DIY sweat composition testing

OK, so I’ll kick my own old thread, as I finally got around to doing some more testing, and thought I’d provide an update. (previous posts go over how I have been doing this.)
@Dr_Alex_Harrison - I thought this might interest you.

I’ve now done 3 tests - 2 a while ago, and one just recently.
The results in mg/L of Sodium for the tests are:
800mg/L (5/2020) 92F
920mg/L (7/2020) 87F
1148mg/L (9/2022) 94F
Note that these are whole body sweat concentration calculated from the forearm sweat concentration using equation 3 from: https://www.gssiweb.org/sports-science-exchange/article/sse-161-sweat-testing-methodology-in-the-field-challenges-and-best-practices

As @PrecisionHydration mentioned, there is quite a bit of variability here, so I haven’t ended up with a ‘precise’ number to use. Also I found that my left arm always produced higher concentration, by 12, 16 and 24% respectively, so as the overall concentration went up the left arm difference went up as well. I think I have controlled for variability about as well as is practical - washing arms with RO water, waiting for onset of sweating, calibrating TDS meter with calibration solution among other things. This has grown to no longer be a ‘simple DIY’ solution - based on the results I can’t recommend anyone trying this. The main reason to do something like this is to practice running experiments, not to get useful data :slight_smile:
At the end of the day, my assumption going into the testing was that my sweat concentration was likely about 1g/L based on surveys, etc, and the test results are consistent with that.
I also measured a sweat rate of about 1.6 L/hour on my trainer at 94F, so during the 2 hour test ride I did I lost about 4 grams of Sodium during the test, or almost 11 grams of NaCl. Even though these numbers are approximate, I do think it is helpful to roughly quantify these to guide replenishment. If I were to get all this from some 1g NaCl tablets I have, this would have been 1 tablet every 10-15 minutes on the bike, which surprised me.