Potassium, Muscle Strength, and Exercise Endurance

Hey , guys .

I'm back .

And I've been doing a lot of research on potassium , so I wanted to create this video .

It's actually quite interesting .

This topic relates to how potassium affects your muscle strength and your exercise endurance .

Okay ?

I want to give you a little background , but I'm going to make it as simple as possible .

You have these little tiny pumps on your cells , on the membrane of the cells .

You have billions of them .

They're called the sodium potassium pump .

They're a little tiny protein molecule that have enzyme activity , and you have billions of them and they work 20 fourseven .

And the name of the entire structure is , sodium potassium ATPase .

The ace is an enzyme , and the ace basically splits up this , energy currency , the ATP , so it can have energy to do its job .

30% of all of your energy in your body is allocated to these tiny pumps .

Now what do they do ?

All they do is they push out sodium and pushing in potassium .

So they push out 24 , 000 sodium ions and they push in 16 , 000 potassium ions .

Now if you do the math , there's a difference of 8 , 000 .

So that difference is very , very important because that difference makes the inside of the cell more negative than the outside , and it creates a little voltage .

So basically , this pump turns a cell into a battery to allow muscles to do their work through the nervous system .

So if you've ever taken a biochemistry class and not sure how it worked , I hope I explain this in a real simple way .

Now if this pump is not working , you're gonna feel it in your strength .

You're gonna feel weaker , and you're definitely not gonna have the endurance .

And there's several things that can influence that .

Number 1 , low potassium in your diet .

You don't get enough potassium , you don't eat enough vegetables , you just you don't have enough potassium in general .

Now it could be you have you know vomiting , diarrhea , excessive laxatives , something like that where it's depleting potassium .

But also training .

The more you exercise , the more of these you develop .

The more inactive you are , the less of these you're gonna have in your muscles .

And by the way , the biggest concentration of these pumps are in the skeletal muscle .

Now if you have insulin resistance because you're pre diabetic or diabetic , that can limit these as well .

Also if your thyroid is low you won't have enough of those pumps .

If you have low magnesium , you need magnesium for potassium to work , it's going to affect these pumps .

If you have kidney damage , that can affect the pumps .

If you're on diuretics it'll deplete you of potassium .

If you drink too much coffee , 2 to 3 cups per day , that will definitely deplete your potassium .

And lastly , if you are experiencing too much stress and you have too much cortisol , that will also create a potassium deficiency and affect these pumps .

So as an experiment , if you're exercising now go ahead and increase the amount of potassium in your diet and just observe the difference in your strength and your exercise endurance .

Thanks for watching .