Halo Sport Hydration Mix Supplement – a quick look

Ladies, of course, merely glow rather than sweat. Yet this old adage reflects a lot of truth about our mutual sweatiness. We are all quite different in the amounts of the stuff we produce whilst exercising.

Whilst dehydration caused by a 30-minute jog or gym session is very unlikely to impair performance; once we start to look at endurance sports and team sports then events of over an hour are VERY much more likely to have situations where performance becomes impaired due to a degree of hydration. Once you lose above 2% of your bodyweight you might start to have problems.

If you weigh 75kg then 2% of your bodyweight is 1500ml of sweat. That SOUNDS a lot. *BUT* weigh yourself naked before and after an hour of normally strenuous exercise and see how much weight/water you lose per hour. You’ll be surprised.

So, having done that, you know how much to rehydrate by, right? All you have to do is drink isotonic fluids to your sweat rate??

Well, sort of.

Ask yourself, “How much potassium and sodium did you lose in all that sweat?” Off-the-shelf sports drinks assume an average amount and you are probably not average. Almost no one is average if you think about it.

Dehydration AND SODIUM DEPLETION will EACH make you perform less well. It gets more complex than simply taking table salt as you also need to consider potassium, calcium and magnesium depletion amongst other things.

Halo Sport

Halo Sport’s Hydration Mix Supplement adds additional trace minerals, such as magnesium, copper, fluoride, manganese, iodine, selenium, iron, and zinc which your typical Lucozade Sport simply won’t contain. Some other brands DO contain similar minerals to HALO but HALO’s differentiator is that these trace elements are included in greater quantities than found elsewhere.

Halo Sport has a fairly noticeable taste (in a nice way!) and doesn’t taste ‘salty’ per see. My preference was for the lemonade flavour.

The sachet format makes it better suited for hydrating at leisure at home or as you fill your water bottles before going out on a ride.

If found that Halo Sport also reduces the rate at which water passes through me and it seems that some mineral and salt replenishment increases water absorptions for me. I find the same with similar products.

Race Usage: I used Halo Sport for a few days prior to a recent Half Iron Man which was raced in hot conditions. I also used one sachet for a hydration bottle on my bike and other for a small bottle at the start of my run. I got a massive PB for this distance albeit on an easy course. I have sometimes suffered from cramps and maybe Halo helped prevent those, of course, my training and an easy course would have helped too.

Sweat Science

Pre-exercise sodium loading can increase performance (Barr, 1999) and boost blood plasma volumes and, whilst this doesn’t seem to aid, oxygen transfer per se, it apparently helps improve performance through better-maintained temperature regulation (Del Coso 2015).

More: HaloSport.com

Disclaimer: I got 20 or so free salt sachets, this post is not paid for and I get no commission if you buy their product from their site