacrifice your health for performance. Saturday would never let you do that! It just means that when the clock is running, or the race is on, you probably care at least a little bit about how you're measuring up compared to others or even just compared to your past self.

You don't have to select this option, and many Saturday users don't. It just depends on what's important to you! If you are a Saturday member because every time you exercise you get an upset stomach or feel terrible, and you really aren't interested in going faster, then you might just want to feel better during endurance exercise, and unselecting performance might just be the ticket!"

"The Gut Distress concern, when selected, adds a few more checks and balances to make sure you have good gut comfort during all your training and racing. It performs more stringent concentration checks, and sets lower absolute maxes for carbs, sodium, and water.

For most folks, they don't need this toggled on, and Saturday still makes sure they've got a comfortable gut.

But if you've had some gut distress issues in the past, have experienced diarrhea, stomach or intestine cramps, nausea, etc, it might be a good idea for you to toggle on the Gut Distress concern, and let Saturday smoothe things out for you.

What Gut Distress is checked, it will reduce the peak carb concentrations allowed, and the peak sodium concentrations, and won't push the limits on carbs, sodium or water, that it recommends per hour, especially for very hot, very intense activities. Gut Distress toggle on might not do much to affect short, easy, thermally unchallenged activities. But it will have a big effect on longer, more intense activities, especially if you select a high sweat selection for that particular activity. The Gut Distress toggle just reins in the extremes of Saturday's recommendations to be extra safe.

Another thing you can do to make sure gut comfort is always good, in addition to toggling on the Gut Distress concern, is usually use sodium citrate as your primary sodium source. Check out the FAQ about sodium citrate for more info about why."

"The Heat Tolerance concern is a great one to select if you've frequently been that person who just struggles to feel like yourself in the heat. It's also great setting to toggle on if you live in a cold environment but are going to go do an event in a very hot or humid environment. Since you live in the cold, and train in the cold, you're not well heat acclimatized. Toggling on Heat Tolerance means Saturday will give you your best fighting chance to come out of the heat unscathed.

The Heat Tolerance concern in the 'on' position tends to mean a little higher sodium and water recommendations for the same activity. In extreme conditions, like if it's 'on' and you also rate an upcoming activity as a very sweaty one, and with higher intensity, it might even slightly reduce carb consumption to help you prioritize staying hydrated at all costs. It's usually a subtle but meaningful effect.

If you ever see your carbs go down a bit for a hotter activity, it's probably because Saturday is trying to protect you from dehydration, and making sure that your gut can continue to function well enough to absorb the carbs that you ARE intaking. If you were to get dehydrated, carb absorption ability drops fast!"

"The Muscle Cramps concern primarily increases sodium intake, if you put it in the 'on' position. It only increases sodium intake when Saturday thinks you're likely to experience cramps, not for all activities, all the time.

Why does sodium intake matter?

Cramps are usually caused by one of two things, or the interplay between them:

1. Sodium loss and electrolyte issues, sometimes related to dehydration or overhydration.

2. Fatigue from training/racing beyond one's current work capacity or fitness level.

The more electrolytes and hydration are mis-managed, the less fatigue it takes to cause cramps.  One in the absence of the other must be pretty extreme to cause cramping.  

So, when you indicate that you'd like help avoiding muscle cramps by toggling this one 'on,' Saturday gives you a bit more sodium, (and maybe a bit more carbs and water too, to avoid fatigue), especially for higher intensity and longer/hotter training where muscle cramping seems to be the most prevalent."

"If you ever get faint or lightheaded, or foggy brained, for seemingly no reason at all during training, definitely push this toggle to the 'on' position.

The main reason people end up getting faint in training is dehydration. Sometimes it's caused by insufficient sodium to retain adequate blood volume. Other times it's caused by insufficient drinking. And yet more times, it's caused by a combination of both.

Faintness not linked to hypoglycemia (blood sugar crash), is usually the result of hypotension, aka: low blood pressure. Specifically, low blood pressure to the head. It's usually nothing serious in non-extreme cases, but it certainly doesn't feel fun, and it's not performance-promoting.

Toggling this concern to the 'on' position increases the sodium and water recommendations, so you'll have better offsetting of any fluid loss in sweat, and you'll retain your all-important blood plasma volume better. Forgot what plasma is? Its the watery part of your blood, and it's what allows the red blood cells to flow nicely to your brain, where they can keep you awake with fuel and oxygen to your working brain cells. When your hypotensive, because of reductions in blood volume over the course of a training session, the result is you feel woozy, faint, lightheaded, or foggy. More water is the quick fix, and more sodium is the sustainer. You need both. And that's what this feature does for you!"

"If you're getting hungry during training, it means you're usually burning enough that you're falling way WAY behind on calorie (carb!) consumption during training.

If you select Hunger During Training, you'll get slightly higher carb intake recommendations. Don't worry, we'll always keep it healthy, and ALWAYS stay under whatever you select for your carb slider maximum. :)"

"The 'Thirst during training' concern is a pretty straightforward one. If you routinely find yourself thirsty in training, you either need to drink more, or consume more sodium. The reason you might simply need more sodium is becauase you can get thirsty because your blood isn't retaining all the fluid you're consuming! It's a catch twenty two!

