Nutritional Functionality

The best place to start is the actual functionality of each product i.e. what it's going to do to help you perform and keep you going. The functionality of sports nutrition is usually divided into 'Fuel' and 'Hydration' and with Active Root we also have 'Balance' i.e. how much is the product going to settle your stomach.

Stomach settling - Ginger

Let's start with the ingredient most pertinent to Active Root as it's the easiest to digest... It's simple, all our products contain 204mg of ginger per serving, the proven optimal amount to keep your stomach settled and help prevent nausea and bloating.

Fuel - cane sugar

When working at a steady intensity, you need about 60g of carbohydrate per hour to keep fuelled. Both our Sports Drink and Gel Mix contain about 50% of this per serving, whereas Active Root ElectroLite only contains about 1/8. A lot of athletes work backwards from the 60g of carbs p/hour mark to work out what they should be taking in. In the case of Active Root that would mean: 1) 1x Gel Mix serving & 1x Sports Drink serving; 2) 2x Gel Mix servings and 1x ElectroLite serving or 3) 2x Sports Drinks servings, to get you to the 60g p/hour mark. 

Hydration - sea salt

Hydration is probably the most difficult element to measure as there's very little evidence as to 'how much' you need per hour. Both our Sports Drink and ElectroLite have 400mg of sea salt p/serving, in line with industry standard for rehydration products. Without any reliable evidence it's hard to be exact, but we'd provide two bits of advice. Even if it's not hot, you're going to sweat so make sure some form of hydration is part of your plan (take more than you expect to need), especially if you're going to be out for a long time. And, like fueling, try to drink little and often. 

Logistics

After working out what you need, the next thing is to think about how and whether it's going to be possible to take it with you. For instance, if you're running the London Marathon in April, you aren't going to be able to rely upon 6x 500ml Active Root bottles. You'd probably think about taking one bottle and a couple of 150ml gel soft flasks. If you're riding a tour however, you'll probably have 2x bottle cages and a couple of pockets for soft flask in your cycle jersey as well as plenty of space on the handle bars. 

The golden rule when it comes to nutrition is 'try before race day', multiple times if you can. The last thing you want is to hate the taste of the fuel that you're going to be using for the next 3 hours, or not be able to get your soft flask out of your waist belt without stopping and taking it off! We hope this goes some way in explaining how you could create an Active Root nutrition plan. We've attached some recent examples from our own racing/training below as well as a guide to using Before/During or After on the right. As always, if you have any questions please get in touch here at enquiries@activeroot.co.uk