Potassium and Sodium for Athletes: Essential minerals and nutrients

Potassium

In order to prove its importance, you should note that the third most abundant mineral in the human body is potassium. Even though it holds great significance to keep our bodies on the track, about 98% of the American’s are below the required threshold of potassium content (just to give you an idea).

Muscles Strength

This is probably the most important thing required by an athlete. If his muscles are gaining strength, he probably does not need to reconsider anything in his lifestyle.

Potassium enables your muscles to contract and relax efficiently. As a result, it enables you to work out excessively and undergo an array of strenuous exercises to keep up the stamina and build strength. Moreover, it also enables an efficient brain working which implies that your brain and muscles can work with an enhanced collaboration.

Water Retention

Athletes sweat excessively, and in order to stay in the competition, they must be hydrated. Here, it has an anti-sodium effect. Since an excess of sodium makes water retention less efficient, you must ensure to intake potassium in reasonable amounts. Potassium tends to pull out the excess of water and sodium from the cells to maintain equilibrium.

Potassium elevates the rate of metabolism, and it also ensures that the maximum number of required nutrients and minerals are extracted from the ingested food. Moreover, it has also shown positive results for synthesizing muscle protein. So ultimately, it helps in making an athlete’s muscle bigger and stronger.

Sodium

It is a very important component of your composition which needs to be present in the perfect amount. Quite frankly, you cannot risk it going off the suggested boundaries, or your body might react differently. Athletes tend to sweat a lot, and of course, they get paid for sweating! But this process makes them lose an array of salts from the body. Therefore, in order to compensate for the salt loss, it is important to consume the deficit salt.

Nerve Transmission

When an athlete is in the business, he needs to exert and act perfectly. Therefore, it is important to keep a perfect balance of sodium to ensure that his body parts are coordinating with a very efficient nerve transmission system.

Blood Volume

For serious athletes, it is very critical to maintain the extracellular blood volume, and that is where sodium comes into play.

Recharge!

It is important to remember that the sodium stores in your body are limited and once they start decreasing (by sweating, etc.), your body cannot produce on its own. So you are responsible for refilling this debt!