So, when you push the Thirst During Training to the 'on' position, you'll get a little more water, and a little more sodium for all your training sessions, especially those where Saturday predicts you're the most likely to run behind on staying hydrated."

"The satiety vs. performance slider is all about telling Saturday how much you value being able to eat higher volume foods outside of training, vs. how much you like to max out your fuel intake during training so that you're always primed and ready for race day. Usually the more competitive-minded someone is, the more they'll opt for the ""Performance"" side of things. For someone who has a history of weight maintenance or weight loss struggle, or who might struggle with portion control outside of training, it's sometimes better to choose satiety management.

If you're actively in a weight loss phase, trying to lose weight now, then choosing the most ""Satiety"" oriented option is a good idea. This allows you to eat a bit more whole food outside of training, and feel more satiated (full and satisfied, aka ""having good satiety""). Side note! If you're working on losing weight or trimming up, it's probably a good idea to be consulting a professional like a registered dietitian who can help guide the how, how much, when, and why, you want to lose weight. It's a very common trap for endurance athletes to be overly concerned with weight loss and not concerned enough with fueling their training.

When you push the satiety setting to the most satiety-oriented selection, you'll notice that for the shortest and easiest activities, you get much less fuel during training. But for the longer and harder activities, you're still provided plenty of fuel to perform at your best.

When you've got it all the way biased as far towards perforamance as possible, you'll notice that you're probably getting pretty high carb fueling recommendations all the time.

Until Saturday has a calendar of your race events and a feature to help gut train you, you can actually use this feature as your way to get trained up for a race, so that you're ready to consume high carbs with good gut comfort on race day. As you approach the race, shift the selection more towards performance. Then, after the race, if you typically have a more satiety-oriented selection, move it right back!

Fun fact: Saturday's two founders use very different settings here! Alex has his set to satiety management because he doesn't mind going a little lower on carbs during easy & shorter training sessions. And Michelle likes to fuel up like the boss that she is, so she usually has hers set closer to Performance."

Sometimes you just don't want to eat or drink in training or racing. If this is an experience that resonates with you, select this option. It will try to keep you better hydrated so that food tolerance and beverage clearance will be more comfortable. And don't forget to start fueling early and often. The biggest reason folks end up not wanting to consume much at the end of a very long activity is that they slacked on their fueling & hydration early in the activity and now their gut isn't very happy with them.

"Before we answer that, did you know that you can add your own custom products and grow your own list right within your Saturday app? Just open your menu, and look for the custom product list. Add away! Oh! You can also curate your custom product list from within the ""add product"" area when you're building your recipe. That way, you can add things on the fly, right as you decide to include them in your fuel recipes.

Okay, now that we've got that out of the way... We are constantly growing and adapting the list as the market of products and their formulations change. We have a faily comprehensive list of products with North American availability, but are a little thinner on European and Oceania options. If you're in a part of the world other than those three, we're pretty much just not there yet. We thank you deeply for your patience with us, and encourage you to set up an awesome custom products list for yourself.

Here's how we decide to add a product to the list. We have some simple rules:

The product has to be able to fit into a fueling plan without causing GI distress. If it always dramatically increases risk of GI issues, we won't include it.

And, it has to be contributing something positive to at least some hypothetical fueling plans, like sodium, or carbs.

So...

First, we don't have any zero calorie, zero sodium beverages because that's basically just water, and you can add those however you like. Just maybe don't go over your water recommendations by too much by adding these zero-zero beverages.

Second, we don't have any gels, chews, or other solids that have a high fat, protein or fiber content. Protein, fat, and fiber, are some of the worst gut offenders, and they don't offer much in the way of increased energy during training. If anything, they make your gut slow down more, and less capable of consuming the other good carb and sodium sources you've consumed alongside the protein, fat, and fiber.

"We added most popular and effective North American products to the list and will be growing our limited on our European & Oceania additions soon. There are always more joining the market or ones that we may have missed.

Here's how we decide to add a product to the list. We have some simple rules:

The product has to be able to fit into a fueling plan without causing GI distress. If it always dramatically increases risk of GI issues, we won't include it.

And, it has to be contributing something positive to at least some hypothetical fueling plans, like sodium, or carbs.

So...

First, we don't have any zero calorie, zero sodium beverages because that's basically just water, and you can add those however you like. Just maybe don't go over your water recommendations by too much by adding these zero-zero beverages.

Second, we don't have any gels, chews, or other solids that have a high fat, protein or fiber content. Protein, fat, and fiber, are some of the worst gut offenders, and they don't offer much in the way of increased energy during training. If anything, they make your gut slow down more, and less capable of consuming the other good carb and sodium sources you've consumed alongside the protein, fat, and fiber.

