#291 PRO HYDRATION STRATEGIES for PEAK PERFORMANCE - Dr James DiNicolantonio

James DiNicolantonio (0:00)

Gastro, basically gastric emptying, so emptying of fluids from the stomach to the intestine dramatically goes down when you're vigorously exercising. So if you start pushing too much water into an athlete, especially during vigorous exercise, you're gonna expand their stomach and lead to bloating, abdominal pain, and actually decrease performance by consuming too much water.

Siim Land (0:22)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host, Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. James DiNicolantonio.

Dr. James and I co-authored another book called Win, Achieve Peak Performance, Optimize Recovery, and Become a Champion. You can get Win from Amazon. This episode is brought to you by the world's most recognized probiotic supplement Seed. Seed's Daily Synbiotic is a pre- and probiotic two-in-one capsule that supports your gut health, skin, digestion, and so much more.

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James DiNicolantonio (1:20)

Seem, good to be here.

Siim Land (1:22)

Yeah, it's another podcast with you and I because we co-authored another book, a third one with us.

And this one is gonna be about a win and like mostly optimizing physical performance and fitness and that kind of thing. So, yeah, maybe we should start with that because it's a somewhat of a different turn from our previous books. So what, let's say, what was the main motivation for you to let's say propose the idea of writing this kind of a book?

James DiNicolantonio (1:52)

Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of it stems from my first book, The Salt Fix. And how do you translate sort of like the benefits of salt into athletic performance?

Because I don't know of a single book that's ever really gone into how to actually improve performance using salt and fluids. Like, you know, actually like citing the clinical literature, being specific on how to dose it, how much, when to take it, how slowly to take it. And so I think really the salt fix sort of was a key to kind of launching this book on athletic performance because I've used that knowledge to help a lot of athletes out to improve their performance, whether it be in the octagon, in the UFC, or NFL players by far and away, getting the salt dosing correct has been the best thing for athletes in regards to improving their performance.

Siim Land (2:46)

Yeah, it's kind of true that it's very underrated for hydration side and minerals and electrolytes.

So you do need them like quite crucially for physical performance. And the book has, I think, yeah, one of the first chapters has like an amazing overview about all the different reasons, you know, why to hydrate and different ways to do it, the most optimal way as well. And not just, you know, not only with salt, but also like different kinds of electrolytes and minerals.

James DiNicolantonio (3:16)

Yeah, exactly. And there's, we actually cover several different strategies in regards to hydration. So it's not just about like acutely boosting performance, which salt solutions will do that. But we also talk about certain things, how to hydrate to improve performance later on, essentially becoming dehydrated acclimated and how to do that appropriately and how to rehydrate appropriately and the adaptations to constant dehydration can actually expand baseline plasma volume and just basically give you a larger basically tank of fuel to cool yourself off, which is really what salt loading does is it acutely boosts blood volume. And that gives you, we need to understand we lose water from our blood volume to dissipate heat by cooling off.

So your tank, your blood volume drops dramatically within just five to 10 minutes of vigorous exercise, not just from the loss of fluids from sweat, but there's a competition between blood volume between the heart, the working skeletal muscle and the skin. So when you and I are resting here, the blood volume is fine feeding the heart. As we start moving and as blood is now being pushed towards skeletal muscle and towards the skin to dissipate heat, you're pulling blood volume away from the heart.

And that's the main thing that decreases performance. And we know that because if you actually give IV solutions to athletes and you hold their blood volume normally, you don't see decreases in performance. So we know that blood volume is really controlling a lot of this because it also controls increases in core body temperature through keeping core body temperature much lower if you preload with cell fluids.