so today we're going to talk about why your muscles
need most of your potassium now what's very unique about potassium is that
it's one mineral that we need a tremendous amount of we need
4700 milligrams and out of all the tissues in the body
eighty percent is needed by your muscles mainly question is why do we need so
much and why is it going to the muscles but before i explain that i need to
explain something called the sodium potassium
pump okay you have billions of these little pumps
and what they do is they keep potassium on the inside of the cell and they keep
sodium outside the cell so that's their main
purpose and the reason for that is anytime you have two different
minerals that are held apart like that by a pump and by a membrane the cell
wall you create a battery which is this you
have positive negative held apart that flow of electrons that current
generates a certain amount of energy that is stored in the battery
well your cells are mini batteries in fact
your brain has about 80 billion mini battery cells potassium is needed as a
raw material to make sure this pump works in fact 30 of all the energy
that you have in your body is allocated to this one little pump and because this
pump allows two potassium in and three sodium
out and that difference creates a voltage if we're talking about
the muscle we're talking about 90 millivolts
in a nerve it's about 70 millivolts in the skin it's about 50 millivolts the
voltage is just the power of this battery created by the
difference between these two minerals held apart
and another term for that is called membrane potential because
when it's at rest it's like a battery but then it gets activated and it starts
releasing this electrical charge that then causes
the muscle to contract and it creates nerve impulses and it
causes glands to secrete like hormones or even like sweat glands
the same principle happens in the thunderstorm where you have these clouds
that have a positive charge and the earth is negative and when those
clouds start building up moisture at a certain humidity you start
generating a tremendous amount of electrostatic
energy and when that electrical field gets to a certain point
it will discharge the energy as a thunderbolt
giving off 3 million volts per meter so that's a tremendous amount of energy
that is discharged the same thing in the cell you have the cell wall
on the outside you have positive the inside you have negative
and you have a very very thin membrane okay it's like five
nanometers of course this is a very large distance right here this is very
very tiny but the cell wall or membrane is two
layers of lipids or fats that keep these two minerals apart and
once the muscle is activated to contract or the nerve
is activated to send an impulse you lose potassium the more exercise you're doing
the more you're sweating the more you're losing these
electrolytes if you're injured or go through a surgery or trauma you
will lose potassium when the thyroid works it's a gland
you'll lose more potassium and also when you consume more refined
sugar you will also lose potassium as well
the other question is are we losing as much sodium
no not necessarily because sodium has a tendency to be retained in the body
but we do lose way more potassium and this is
why this is a requirement right here as far as the sodium requirement it's about
half what we need as far as potassium when you do
fasting your body will have a tendency to retain
more potassium just as a survival mechanism so that's one of the biggest
reasons why we have most of our potassium 80
in the muscles and then when our potassium becomes low the muscles become
weak you get tired you don't have the endurance anymore
when especially when you exercise and your muscles start to cramp
if you haven't seen my other videos on potassium i put them up
right here check it out