Best Electrolytes for CrossFit: What to Drink for Sweaty WODs

By Sebastian Madlangbayan, founder of Cleonse: the world's cleanest 3-ingredient organic electrolyte.

The best electrolyte for CrossFit is a high-sodium drink with real, fast carbohydrate and nothing artificial. WODs are short, brutal, and drenching, so you burn through sodium and glycogen fast. Cleonse delivers 500mg of sodium and 24g of organic cane sugar per stick from just three ingredients, which fits that job well.

I'm the founder of an electrolyte brand, so take the recommendation with that grain of salt (pun intended). But the reasoning here applies no matter whose product you buy: CrossFit is one of the sweatiest, most metabolically demanding things you can do in an hour, and the drink you reach for should match that. Let me walk through why.

Why CrossFit drains your electrolytes so fast

A CrossFit workout is a strange beast. It's not a steady 60-minute jog and it's not a slow strength session. It's repeated bursts of near-maximal effort — thrusters, burpees, box jumps, rowing — usually in a warm gym with the fans barely keeping up. That combination produces a lot of sweat in a short window, and sweat is how you lose electrolytes.

Sweat is mostly water, but it also carries sodium, and smaller amounts of potassium, magnesium, and chloride. When you're going hard in a hot box gym, you can lose a surprising volume of fluid and a meaningful amount of sodium in a single WOD. Add in the fact that many CrossFitters train fasted, early, or back-to-back with a second session, and it's easy to show up to your next workout already down a bit on fluid and sodium.

On top of that, CrossFit taxes your glycogen — the stored carbohydrate in your muscles. Those explosive, repeated efforts run largely on carbs. When you pair heavy sweating with heavy glycogen use, plain water alone doesn't cut it. Water replaces the fluid but not the sodium, and it does nothing for the fuel you just burned.

How much sodium do you actually lose?

This varies a lot from person to person, which is important to say honestly. Research on sweat composition puts the average sweat-sodium concentration somewhere around 900mg per liter, but the real-world range is huge — roughly 200mg all the way up to 2,000mg or more per liter for very salty sweaters. You can often spot a salty sweater by the white crust left on a black shirt or a hat after a hard session.

Now think about volume. In a hot gym, losing a liter or more of sweat in an hour of hard CrossFit is completely normal for a lot of people. So a single tough WOD could cost you anywhere from a few hundred milligrams of sodium to well over a thousand. That's why a low-sodium "hydration" drink with 50 to 100mg per serving often feels like it isn't doing much after a real session — because relative to what you lost, it isn't.

This is the case for a higher-sodium approach. A drink like Cleonse at 500mg of sodium per stick is built to replace a meaningful chunk of what a heavy sweater loses in a WOD, not just wet your whistle. If you want the deeper background on how much sodium athletes need, I wrote a whole piece on it.

What to look for in a CrossFit electrolyte

Here's my honest checklist, and it's the same one I'd give you if I didn't sell anything.

Notice that most "hydration multiplier" products nail the clean-taste part but come up short on sodium, and most old-school sports drinks nail the carbs but load up on dyes and high-fructose corn syrup. The sweet spot for CrossFit is real sodium plus real, simple carbohydrate with a short ingredient list.

Why real cane sugar is an advantage here, not a drawback

A lot of clean electrolyte brands are terrified of sugar. I went the other way on purpose, and CrossFit is exactly the use case where that choice pays off.

During and right after an intense WOD, a modest dose of real carbohydrate does two useful things. It helps your gut absorb the fluid and sodium faster, and it gives your working muscles fuel to burn and then replenish. The 24g of organic cane sugar in a stick of Cleonse is there for that reason. It's the same idea as the sugar in a traditional sports drink, minus the corn syrup, dyes, and additives.

To be clear and honest: if you're deliberately keeping carbs very low — strict keto, or you're just not training hard enough to need the fuel — then a zero-sugar option makes more sense for you, and I'd tell you so. Cane sugar is an advantage when you're actually depleting glycogen. It's not magic on a rest day. If you want the full reasoning, I laid out the case for real cane sugar over the alternatives in a separate breakdown, and you can always check our facts page for the exact label.

A simple CrossFit hydration routine

You don't need to overthink this. Here's a routine that works for most people who train hard.

Start the day already topped up: drink water with your breakfast or first meal so you're not walking into the box dehydrated. If you're an early or fasted trainer, having some sodium beforehand can help. During the WOD, sip water — for short workouts you often don't need much beyond that. The key window is during a long session and immediately after: that's when mixing a stick of a real electrolyte drink into 16 oz of water makes the most sense, replacing the sodium and giving you some carbohydrate to start recovery. If you did a second session or trained in serious heat, don't be shy about a second serving.

The whole point is to match your intake to your output. Hard, sweaty, long, or hot means more sodium and fluid. Short and cool means less. Simple.

What about potassium and magnesium?

Fair question, and here's the honest answer. Sodium is the electrolyte you lose the most of in sweat by a wide margin, which is why it's the priority for a sweat-replacement drink. Potassium and magnesium are lost too, but in much smaller amounts, and most people get plenty from a normal diet full of fruit, vegetables, nuts, and whole foods.

Cleonse is a sodium-forward drink. The potassium and magnesium in a stick come only from the trace minerals naturally present in French grey sea salt, so they're there in small amounts rather than as a big added dose. I'm not going to dress that up. If your specific goal is to supplement meaningful potassium or magnesium — say a coach or doctor told you to — then a product formulated with added doses of those minerals, or getting them from food and a separate supplement, is the more direct route. For the core job of replacing heavy WOD sweat, though, sodium plus fluid plus a little fuel is what moves the needle, and that's exactly what Cleonse is built around.

Frequently asked questions

Do I really need electrolytes for a 20-minute WOD?
Not always. For a short workout in a cool gym, water is often fine. Electrolytes earn their keep when you're sweating heavily, training in heat, going long, or doing multiple sessions in a day.

Should I drink electrolytes before or after CrossFit?
Both can work. Some sodium beforehand helps if you train early or fasted; a serving during or right after a hard session replaces what you lost and kick-starts recovery.

Isn't the sugar in Cleonse a problem?
Not for hard training. The 24g of cane sugar helps fluid absorption and refuels glycogen you burned in the WOD. If you're strictly limiting carbs, a zero-sugar option may suit you better — that's an honest call only you can make.

How much sodium should a CrossFit electrolyte have?
Look for real sodium, ideally a few hundred milligrams or more, since heavy WOD sweat can cost you anywhere from a few hundred to over a thousand milligrams. Cleonse has 500mg per stick.

Can I just eat salt and drink water instead?
You can, and plenty of athletes do. A drink mix like Cleonse just makes it convenient and adds a little carbohydrate and flavor so you actually drink enough.

Keep reading

• How Much Sodium Do Athletes Actually Need?
• Do Electrolytes Need Sugar?
• What Is the Cleanest Electrolyte?

Editor's note: Sweat-sodium figures (average ~900mg per liter; individual range roughly 200–2,000+ mg per liter) reflect published sweat-testing data summarized by Precision Hydration and general sports-science sources, verified September 2026. Cleonse figures reflect the current product label. This article is general information, not medical or dietary advice.