You can use whatever products you want! Truly not sure? Pick one you like the taste of, and use it for about half (or even less than half!) than half of your Saturday recipe for each training session. Let Saturday help guide you to how much Speed Nectar (kitchen ingredients) to add to make your recipe perfectly optimized for you, the easy way.

The surprising answer is that it might simply be optimal to pick your product based on taste, now that you're using Saturday to help optimize your fuel intake.

If you're using some of the Speed Nectar™ (kitchen ingredients like sugar or salt) then, fortunately for you, you're optimizing the composition (sugar ratios! read more in the FAQ question about the glucose:fructose ratio!) of the products your choosing.

Most products are too low in fructose, and way too high in glucose contribution. Using some sugar alongside them improves the ratio of these two important monosaccharides. The result: you can pick just about any product on Saturday's list add a bit of sugar, and you'll have a very optimal product for health, performance, and gut comfort!

Every product on our list has been hand-verified by experts to be able to comprise at least some part of a good fueling & hydration strategy. The are all pre-approved, based on their limited contributions from fat, fiber, and protein, and most of them have some combination of carbs and sodium.

Saturday takes the details into account, and does the math for you. As long as you put everything you see listed on your recipe page into your body during your training session, you'll be perfectly optimized, no matter which products you choose. That's the magic of Saturday.

Yes, that's correct. You do not need a fancy electrolyte mix! Salt will do just fine, in most cases as your source of sodium for your fuel & hydration strategy during training or racing.

Even when other electrolyes are lost via sweat, they don't become a performance limiter like sodium. Sodium is lost at a much higher rate than any other electrolye, and typical table salt provides the sodium you need to replenish.

When you're consuming more than 1000mg of sodium per hour, sodium citrate might be a nice addition to assist in keeping your gut comfortable.

The only time table salt tends to be a problem is if you're getting dehydrated and gut function is decreasing, as a result of that dehydration. Think: really hot, really high effort, or super long training sessions and ultra-endurance events. In those cases too, replacing some or all of your salt with sodium citrate, as your sodium source, will probably help your gut stay happy and you stay hydrated and performing at your best.

Sodium citrate is our second option for adding salt to your beverage on your recipe page. Tap the table salt to swap it out for sodium citrate and we'll do the math for you.

So what is it?

The short answer is, sodium citrate is an easier-on-the-gut option for consuming sodium during training and racing. Here's the science of why you might care about this:

First, we need to understand that the gut is very sensitive to being exposed to "too much" stuff. Sometimes, that "too much" can be the total number of dissolved particles in the solution (fluid). Sometimes that "too much" can be too much of one particular thing, like "chloride ions." For now, just understand that your gut doesn't like too much of any one thing, or all things altogether. It's a sensitive system, especially when you're exercising hard!

Next, understand that sodium citrate is the sodium salt of citric acid. It turns out that citric acid likes to meet up with and stick to 3 sodium molecules at once. What that means is that sodium citrate has 3 sodium ion for every 1 citrate ion when it dissolves in your drink (or in the fluid in your gut).

Meanwhile, sodium chloride, also a "salt" (aka, table salt) has 1 sodium ion for every 1 chloride ion.

Why does it matter that sodium citrate produces 3 sodium ions and table salt produces only 1 sodium ion, for every "other" ion they produce (either citrate, or chloride)?

It matters because for the same amount of sodium consumption, there will be a greater number of total ions in solution (charged particles floating around dissolved in your drink, and your gut), if you use table salt, instead of sodium citrate. This higher number of ions in solution in your gut from salt, compared to sodium citrate, can be irritating to an already tempermental gut.

In sodium citrate, the the greater contribution from sodium ions to the total ion count in solution (because there are 3 sodium for every 1 citrate) is part of what makes it easier on your gut. It takes fewer total ions floating around, to deliver you the same amount of sodium you'd get with more ions from table salt.

Second, table salt (sodium chloride) is 50% chloride ions when it's dissolved in your drink. When you need a lot of sodium to stay hydrated and promote blood volume retention (a good thing for exercising muscles and your cardiovascular system), if you're getting all your sodium from table salt (sodium chloride), that's going to add up to a lot of chloride ions floating around. It turns out, your gut is particularly offended by too many chloride ions. Yet another reason why sodium citrate tends to play nicer with your gut during training.

