Table sugar (as much as req’d for carbs) granulated/coarse is fine, will mix while riding or left overnight
1tsp/5g Citric Acid (sharpens the mix, makes it less sweet)
1tsp/5g Sodium Citrate
500-1000ml water
You can buy bulk bags of citric acid and sodium citrate and they last for months.
My recipe for a 0.7 bottle:
60g table sugar
40g maltodextrin
5g sodium-citrate
50ml unsweetened lemon juice
fill up with water and shake.
super cheap and not too sweet. Can always go for maltodextrin if desired.
Just buy the big containers of Gatorade powder. I get the ones that make six gallons for about 11 bucks on Amazon. No need for the fancy brand stuff. Like someone said on the hot takes part of the podcast awhile back, “Scratch (or any of them) is just the Rapha of sports drink”
Lemon powder works great for flavor
I merged your post with the long running one on the same topic.
Trying to do 90g of carbs (or more) with just Gatorade in a bottle is pretty rough, definitely not formulated with that goal in mind. Roctane works but it’s expensive.
I don’t do 90g per hour in normal training. It’s too expensive using the fancy cycling nutrition. Gatorade works fine most of the time. If it’s those times I need more carbs in a training cycle then I eat some Gushers.
Thinking of the reel TR just posted on sodium and these recipes, I wonder about how sodium is calculated for these recipes. We should be going off of molecular sodium, right?
If so, sodium citrate (trisodium citrate dihydrate) is 23% sodium by weight. So to get 1000 mg sodium, you would have to add 4.3 g to your mix. And for NaCl (table salt) it is 39%, so for 1000 mg sodium you would add 2.5 g.
I think @Dr_Alex_Harrison has mentioned that sodium citrate has an additional sodium ion which makes it preferable from an absorption standpoint than salt. Also easier on the gut in general when the sodium requirements get higher.
Lots of people make this topic pretty complicated, but the Dr. Alex Harrison recommendations keep it simple. Table Sugar + Sodium + Flavor as needed. He says 1g of table sugar = 1g of carbs, so add table sugar to you bottle to get the right level of carbs for you. In the summers I’ll add 1 teaspoon of sodium citrate (which I think is about 1000mg of sodium), less in the winter when I don’t sweat as much. For flavor, I started adding a little bit of old school Kool-aid powder. I usually get three or four bottles from a small packet of Kool-aid, which costs me about 35-cents and come in a lot of different flavors. When I started the DIY mix, I used gatorade for flavor, but I think the kool-aid is much better tasting and comes in a lot of different flavors so you can mix things up.
Saturday was my starting point.
Today’s mix is…
80g of baker’s sugar
40g of maltodextren
5g of sodium citrate
3g of unsweetened green tea powder
In each 600ml bottle.
Now time to hit Fort Ord one last time before the parade of atmospheric rivers begins
Correct.
Well its not that simple, many very different ways to get your Sodium.
What is the best?
Sodium Citrate tops a lot of people’s lists. 1tsp = 5ml and just happens to weigh 5g. So when I use the Saturday App, I swap from salt to sodium citrate and make it happen.
I do deviate in that I almost always split hydration and fuel, but still bring 2 bottles of “nectar”. That said I also bump the hydration tabs I have in my hydro pack with a little extra sodium citrate to make sure I’ve got sodium coming in when I’m hydrating AND eating.
I am so thankful for finding these threads. I do not use a scale and so far it’s been fine to eyeball the following:
Three heaping tablespoons maltodextrin
Three leveled tablespoons fructose
One teaspoon sodium citrate
Top off the water bottles with a splash of espresso before leaving in the morning
I take two baggies with these with me and buy water or use a water fountain. Shake hard. That’s it to fuel a full ride.
How many grams of carbs in this recipe? I like not using a scale!
I use a protein powder scoop for my sugar. I weighed it once and it happened to be about 25g, so that makes things quick.
I used to buy BetaFuel and did the math when converting to my homemade mix. It is approximately 80g carbs give or take a few, i.e., I have not felt a difference on 6-10 hour rides when I know one tablespoon is slightly different than another. This lines up with older research when the standard recommendation was a 1:1 ratio and not a 1:0.8 ratio. My bank account sees a big difference though. 