Sodium Bicarbonate for Endurance Athletes: Is It Worth It?

I think most some people might be like, sorry if there's background noises, but some people might be like, what is sodium bicarb? Well, it is essentially it's baking soda.

So you probably do.

It's either in your fridge, like Justin said, hanging out in the background.

In the back, they're absorbing different smells or whatever, or it's something we use for baking.

So I commonly use it for baking cookies or muffins or something like that.

So that is essentially...

But we'll talk a little bit more about how it's used or what it's doing as well.

So essentially, just a quick kind of overview is sodium bicarbonate.

It lowers the acidity of things.

And we'll talk about how it's acting a little bit more.

But it's a chemical like acid-base reaction that's kind of neutralizing the acidity of things, essentially.

And so where's commonly been used, where I've seen it commonly used is, you know, we think of it as terms of like baked goods, but it's also used commonly in the clinical setting.

So in the hospital, which...

I have a little bit of a clinical background as well.

So the way I've seen it used is when somebody has some sort of metabolic acidosis, which commonly happens in diabetic ketoacidosis, where somebody is having really high amounts of ketones, which are very acidic, or kidney disease, where people are filtrating out certain acidic things that need to be generally filtered out, and they have some sort of kidney failure condition.

issue or there's tons of other things that can kind of happen.

Sepsis is another one.

They'll actually drip in sodium bicarb through the IV to neutralize that acidity.

And so that's where I've seen it before.

I think then what's kind of happened and it's actually been around a little while with the athletic community.

I just think I've been hearing a lot more about it recently because I've been watching videos and I think there's certain companies that have kind of capitalized on it a little bit to make it maybe a little bit easier to use because historically it's been really hard to consume orally.

So there's some things kind of happening with it that are just making it a little bit easier for athletes to get a hold of.

But essentially, I think...

the background of it is people were like, oh, this is helping in these situations where there's acidity.

How about during exercise where we do have also some level of acidity happening? And that's kind of partly, you have these metabolic byproducts with exercise that are causing more of an acidic environment.