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Saturday wants to be really careful about coming off as a seller or promoter of any one product. We're a promoter of good fuel & hydration, and putting the power in your hands. But we also understand that most folks first question when they decide they might be interested in sodium citrate is: "where do I get it and what do I buy?" So, we're providing a link here, but please know that if you would like to avoid clicking our affiliate link, we SO support you in doing that. You can very easily head to amazon and search for sodium citrate, and buy probably any one of the top 5 search results and not go wrong. If you do find Saturday's information valuable and want to support our work, then you can click the link below to one of many products that will work.

Sodium Citrate - Pure

All products are NOT created equal, but the differences are often less severe than you might think.

The major considerations around product choice are about carbs, sodium, the ratios of those, and flavor. Since we take care of the sodium & carbs math for you, it pretty much just comes down to flavor and ease of use for you! Let Saturday do the rest.

If you have any doubt at all, that your product might work, use a little more Speed Nectar™ (the main ingredients) because those virtually always improve upon the mixtures used by every company on the market today, when mixed altogether. And you'll save some money! Win-win!

It's a bit bewildering at first, after years of personal trial and error, and having spent more money than one cares to think about on supplements designed by leading industry science teams.

But the answer is yes.

Sugar is often not only as good as many available fueling potions, it's actually better in many cases. Saturday users are routinely amazed at the performance and gut comfort improvements that mixing their favorite products with sugar has granted them.

The reason? It's glucose and fructose stuck together, and that happens to be quite an optimal mixture. It's yet unknown what the exact optimal glucose to fructose ratio is for all endurance activity, and it may be a shifting number, depending on hourly intake rates... or it may not. One thing is for sure though. As research has progressed over the last 50 years, the optimal ratio of glucose to fructose has been inching it's way, sometimes begrudgingly, and always slowly, towards 1:1.

It just probably feels a little silly for expensive powder manufacturers and scientific teams to report to you "we put sugar in your bag and sold it to you for $2 per serving." And so, they don't. But they are putting an ever-closer ratio of glucose to fructose in bags and selling it to us. Saturday says: let the truth reign! Sugar is often better than commercial carb products for gut comfort and for performance.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to using sugar alone as your fuel source is that is just tastes so plain. Hence, Saturday generally recommends mixing some Speed Nectar™ (sugar & salt, or sodium citrate) with a product that you like the flavor of. It just feels a little more human that way, and your personal experience and preference in fueling & hydrating should play a big role in what you choose. So, mix away!

The Saturday website & Saturday Morning YouTube channel are great places to start for the basics.

Having no association with any one brand or product is critical in any good scientific resource. Look for product & brand-neutral info resources. Brand neutrality is the biggest predictor of quality of information. Saturday will never be associated with any particular product.

There isn't convincing scientific evidence of potassium being necessary in a drink.

Thousands of Saturday users have reported quality training and racing without giving potassium a second thought, and many of the leading supplement brands are moving away from including it at such high rates, or at all. It's about time! Saturday is glad to see that.

Why wouldn't we need it? Potassium isn't excreted in sweat in the same quantity that sodium is.

That said, there is no harm in adding 50-100mg potassium per hour, other than it taking a bit of your time and money to do it.

On the extreme flip side, if you find a fuel or hydration product that has more potassium than sodium, it might be best to find a different product because that product development team is probably a bit misguided on what causes hydration. Sodium is what causes you to keep the water in your bloodstream where you want it. Potassium does not do this. In fact, adding too much potassium, relative to sodium, can have the opposite effect!

Sodium is excreted in the highest quantity through sweat; the other electrolytes are not, and we haven't found convincing scientific evidence that these are necessary in a drink. Potassium almost certainly is not performance enhancing, and it can cause problems.

Magnesium is unnecessary, and is more likely to cause problems than do good.

