When Kids Actually Need Electrolytes
Water covers most youth sessions. Sports drinks start to earn their place around intense exercise lasting roughly 30 minutes or more, and in real heat with heavy sweating. Below that, a sports drink is mostly sugar your kid did not need.
Water is the default
For a sixty-minute practice in ordinary weather, water is the answer and the question does not really arise. Guidance for young athletes consistently favours drinking water over drinking nothing, and the interesting debate is a much narrower one than the shelf in the supermarket suggests.
Starting from water and asking what would justify changing is the honest way round.
Where a sports drink starts to make sense
Children's Hospital Colorado suggests sports drinks before or after intense exercise lasting 30 minutes or more, to replace electrolytes and sugars.
The word doing the work is intense. A technical session with drills and standing around is not the same as thirty minutes of continuous hard running in August.
| Session | Water | A sports drink adds something |
|---|---|---|
| 45-minute technical practice, mild weather | Yes | No |
| 60-minute practice, moderate effort | Yes | Rarely |
| Intense session over 30 minutes, real heat | Yes, plus | Often |
| Tournament day, several games, heavy sweating | Yes, plus | Often, alongside salty food |
| Swimming lesson | Yes | No, though drinking is still needed |
What is actually in them
A standard sports drink is water, sugar, sodium, and potassium, in that order of quantity. The sodium is the part with a job on a hot day. The sugar is there for energy during prolonged exercise and is the reason these are not everyday drinks.
That is also why a sports drink at the end of a forty-minute practice, drunk in the car, is doing very little except adding sugar to the evening.
- Read it as a drink with a specific job, not as a healthier soft drink.
- If it is being drunk on non-training days, it has stopped being sports nutrition.
- Energy drinks are a different product entirely and are not appropriate for children.
- Anything with caffeine has no place in a youth sports bag.
Cheaper and simpler alternatives
Most of what a sports drink provides on a hot day is available from ordinary food and water, at a fraction of the cost.
Works and costs little
- Water plus salty food: pretzels, crackers, cheese.
- Milk after a session, which supplies fluid, carbohydrate, protein, and some sodium.
- Fruit, which carries water as well as carbohydrate.
- Diluting a sports drink, if your kid likes the taste but does not need the full sugar load.
Not the answer
- Energy drinks, which are not sports drinks and are not for children.
- Electrolyte tablets used routinely without a clinical reason.
- Salt tablets, which are a clinical decision.
- Anything bought because a professional athlete appears on the packaging.
What we will not tell you
We will not give you a temperature at which to switch drinks, a millilitre figure for your child, or a rehydration plan for a kid who is already unwell. Those depend on the individual and on conditions this page cannot see.
Heat illness is a medical emergency. Confusion, vomiting, fainting, hot dry skin, or a child who has stopped sweating in the heat needs immediate medical help. If your child has had heat illness before, get a plan from their clinician and give it to the coach in writing.
Is today a sports drink day?
Ordinary practice, ordinary weather
Intense session over 30 minutes, or real heat
Your kid has a medical reason to manage fluid or salt
Questions about electrolytes for kids
Do kids need electrolytes for a normal practice?
Usually not. Children's Hospital Colorado places the useful case around intense exercise of 30 minutes or more, which is narrower than most youth practices.
Are sports drinks bad for kids?
They are not harmful in the situations they are designed for. Used as an everyday drink they are a sugar source with no particular benefit.
What about coconut water or electrolyte tablets?
They are alternative delivery methods for the same idea. The question of whether your kid needs added electrolytes at all comes first.
- Hydration Tips for Preventing Heat Illness, Children's Hospital Colorado, childrenscolorado.org.
- How to Keep Young Athletes and Active Kids Safe in Hot Weather, American Academy of Pediatrics, HealthyChildren.org, healthychildren.org.
- Heat and Athletes, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cdc.gov.