Homemade sports drink
A sports drink is mostly water, sugar and salt. The bottle in the shop adds colour, flavouring and a few extras. Make it yourself and it takes two minutes, costs almost nothing, and tastes of lemon rather than of a laboratory.
01
The recipe
For one litre:
- one litre of water
- 60 grams of sugar, about five tablespoons
- 1.5 grams of salt, a quarter teaspoon of fine salt
- the juice of half a lemon
Put the sugar and salt in a jug with a splash of warm water and stir until they dissolve. Add the lemon juice, top up with cold water to a litre, and pour it into your bottles. Taste it: it should be lightly sweet and only just salty, like a lemonade that has been to the sea.
02
Why these amounts
The sugar. Sixty grams in a litre makes a six percent drink. Above about six percent, the stomach empties more slowly and the water reaches you later. Sixty grams is also roughly what you can use in an hour on a session of two to three hours. Drink to thirst rather than to a set amount, because sweat rates vary a lot. If you drink less than a litre in the hour, take the rest of the carbohydrate as food. Table sugar is half glucose and half fructose, two sugars the gut takes up by different routes. That matters most on the longest days, when the research recommends a mix like this.
The salt. Sweat carries salt, and how much varies a great deal from one person to the next. A litre of sweat carries anything from about a tenth of a teaspoon of salt to more than half a teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon in a litre of drink sits in the middle of what the American College of Sports Medicine recommends for a drink during exercise, as a 2023 review of sports drinks reports. Most shop bottles carry a little less. If long, hot sessions leave white marks on your clothes, that is salt, and you can try a little more next time.
The lemon. Flavour. It makes you want to drink it, and that matters on a long day.
03
Change it
- Swap the sugar for honey: about 75 grams, or three and a half tablespoons.
- Use lime, orange or grapefruit instead of lemon. With orange, use the juice of a whole one; it brings a little sugar of its own.
- For a smaller bottle, scale it. A 750-millilitre bottle takes 45 grams of sugar and 1.1 grams of salt, a little under a quarter teaspoon.
04
When to drink it
On the long sessions you fuel, and on hot days when you sweat a lot. Not every long session is fuelled. We fuel a run past about two and a half hours, a ride past about four, and a long run that rehearses a race. For a short or easy session, water does the job. Make it fresh on the day, like the rest of the food you cook.
Sources
- Pérez-Castillo et al. 2023. Nutrients 16:17. Compositional aspects of beverages designed to promote hydration before, during and after exercise.
- Jeukendrup 2014. Sports Medicine 44 Suppl 1:S25-33. Carbohydrate intake during exercise.
- Baker 2017. Sports Medicine 47 Suppl 1:111-128. Sweating rate and sweat sodium concentration in athletes.
- US Department of Agriculture, FoodData Central. Salt, table (FDC 173468); Honey (FDC 169640).