Kaged Hydra-Charge: Hydration or Flavor System? How about BOTH!

Supercharge your training with Hydra-Charge, a versatile product from Kaged that provides electrolytes to keep you hydrated, antioxidants for overall health, and taurine for added performance. Fitting the mold of most Kaged products, it is naturally flavored, sweetened primarily with stevia, contains no artificial colors or flavors, and tastes amazing – especially that legendary fruit punch flavor!

Flavor or Hydrator? A Multi-use supplement

Hydration system or flavor system? Kaged’s Tawna Eubanks-McCoy knows the truth: it’s both! Have you tried it yet?

When it was initially developed, Hydra-Charge wasn’t meant to be a stand alone product! Even though it provides a ton of benefits on its own, its original purpose was to be the flavoring system for Kaged’s unflavored line of stackable supps.

Kaged told us,

“HYDRA-CHARGE started as the flavoring system for the mix-your-own stack (and it still makes a great flavor agent for any “unflavored” supplement on the market) – but it’s become an essential part of a lot of our customer’s stacks.”

— Team Kaged

Read on to discover the benefits of using Hydra-Charge, both on its own and combined with other supplements to supercharge your stack. Before we look at what’s in it, take a moment to sign up for Kaged news alerts with PricePlow to stay up to date on the latest deals:

Want it caffeinated? See the new Hydra-Charge AMPED formula!

Hydrate and defend

The incredible Kris Gethin showing how you flavor the solo ingredients from KM: with Hydra-Charge!

Hydra-Charge is packed with electrolytes and micronutrients. Taken on its own, it’s a delicious way to supplement your electrolytes and support hydration before, during, and after your workouts, as well as providing free radical defense with SPECTRA, a high-ORAC antioxidant blend of fruit, vegetables, and herbal extracts / concentrates.

The really great thing about it though, is it can be stacked with any of the unflavored supplements Kaged offers! Use it with Kaged’s Citrulline and drink it pre-workout for tasty nitric oxide pumps, or add it to their Fermented BCAAs and/or Kaged Glutamine for a tasty post-workout recovery treat.

Or, like many do, simply add it solo to your water bottle to sip on throughout the day.

Electrolytes

Each serving of Hydra-Charge consists of five electrolytes – magnesium, phosphorus, sodium, potassium, and calcium — that are essential to meet the hydration demands of athletes. These minerals (called “electro”-lytes because they conduct electric signals) help regulate multiple functions in the body including nerve and muscle function, blood pressure, bone strength, balance of fluid in the body, and the rebuilding of damaged tissue.

Keep the electrolytes coming, and the taurine brings ‘instant’ endurance in Hydra-Charge

The most important takeaway for anyone conducting intense physical training is that electrolytes are imperative for strong muscle contractions and for the nerves that send the signals telling those muscles it’s time to work. Let’s dive a bit deeper into each one:

• Magnesium

  Involved in over 300 chemical reactions in the body, magnesium helps maintain normal nerve function, muscle contractions, and keeps the heartbeat regular. It is also a main component of strong bones and plays a role in regulating both blood pressure and blood glucose levels.^[1]

  This is often deficient (especially those with the “Standard American Diet”), as discussed below in our ‘rant’ on modern agriculture.

• Phosphorus

  The main function of phosphorus is in the formation of bones and teeth. It also helps the body make proteins used for growth and repair of cells and tissue in the body.^[2]

• Sodium

  Balances fluids inside the body, specifically the balance of intracellular and

  extracellular fluid, to maintain proper hydration of cells. Sodium helps send nerve signals and, most importantly for athletes, is essential for strong muscle contractions.^[3]

• Potassium

  

  It’s all about the potassium sodium BALANCE. This is where Kaged keeps things in line, whereas other electrolyte supplements are often sodium-only.

  Works with sodium to balance fluids in cells, preventing too much fluid to build inside of them. Potassium also plays a role in the synthesis of amino acids inside of cells.^[4] We too often see a focus on sodium (with various “sea salts”) but not enough focus on potassium. It may not taste as good, but it’s worth it – and Kaged makes it taste great with Hydra-Charge.

• Calcium

  Foundation of building and maintaining strong teeth and bones. Calcium plays a major part in the cardiovascular system, regulating the heartbeat through nerve impulses and blood pressure via relaxation of blood vessels.^[5]

  For most people, electrolyte balance is kept in check through diet. But if you are someone who sweats a lot, consistently going hard in the gym or on the field, or working a physical job, then you need to pay extra attention to hydration and electrolyte balance. Obviously, focus on nutrition first.

Stay balanced!

Using Hydra-Charge gives you that additional bit of the nutrients you need to keep active bodies in balance. If you are deficient in any one electrolyte, it could lead to an imbalance, where the remaining ones may become highly concentrated, causing decreased performance or even more serious medical conditions. This situation is what we speak of above with the sodium and potassium balance. Potassium is too often completely left out of these formulas! Not with Hydra-Charge.

The new and improved shorter Hydra-Charge tub released in 2019!!

