Welcome to the ask a cycling coach podcast presented by trainer road today. We have Dr. Kyle Faufenbach with us from Eastern Oregon university from the Brooks beast. He's got athletes going to the Olympic trials here soon and possibly even the Olympics. Really soon. It's exciting times. And thanks for joining us in finals week, Kyle. Uh, that's a, it's a tough week to join us. We're going to talk about protein for cyclists, sodium loading, fructose and other stuff. So stay tuned if you're interested in any of that stuff and how it can make you faster, let's go straight into Ian's question. He says, I've heard you guys talk a lot about sodium intake. Obviously. I haven't heard you mentioned sodium bolusing, which she's talking about, like, preloading with a lot of it in one sitting, uh, before a heart event, such as what is being recommended by any mentions, Dr. James nickel on Tony. Oh, I believe is how you pronounce the name. There's a book called the salt fix. When I think he has, he recommends large sodium loads of two to four plus grams, about an hour before exercise to increase plasma volume and improve performance, any thoughts on this? Uh, thanks Kyle. The first thing that stands out to me is number one, I'm curious to see if you recommend this for your athletes, but I, and this is to my own lack of understanding. I feel like a huge bolus like that just before to increase plasma volume, from what I understand, doesn't that take longer than just like an instant, like boom, plasma volume's up because I took in a bunch of salt? No.

It actually does work like this, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, it is kind of interesting. I have to remember there's some European papers on this. There's a guy, I'm absolutely... There's a person, I'm absolutely going to butcher their name. So there's Goulay, G -O -U -L -E -M and I think there's an apostrophe in there somewhere. So they, that person is in that group has done a couple papers and then there's a, there's an author that starts with a P, this is so bad. I'm trying to pull this like out of memory of hundreds of articles that I read in a pure lay or something like this. Anyways, so these are called hyperhydration protocols. And the idea is that if you take a whole bunch of salt with a whole bunch of water, that's the key. And that, um, so the way I explain this to, to athletes or people that I'm talking to, to try and just, just make it simple is that where the body does sort of like the, it, it defends a ratio of salt to water. So if take on a bunch of water without any salt, you'll end up flushing the water. And it's actually it's it's counterintuitive. So this is one of the reasons why I'm kind of bouncing all over the place here. But this is one of the reasons why urine color is not a great indicator of hydration status, even though we all kind of do it, either consciously or subconsciously. Take a piss, you see it's bright yellow, you think, oh, I need to get hydrated. Drink a whole bunch of plain water, 45 minutes later, an hour later, you pee and it's clear, and you think I'm hydrated. And you're not, it's not necessarily putting you in hydration, you're just flushing all the water you drank because you just took on a whole bunch of water without any salt. And you end up having to pee some of that as your kidneys like kind of play catch up and things like that. So the kidneys are basically either retaining sodium or retaining water or flushing water and or trying to flush sodium and there's a whole balance there and it's actually really accurate. It just takes some time. And so we typically get it right on a 24 hour basis. And so we really try and think about hydration on like an overall basis, not a moment to moment basis.