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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 .