klehner wrote:
Let me get this straight: the higher concentration of sodium in your body, the higher the concentration of sodium will be in your sweat (amazing how the body self-regulates, isn't it?). So this "technology" will tell you that the more sodium you excrete, the *less* sodium you need to take in? I'm guessing that it does the opposite.
Depends upon what you mean by "in your body." If you mean blood sodium levels - e.g. what's really important to performance (and life), that's a relatively narrow range. But if you mean that if you eat a whole bunch of excess salt, the body will dump it out in sweat, that's true. So how and when you use the patch would be really important.
But in general, both
sweat rate and seat salt concentration can vary widely between people independently of salt intake. Though not independently of conditions.
I could see it useful to know for some given race condition and given a "normal" diet where you fall as an individual on these two graphs. The difference between 0.5L/h and 5L/h or 5 mL/kg/h and 50 mL/kg/h is a full order of magnitude difference. That is possibly useful to know. I believe most of us with experience have some idea where we fall - some of us (me) end up salt encrusted in 45 minutes, and some people don't. But it's still nice to be able to somewhat objectively measure things.
Per hour point I don't think these graphs are simply measuring who just had a plate of nachos supreme and who didn't.