If you finish summer rides with white streaks on your helmet straps and salt crust on your jersey, here’s the cheapest hydration upgrade in cycling. Add a pinch of table salt to your bottles.
Sodium is the biggest electrolyte you lose in sweat, and many riders lose more of it than their drink replaces. Sweat sodium varies a lot from person to person. Researchers have measured anywhere from about 200 mg to more than 2,000 mg per liter. Meanwhile, a lot of familiar drinks are surprisingly light on it. Classic sports drinks have around 270 to 380 mg per serving, and some “daily hydration” powders have far less. If you’re a salty sweater, that can leave you running a deficit all ride long.
The fix costs almost nothing. About 1/8 teaspoon of table salt adds roughly 300 mg of sodium to a bottle, and 1/4 teaspoon adds close to 600 mg. If you already use a flavored drink mix, stir the salt into that. The sweetness and flavor will hide most of the taste. If you ride on plain water, a small pinch is barely noticeable. Think of the faint mineral taste of some bottled spring waters. But go much past 1/8 teaspoon in plain water and it starts to taste distinctly salty. A little sugar in the bottle isn’t just for flavor, either. Glucose helps your gut absorb sodium and water together, which is the whole principle behind oral rehydration drinks. Coach John Hughes had his own DIY recipe for a sports drink that was designed around this concept.
Does the extra sodium actually help? A study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports had triathletes take enough supplemental salt to replace about 71 percent of the sodium they lost. A placebo group replaced only about 20 percent. The salt group finished a half-Ironman an average of 26 minutes faster. The researchers noted that extra sodium also stimulates thirst, so those athletes drank more fluid and stayed in better fluid balance. You can read the study here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sms.12427
If mixing your own isn’t your thing, there are tidier ways to get the same sodium. Salt capsules like SaltStick let you swallow a measured dose with plain water, which is what the triathletes in that study actually did. Unflavored blended electrolytes like Boulder Salt, or liquid concentrates like Elete drops, combine sodium with the smaller amounts of potassium, magnesium and calcium you also lose in sweat. You add them to any bottle. And a newer generation of high-sodium drink mixes like LMNT packs around 1,000 mg of sodium per serving, several times what the traditional sports drinks contain. That’s plenty for a hot, long day, though probably more than you need for a short, easy spin.
The bottom line: sodium is the electrolyte that matters most in your bottle. Check the label on whatever you’re already using. You may find you’re well covered, or nowhere close. And if you’re coming up short, a pinch of table salt is the fix that costs almost nothing.
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