--- title: "A supplement checklist for people who walk" author: "Mel Farrow (@switchback)" date: 2026-07-19T08:33:38.256Z updated: 2026-07-19T08:33:38.256Z canonical: "https://jot.place/@switchback/a-supplement-checklist-for-people-who-walk" description: "A fork of Ines Kruger's method, rewritten for people who walk all day, because half the trail forums are now shops selling electrolyte powder." tags: - "evidence" - "hiking" - "medicine" - "pharmacology" --- # A supplement checklist for people who walk This is a fork of @panacea/how-to-read-a-supplement-study-in-nine-minutes, which is the single most useful thing I have read about my own kit list, and none of the method here is mine. Ines wrote a general procedure for deciding whether a supplement study means anything; I have kept her rules and swapped every example for something that gets sold to hikers, added the actual numbers for walking all day, and dropped her section on assay quality because I do not understand it well enough to summarise it. The reason I bothered is that roughly half of every long distance walking forum is now a shop. Electrolyte powder in a sachet with a mountain on it, at somewhere between one and two pounds a serving, sold on the idea that eight hours on a hill is a metabolic emergency. It is not. It is a long day, and long days have been solved for about a hundred years with sugar, salt and coffee. Here is the honest version. Grades are mine; the sources are at the bottom. | Thing | What it does on a walking day | Evidence | Verdict | |---|---|---|---| | Carbohydrate | fuels anything past about two hours | Strong. Around 60 g an hour for a two to three hour effort, up to about 90 g an hour for ultra-endurance efforts, and at the high rate you need more than one type of carbohydrate so your gut can absorb it[^1] | Yes. It is called food | | Sodium, in real quantities, when you are sweating hard for days | replaces what leaves in sweat | The Australian Institute of Sport puts electrolyte supplements in Group A: strong evidence, in specific situations[^2] | Yes, in specific situations. Not as a daily habit | | Caffeine | small to moderate benefit, most consistent in aerobic endurance, and it helps when you are short of sleep | 3 to 6 mg per kg of body mass, commonly about an hour before. Minimum useful dose may be as low as 2 mg/kg. 9 mg/kg gives you the side effects without extra benefit[^3] | Yes, and you already own it | | Iron, vitamin D, calcium, zinc, folate | correct a measured deficiency, nothing more | AIS Group A as medical supplements, meaning strong evidence for treating a deficiency[^2] | Only after a blood test, only with a doctor | | Creatine, beta-alanine, sodium bicarbonate, beetroot nitrate | real effects on short hard efforts | AIS Group A, strong evidence[^2] | No. Right evidence, wrong sport | | Magnesium | nothing you will notice | AIS Group C: evidence not supportive of benefit in athletes[^2] | No | | BCAAs, HMB, tyrosine, alpha lipoic acid, phosphate | nothing | AIS Group C[^2] | No | | High dose vitamin C and E | may work against you | A double-blind randomised controlled trial in 54 people found vitamin C and E supplementation hampered cellular adaptation to endurance training[^4] | No, and especially not while training | Two things worth saying about that table. First, "Group A" does not mean "buy it". It means there is good evidence for a specific use, and sodium bicarbonate has excellent evidence for an eight hundred metre runner and no relevance whatsoever to a person crossing Sutherland at four kilometres an hour. Second, I have deliberately not printed a milligrams-per-litre figure for sweat sodium. Sweat composition varies a lot between people and I have not measured yours, and any brand that tells you your requirement without measuring you is guessing at a price. On carbohydrate: 60 g an hour is two gels, or a handful of jelly sweets and half a flapjack, or about 400 ml of ordinary sports drink plus a cereal bar. The joint position statement from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada and the American College of Sports Medicine is the standard reference for all of this[^5], and none of it requires a subscription box. :::danger Drinking more water is not automatically the right response to feeling terrible on a hill. Exercise-associated hyponatremia is a blood sodium concentration below 135 mmol/L occurring during or in the 24 hours after prolonged activity, and the Wilderness Medical Society guideline is explicit that it gets mistaken for heat exhaustion and exertional heat stroke, and that getting that call wrong makes the outcome worse[^6]. In the field, on a long hot day, if someone is confused or vomiting, the answer is not to pour another litre into them and hope. ::: ## The list What actually lives in my pack, for a day of eight to twelve hours walking. - [x] Food, in a quantity I have weighed, which is where all the useful carbohydrate comes from - [x] Salt, because I add it to dinner and because I am sweating for eleven days - [x] Coffee, at a dose that is roughly 200 mg for me, which is inside 3 to 6 mg/kg - [x] Sugar in a pocket, reachable without stopping - [ ] Electrolyte powder, only on days over about 25 km in heat, and the cheap tablets, not the branded sachets - [ ] Anything else That last unticked line is the whole point of the fork. Ines has a paragraph about magnesium that I keep sending to people, and it applies exactly to hikers, who buy it by the kilo for cramp: @panacea/magnesium-what-the-trials-actually-show. One caveat that is not optional. I am a hiker with a set of kitchen scales, not a clinician. If you take any regular medication, or you have a heart, kidney or blood pressure condition, or you are pregnant, ask a doctor or a pharmacist before you start adding salt tablets or caffeine to your day, because both of those do things in a body beyond making you walk faster. The powder in the pretty sachet is sugar and salt. Buy the cheap one and spend the difference on a train ticket north. [^1]: Jeukendrup A. A step towards personalized sports nutrition: carbohydrate intake during exercise. Sports Medicine, 2014, 44 Suppl 1, S25 to S33. PMID 24791914. [^2]: Australian Institute of Sport Sports Supplement Framework, ABCD classification. Group A: "strong scientific evidence for use in specific situations in sport using evidence-based protocols". Group C: "scientific evidence not supportive of benefit amongst athletes OR no research undertaken to guide an informed opinion". [^3]: Guest NS and colleagues. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: caffeine and exercise performance. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2021, volume 18, article 1. PMID 33388079. [^4]: Paulsen G and colleagues. Vitamin C and E supplementation hampers cellular adaptation to endurance training in humans: a double-blind, randomised, controlled trial. Journal of Physiology, 2014, 592(8), 1887 to 1901. PMID 24492839. [^5]: Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM. Nutrition and Athletic Performance. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2016, 48(3), 543 to 568. Joint position statement of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada and the American College of Sports Medicine. PMID 26891166. [^6]: Bennett BL, Hew-Butler T, Rosner MH, Myers T, Lipman GS. Wilderness Medical Society Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Management of Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia: 2019 Update. Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, 2020, 31(1), 50 to 62.