Acidity kills your output.
The burn is chemistry. Lactate acidosis is the limiting factor in every hard effort. Here's how sodium bicarbonate raises the buffer that keeps you firing.
The burn
is chemistry.
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.
Normal blood pH. Muscles contract efficiently, enzyme systems function optimally.
Hydrogen ion accumulation overwhelms the body's natural buffers. Fatigue accelerates rapidly.
Watch the burn happen.
During a hard effort your blood floods with acid and pH crashes. Cross the fatigue threshold and your muscles stop firing cleanly. Bicarbonate raises the buffer so you cross it later — or never.
Illustrative of the published mechanism: bicarbonate loading raises extracellular buffering capacity, slowing the blood-pH decline during near-maximal efforts of ~45s–8min. Individual responses vary.
Where bicarb wins.
Bicarbonate pays off most in efforts long enough to flood the blood with acid, but short enough to stay near-maximal — roughly 45 seconds to 8 minutes.
Relative ergogenic effect by effort duration, synthesized from the meta-analytic literature. The strongest, most consistent benefits cluster in near-maximal efforts of ~45s–8min; effects taper for pure sprints and for steady-state work beyond ~10K pace.
Raise the
buffer.
Sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO₃) is an alkaline compound that acts as an extracellular buffer. Taken at 0.3g/kg body weight 60–90 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 gel
is the key.
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.
See the
research.
Peer-reviewed evidence from the ISSN, PubMed meta-analyses, and 40+ years of sports science.