Why Brode is the Ultimate Hot Yoga Vitamin
People who love hot yoga LOVE HOT YOGA. The intense experience is like the yoga version of boot-camp. Yoga studios crank up the heat over 90 degrees F, and some even crank it over 100. At those temperatures, your body is scrambling to keep your core temperature regulated to 98 degrees.
Your body does this by sweating, duh. When sweat evaporates from your skin, it takes heat with it. That cools you down. (In fact, sweating is a huge human evolutionary advantage.) But, just as obviously, the water and minerals in sweat that leave your body in order to help cool you can no longer be used internally for properly functioning muscles and organs.
In hot yoga, it is not unusual to lose 2% of your body weight during class. So a 140 pound person could lose nearly 3 pounds. This is all sweat, and that sweat takes with it electrolytes, specifically sodium and potassium, but also chloride. It may be evident that you need to drink some water, but it is less obvious that you may need to replace those electrolytes.
Sweat averages around 500mg of sodium per pound of sweat. That's a lot! Two tablets of Brode replace 350 mg of sodium, helping you back into balance.
Brode Electrolyte Vitamin was specifically made for intense activity like hot yoga. That salty taste of sweat? That is the sodium leaving your body onto your skin. It's critical to either pre-boost or post-recover when engaged in hot yoga, and nothing is better than Electrolyte Vitamin and some water! (Because Brode Electrolyte Vitamin is so portable, you can always keep some in your bag.)
If your body cannot cool its core temperature adequately, heat-stroke symptoms start to set in. First you get woozy, but then, if the body's core temperature approaches 103 degrees F, the situation because dangerous and one should seek immediate medical attention. At that core temperature, organs are at risk of failure and cell membranes are at risk of rupturing.
A little known fact is that it is best NOT to wipe sweat away with a towel, because that sweat needs to naturally evaporate in order to whisk heat away from your body. Wiping sweat with a towel prevents your body from natural sweat cooling, and makes you sweat even more.
What happens if your body looses too much sodium from sweat? In this case, because the sodium/water balance becomes off-kilter, your body struggles to send signals from the brain to the muscles, which can show as symptoms of cramping, fatigue, and headaches. You must be cautions and aware, though, because the symptoms of having not enough sodium are very similar to the opposite diagnosis, which is drinking too much water. (Too much water is called hyponatremia, and every year a handful of amateur athletes die from drinking too much water because they thought they were dehydrated.) Too much water dilutes the blood, causing the same problems with sending signals from the brain to the muscles.
What to remember:
- Sweat evaporation naturally cools the body (Don't wipe it all away with a towel!)
- You can lose 2% of your weight in sweat in an hour (often a few pounds), and this sweat contains on average 500mg of sodium per pound.
- Replace both the water AND the electrolytes. Brode Electrolyte Vitamin replaces 350mg of sodium per 2-tablets.
- Symptoms of low-blood-sodium include cramping, fatigue, wooziness and headaches, and in extreme cases, can cause catastrophic organ failure.