How many electrolytes does a football player loose during...?

Question

How many electrolytes does a football player loose during practices and games? I'm talkin about 3-5 hour practices and 2-3 hour games.

How many electrolytes does a normal sized football player loose and how quickly are they lost?? Are ther any kind of foods that help replenish wat you sweat out (electrolytes, ect.)?

Answer 1

Weigh yourself before and after practice.  Then add a pound for every pint of you drank at practice.  That's how much water weight you lost.  Ideally, you want to drink a 50/50 solution of water to sports drink and not lose any weight during the practice.  That is usually impossible but it's a good rule of thumb.

Remember: 1 pint of drink = 1 pound.

BTW if your sweat doesn't taste salty, then drink a sports drink until it does.  You've lost too many electrolytes.

Answer 2

Good question.

Electrolytes chemically are just substances that contain free ions that are used to pass electrical current in the body. Physiologically there are a couple main electrolytes sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and phosphate. When you sweat you lose those ionic elements mainly sodium and potassium, you also lose an insignificant amount of calcium and magnesium. So basically you want to replace those elements. You really need to replace the sodium lost which you can absorb most naturally through salt (sodium chloride) so eat anything that's salty or has salt added to it like gatorade. And you can replace potassium through a variety of fruits, vegetables, meats: the best sources being any meats, fish, and poultry then fruits and vegetables like bananas, apricots, potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, oranges, etc.

The average person sweats 0.8-1.4 liters per hour during exercise. So a 3 to 5 hour practice you could lose anywhere up to 2.4-6.0 liters of sweat. And in a game you can lose anywhere from 1.6-4.2 liters of sweat. Sweat is about 99% water which is the solvent, but the solute is composed of .9 grams of sodium per liter and .2 grams of potassium per liter. So in a practice you can loose 2.16-5.4 grams of sodium in 5 hours and .48-1.2 grams of potassium. In a game you can lose 1.44-3.78 grams of sodium and .32-.84 grams of potassium in a game.

You may be thinking to yourself well 5 grams of sodium and a gram of potassium aren't a lot. But both are pretty significant numbers. They may sound small but they're actually quite large when you're talking about nutrition. Most of the times sodium and potassium are measured in milligrams (mg or thousandths of a gram). The nutritional daily value recommend for sodium is about 2 grams only so when you're talking about losing over twice that, 5.4 grams, during practice you see how important it can be to replace it. Like wise the DV for potassium is only .6 grams or 600 milligrams and you can lose over double that in a practice.