Electrolytes - What, why and where.

Electrolytes & Yoga: An Introduction

Our Hot Yoga teacher Jozef Wiewel has prepared a series of articles about Electrolytes and their importance. His first articles will explain why we should care about electrolytes when doing Hot Yoga...

Electrolytes are charged particles (minerals) that become ions in fluid which conducts electricity.

The most common known electrolytes are Sodium, Potassium, Chloride, Magnesium and Calcium.

When you do Hot Yoga you sweat a lot. You sweat to remove excess heat from your body. When the sweat evaporates off your skin it cools the skin, the blood which circulates closest to and in the skin is subsequently cooled and transports this coolness deeper into your body to keep the core temperature at an acceptable level.

Sweating is a vital function of your body, it is the way it thermo-regulates itself.

This outpore of fluid also means that we risk dehydrating and with that losing also valuable electrolytes. If you have ever had a bead of sweat drip on to your tongue or mouth you will have noticed that, because it is salty. The reason for this is because our sweat is an ionic solution. These ions are collectively known as electrolytes and they can be found in certain sports drinks and in certain foods as mentioned below.  There are also supplements on the market from which ‘elete water’ is one of them (www.eletewater.co.uk) which requires just a few drops in a litre of water to give you the required amount of electrolytes back. Or you can make it yourself, there is lots of info on the web on how to.

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Next article in the series will be about Sodium.