Finally, we have calcium, which in some very very rare cases, usually larger bodied folks, competing over very long durations (10 hours or more), who have very high natural sweat rates, are competing in a hot location and are not heat acclimatized, a very small amount of calcium is necessary to stave off hypocalcemia. But this is intensely rare and should not be a concern unless you've ended up in a med tent at an event, and been specifically diagnosed as hypocalcemic. Otherwise, calcium is unnecessary to add to your fuel & hydration recipes.

The most common signs of not enough sodium are:

A) More urination for the same amount of fluid intake during training. If you frequently need to stop your training to urinate, increasing your sodium intake is a really good idea.

or

B) Increased heart rate for the same power or pace, with adequate fluid intake. This happens because blood volume is not being retained. Sodium helps keep the water in your blood, where it should be. Instead, without sodium, the water is going into urine and maybe other places due to low sodium in blood (e.g. one common place is your hands or feet!)

or

C) Greater cardiac drift upwards for the same power, with reduced fluid intake, because of lower thirst. Sodium is necessary to drive thirst, especially when you feel like you're going to need to urinate soon!

More rarely:

D) If you are doing very high-carb fueling and have insufficient sodium you will have impaired carb absorption because of absence of sodium in the gut. Sodium is needed alongside sugars in the gut for the sugars to be absorbed efficiently. The absence of sodium creates a sugar back-up, and this can lead to gut distress.

Glucose and fructose are both simple sugars. They're both monosaccharides, which means, they're sugars that are just made up of one sugar unit: themselves! Glucose is simply one glucose molecule. Fructose, likewise is just a fructose molecule.

Something like sucrose (aka table sugar), on the other hand, is made up of two sugar subunits, which makes it a disaccharide, instead of a monosaccharide.

It turns out, your gut absorbs monosaccharides, like glucose and fructose, through independent channels. What this means is: to make your gut cooperate as much as possible in absorbing all the nutrients and water you consume during exercise, it's ideal to use both of the channels available. There's one set of channels for glucose. And one set of channels for fructose. In an ideal situation, you'll consume roughly somewhere between a 2:1 and a 1:1 ratio of glucose and fructose.

Handy tip: table sugar (sucrose) is exactly, and very conveniently, a 1:1 ratio of glucose to fructose. This convenient ratio makes it a highly optimal addition to your workout fuel. The more companies don't advertise using plain sugar? It makes them seem a little "cheap", doesn't it.

Well, as much as it might hurt our fancy image, we prefer to tell it to you straight. Sugar is an excellent way to optimize the glucose:fructose ratio.

The glucose:fructose ratio tends to matter most when you're consuming the most carbs, or during those longer, harder, hotter activities where your body is experiencing the highest levels of stress.

Hydration means, "how much water is in something." For you, your health, and your performance, hydration means: how much water is in my blood. How much blood volume do I have. The more water in your blood, the more freely your blood flows, and the more oxygen the heart can pump per beat.

To achieve better hydration, you have to drink water. But that's not all. Drinking water alone only hydrates you temporarily until your kidneys quickly figure out that "hey, our bloodstream seems really watered down and dilute. Let's fix it!" The fix here is: consume sodium with your water, and the water will better stay in the blood stream because your kidneys won't go to battle trying to "undilute" your blood.

Generally, peeing regularly, but not excessively is a good bet. Having a good pulse is generally indicative of at least reasonable hydration status too. If your pulses are fading away as you exercise, especially at rest between exercise intervals, chances are, you're becoming dehydrated. Drink water and keep up with the sodium recommendations made for you by Saturday.

Of course, a hallmark of dehydration is overly dark yellow or brown urine. If your urine looks like this, it's probably time for about a quart (a liter) of water, and a healthy pinch of sodium.

If you're urinating every 10-30 minutes, you might be over-hydrated, or you might just be under-salted. Starting to urinate a lot, very clear, and very frequently, is generally a sign that you're no better hydrated than you were an hour ago, and that you've just consumed too much water relative to your sodium intake.

This over-production of very clear urine is the direct result of your kidneys trying to undilute your blood when you've overconsumed water. It's one of the first signs that you're heading towards hyponatremia. The answer: get more sodium in your system, right now.