Slight deficiencies can hinder hydration, nerve signaling, and muscle contractions. Any of these can obviously hurt performance during physical exertion. More advanced cases of electrolyte deficiency or imbalance can cause symptoms such as irregular heartbeat, muscle weakness, twitching, confusion, and in the most severe circumstances, seizures and convulsions.^[6]

With the potassium portion stated, however, the most frequent case of electrolyte disorder in emergency rooms is still hyponatremia, or sodium deficiency.^[7] Athletes who train hard have to be aware that they lose sodium and other electrolytes through perspiration. The harder you work, the more you sweat, the more you need to be diligent about replacing them. Sports drinks on the market claim to do just that, but if you look at the label many contain only a few select electrolytes (and plenty of sucrose/sugar and fructose, which is likely not what’s needed during training).

Hydra-charge allows you to replenish those lost nutrients without all the added sugar.

Our agriculture is getting more mineral deficient by the year!

Realize that we’ve become mineral deficient due to our diets, but also because our agriculture is getting lower on these minerals every year! This is what happens when we do not use animal-based regenerative farming – we stripmine the soil of critical minerals each year, and don’t properly feed it to put it back. So if you’re not eating properly, and get too much monocropped processed food in, you’re likely deficient.

Taurine and coconut water powder

500mg of coconut water powder and a full 1g clinical dose of Taurine round out the hydration matrix. Coconut water powder is a partial source of the electrolytes in Hydra-Charge, and likely adds some flavor too.

Taurine’s Benefits (endurance-wise) can be seen after a single use!

Taurine is one of our favorite ingredients, as we’ve mentioned the multiple benefits of it in many product analyses. We’re thrilled to see it make its appearance here. Taurine has been shown to increase athletic performance (on its own) and helps with hydration and electrolyte balance, and even helps with insulin sensitivity.^[8] It helps pull water into cells, so in addition to the performance benefit, taurine will help you get your pump on, too.

The meta-analysis in our taurine article shows that as little as 500mg increases endurance, in its first use! With a full gram per serving of Hydra-Charge, you’re sure to see results.

SPECTRA antioxidant blend

Stay hydrated, friends.

The second part of the Hydra-Charge formula is the trademarked SPECTRA, an antioxidant blend containing a combination of fruits, vegetables, and herbal extracts and concentrates. Dubbed the “next generation of free-radical defense” by Kaged, this blend of high-ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) superfoods help protect cells from oxidative damage caused by free-radicals.

In your body, a balance of antioxidants and free-radicals is necessary to prevent cell damage. When the number of free-radicals can’t be regulated, the result is a condition known as oxidative stress, which can lead to alterations inside your body, cellular damage at the DNA level, that are the root cause of many human diseases.

Supplementing with external antioxidants has been demonstrated to help mediate the cell damage incurred from oxidative stress.^[9] Looking at the ingredient panel, the SPECTRA in Hydra-Charge contains an impressive combination of 24 foods and herbs that are proven to have antioxidant properties. This addition is sure to aid your performance by keeping overall health high at the cellular level.

The science (for dummies) of antioxidants

For those of you into scientific explanations, free-radicals are formed when a molecule loses an electron. It then looks for a replacement and steals an electron from an adjoining cell, causing a chain reaction. This process of moving electrons continues and spreads until damage is done to the cell. Antioxidants work by giving the free-radical an electron, so that one isn’t “stolen” from a functional cell, thus stopping the nasty chain reaction and preventing damage that could have ultimately resulted in decreased performance, illness, or even worse when occurring en masse.

The Kaged flavoring system

Look at those flavor crystals! Fruit Punch is insanely good!!

In keeping with Kris Gethin’s holistic lifestyle, Hydra-charge is free of artificial colors and flavors. It takes a larger dose of flavoring agent to using natural ingredients compared to artificial, and this adds some expense to the manufacturing process, but this formula is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Kaged. All natural flavors, colors, and mostly natural sweeteners (led Stevia and followed by sucralose).

To get the full perspective on what it takes to create natural products that taste great, check out our in depth discussion with Brian Rand, the chief formulator for Kaged. He is the man behind the label on the full variety of Hydra-Charge flavors.

Our other Hydra-Charge Flavor Reviews

Informed-Choice Informed-Sport Certified!

Look for these two logos if you need to be 100% certain there’s no banned substances

Right on the front of the tub, you’ll see both the Informed-Choice and Informed-Sport logos. This certifies that Hydra-Charge has been batch-tested and is proven to be free of banned substances for athletes!

So if you’re a drug-tested athlete, you can rest easy with Hydra-Charge, as well as the rest of the Kaged lineup.

Conclusion: Power Your Hydration with Hydra-Charge this Decade

Hydra-Charge is a powerhouse of flavor that is packed with electrolytes and nutrients. Essentially three products in one, combining hydration, antioxidant support, and superb taste, it is a delicious way to replenish your body before, during, or after your intense training sessions. We aren’t necessarily surprised though, this is exactly the type of quality product from Kris Gethin, and fans of Kaged will agree.

Want it caffeinated? See the new Hydra-Charge AMPED formula!