During maximal effort, your muscles produce hydrogen ions (H⁺) faster than your body can clear them. pH drops. The familiar burn hits. You slow down — not because you're out of fuel or fitness, but because your blood is too acidic to keep firing muscle contractions efficiently.
This is lactate acidosis. It's the limiting factor in every hard effort from 800m to a 5-minute cycling sprint. Your aerobic engine is still running — but the chemical environment around your muscles has turned hostile.
Sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO₃) is an alkaline compound that acts as an extracellular buffer. Taken at 0.3g/kg body weight ~90 minutes before exercise, it raises your blood's bicarbonate concentration above baseline — effectively expanding your body's capacity to neutralize incoming hydrogen ions.
The result: your blood pH drops more slowly during effort, staying closer to 7.1–7.2 instead of falling to 6.9. That difference delays the point at which acidity forces your muscles to reduce output — letting you sustain harder efforts for longer.
The reason most athletes haven't used bicarb before is simple: swallowing 19g of raw baking soda dissolved in water causes immediate GI distress — bloating, nausea, and worse — that cancels out any performance benefit.
Our hydrogel system solves this. Xanthan gum transforms the liquid into a thick gel that physically encases the bicarb particles. The gel passes through your stomach largely intact — slowing the reaction with stomach acid — and releases the bicarb in your small intestine, where it's absorbed into the bloodstream cleanly. Same mechanism as Maurten. Same science. A fraction of the price.
Peer-reviewed evidence from the ISSN, PubMed meta-analyses, and 40+ years of sports science.