If you think Saturday missed one, or misjudged a product by choosing not to include it, jump on over to the ""Help & Feedback"" menu and select ""get help now!"" If you want to write us a quick note about which product you think we should include, and why you like it, that would be wonderful. This helps make sure we get the best and most popular products added right as they reach the market! You are our

As a helpful reminder: You can add your own product by going to Menu -> Customize -> Manage custom products (scroll down to the bottom to find it), and enter your own. You can also get to it from the screen where you build your recipe by tapping ""add product"" then selecting the Custom tab near the top. Then hit the button to add another of your own custom products."

"In the very short-term, it depends. If you've been on a very low-carb diet, yes! And it's a good thing that it's making you gain weight. Why? Because it means you're storing those carbs as glycogen for energy for future training sessions and races. Glycogen is stored with water, and therefore, when you store more glycogen, you also end up with more hydrated muscle and liver tissue, both good things, but both things that cause the scale weight to go up.

If you've been doing a pretty high-carb diet outside of training, and you start fueling your training better during training, you'll probably see no change whatsoever in your weight, in the short-term.

In the medium or long-term? For most folks, when they fuel with more carbs during the ride, they naturally adjust their eating patterns comfortably with no change in body weight. Any further intentional adjustment isn't helpful.

For folks who've struggled with keeping their body weight down or keeping portion sizes appropriate for their weight loss goals, sometimes it takes a little intentionality off the bike. If that's you, make sure to select the most satiety-oriented option on the satiety vs. performance user setting, in your Personalize page.

"

"Saturday can help you even better, here.

When you get to the first screen after you create your new activity and Saturday is showing you how much carbs, sodium, and water you'll need: Check the ""I won't eat a meal before this"" checkbox when you've got more than about 3 hours between meal and training time. Then follow the instructions in the small print.

This ""fasted before training"" option increases the carbs, sodium, and water amounts recommended so that you can get your blood sugar up into optimal ranges just in time for training, even if your eating patterns haven't been optimal all day. We get it. It's hard to schedule your whole day around food and training. That's why the ""fasted before training"" feature exists!

This feature is also great if you like to get up early and get right to training, first thing."

"A lot of bars are lower-carb and higher in fat and protein. What you need in that immediately pre-workout window is carbohydrate. Stick to mostly just carbs. Things like honey toast, a banana, or a plain granola bar without nuts or chocolate or any other sources of fat, fiber, or protein.

The easiest thing is to just consume more drink mix while you're getting your workout clothes on, then head out the door!

Remember to use the ""fasted before training"" option on the Activity Detail screen. And if you're going to make a portion of your total recipe come from solid food or bar options, be sure to consume them a bit earlier than you want the blood sugar in your system. They're almost all slower to digest than fluid-based carbs. And you'll also need to drink water with them to help them get digested more quicklly. Otherwise you'll end up with a brick sitting in your gut, rather than fuel seeping appropriately into your bloodstream to fuel your working muscles."

"The two most important factors in fuel & hydration, other than water, are carbohydrates, and sodium. Virtually all other components of a fuel & hydration mixture are at least as likely to hurt the fueling experience, and your performance, as they are to help.

If your custom item has more than a gram of fat per serving or a gram of fiber per serving, it might be wise to look elsewhere for ean easier-to-digest carb & sodium source.

If your custom product has as much or more potassium as sodium, it might be wise to get your sodium from a different product, or be sure to add a sodium source as a raw ingredient as part of the Speed Nectar while you're recipe-building."

"Sodium is one component of salt. Salt also has chlorine in it. Sodium makes up about 40% of table salt.

Therefore, the listed salt amount needed to meet your sodium needs for your activity will be about 2.5 times as much as the sodium amount listed."

Item description"It's a common perception that since sodium citrate provides a greater number of sodium ions per molecule of sodium citrate, that the sodium citrate needed to meet your sodium needs would be lower than the equivalent amount of table salt.

The reason the sodium citrate will weigh more than table salt, to meet the same sodium needs is: citrate is a bigger ion than chlorine. Citrate has more mass and takes up more space (volume) than chlorine, and so you end up needing more teaspoons of sodium citrate to get the same amount of sodium, as you would from fewer teaspoons of table salt.

But fear not! Sodium citrate will still be much easier on your gut than table salt alone, especially during activities where you need more than 1000 mg of sodium per liter of fluid."

"We ask ""How warm will you feel?"" instead of ""how sweaty will you be?"" for swimming because we know it's hard to guess how much you're sweating while you swim! The app is truly designed to allow you to answer intuitively about how warm you'll feel while you swim.

If you expect to feel warm at the pool, select a middling option. If you feel like you're always uncomfortably warm in this particular pool, then select a higher option for sure. If it's a cold body of water, selecting one of the lowest options is a great bet."

The app is working as intended! The concern here is that when you start getting very sweaty, we need to increase the amount of sodium in your fuel, so to avoid getting an overall too-high concentration in your gut (and to avoid GI distress!), we need to slightly decrease the carbs. Your experience may vary, of course, so you can try the original carb recommendation if you want, but this is what is happening "behind the scenes"!