Baking Soda Before Workout: What the Trials Show About Sodium Bicarbonate

It sounds too simple to work: a powder from your baking cupboard that lets you push harder. Sodium bicarbonate has a formal position stand from the International Society of Sports Nutrition behind it, so taking baking soda before a workout is more than a social media trend.

It also gave about 3 in 10 people stomach symptoms in the running trials, and one dose holds more sodium than you should eat in a day. Before you try it, it helps to know which workouts it can help, which ones it can't and how much the studies actually used.

Is Baking Soda Good to Take as a Pre-Workout?

It can be for hard efforts of about 1 to 10 minutes, and there's little reason to take it for strength work or easy training. The ISSN position stand (Grgic and colleagues, 2021) says the benefits are mostly established for high-intensity tasks of 30 seconds to 12 minutes. The IOC consensus statement (Maughan and colleagues, 2018) puts the gain at about 2% in sprints of around 60 seconds, and says the benefit shrinks once efforts pass 10 minutes.

How Does Baking Soda Work During Exercise?

Hard exercise fills working muscle with hydrogen ions, which makes it more acidic. Bicarbonate can't cross into muscle cells, so it works from outside them. It raises the bicarbonate level and pH of your blood, and that steeper gradient helps move hydrogen ions and lactate out of the muscle (ISSN). Across 189 articles, buffering supplements raised blood bicarbonate by an average of 5.2 mmol/L (de Oliveira and colleagues, 2022).

That makes it a different tool from beta-alanine, which builds up a buffer inside the muscle over several weeks.

The Research: What Studies Show

The ISSN position stand

The 2021 stand concludes that doses of 0.2 to 0.5 g/kg improve muscular endurance, several combat sports, and high-intensity cycling, running, swimming and rowing. It reports benefits in men and women, and in single and repeated bouts. It also says part of the effect appears to be placebo.

What the meta-analyses found

The overall effect against placebo is small, with a standardized effect size of 0.17 for buffering supplements as a group (de Oliveira, 2022). It changes a lot with the type of exercise. In the table, an effect size of 0.2 to 0.5 counts as small.

Why newer reviews are more cautious

The position stand lists running and combat sports among the winners, and the 2022 to 2026 reviews have narrowed that. Miller and colleagues (2025) pooled 11 trials of continuous running lasting 1 to 30 minutes. The raw effect was 0.32. After adjusting for people who dropped out with stomach problems and for publication bias, it fell to 0.18 and lost significance, which the authors called negligible in a mixed-sex population. It stayed larger in men (0.40), and with so few women in the trials, that gap is only a lead for now.

For baking soda before running, then, expect a small gain at best and weigh it against your stomach. In team sports, the benefit was small and the authors wrote that it "should not be regarded as universally ergogenic" (Ge, 2026). The combat sports review disagrees with the position stand on performance, although it did find higher blood lactate. Swimming reviews disagree with each other, too.

Two more findings shrink the headline. About 25% of the benefit of buffering supplements looks like placebo (Marticorena and colleagues, 2021). And side effects can cancel the gain. In 21 men, 0.3 g/kg didn't significantly improve cycling capacity until the four who had stomach discomfort were removed from the analysis (Saunders and colleagues, 2014).

Why Do Bodybuilders Eat Baking Soda?

Bodybuilders use it to squeeze a few more reps out of long, hard sets. In a trial of 12 resistance-trained men, 0.3 g/kg taken 60 minutes before a leg session produced 139.8 total reps across squats, leg presses and knee extensions, against 134.4 with placebo (Carr and colleagues, 2013). That fits the meta-analysis above: a small gain in muscular endurance and none in maximal strength.

The results aren't consistent. A 2025 trial of 12 trained adults found no significant gain in chest press or knee extension reps at the same dose (Williams and colleagues, 2025). Extra reps haven't been shown to add up, either. In a small study of eight lifters, repeated use across 10 weeks of training added nothing to their explosive power or their training adaptations (Siegler and colleagues, 2018).

One 2026 trial in 20 active men did report more quadriceps growth over 8 weeks, but it combined bicarbonate with beta-alanine, so bicarbonate's own share can't be separated (Pouresmaeili and colleagues, 2026).

How Many Teaspoons of Baking Soda for Pre-Workout?

The trials didn't use teaspoons. They weighed sodium bicarbonate in grams per kilogram of body weight, so a teaspoon count can't tell you what they tested. The ISSN sets the minimum effective dose at 0.2 g/kg and the best single dose at 0.3 g/kg. Doses of 0.4 and 0.5 g/kg added no benefit and brought more side effects, so there's no reason to go above 0.3 g/kg.

These are the amounts studied, not a recommendation, and the table is our own arithmetic. Sodium makes up about 27% of baking soda's weight (22.99 of 84.01 g/mol, or about 274 mg per gram). A 0.3 g/kg dose for a 70 kg adult is 21 g of baking soda with about 5.7 g of sodium. That's about 2.5 times the 2,300 mg daily limit the CDC cites, in one drink. As an antacid, the package dose is half a teaspoon in water (Hughes and colleagues, 2016), so the sports doses are far above normal use.

Timing is more forgiving than it sounds. The ISSN gives 60 to 180 minutes before exercise. Blood bicarbonate typically peaks at 60 to 70 minutes, though peak times ranged from about 10 to 240 minutes between people. With capsules at 0.3 g/kg, modeling showed more than 80% of people stayed at least 5 mmol/L above baseline from 75 to 240 minutes after the dose (de Oliveira and colleagues, 2020).

Baking Soda Pre-Workout Side Effects

Stomach trouble is the main cost. The ISSN lists bloating, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain as the most common problems, and diarrhea is common too. In the running review, 29.5% of people reported stomach symptoms on bicarbonate against 2.6% on placebo, and 8.7% dropped out because of them, against 1.6%. A 2026 review of 101 investigations found that 21 of 35 single-dose studies recorded significantly more symptoms than placebo (Winter and colleagues, 2026). Diarrhea hit 10 of 11 trained adults in one trial of a 0.3 g/kg dose (Kahle and colleagues, 2013). In a test of eight ways of taking it, symptoms were most common 90 minutes after a 0.3 g/kg solution (Carr, Slater and colleagues, 2011).

Bicarbonate releases carbon dioxide when it meets stomach acid, which is the likely source of the bloating (Antonio and colleagues, 2026). Serious harm is rare, and it's still worth knowing about. Stomach rupture has been reported after sodium bicarbonate, and a 1986 paper described one case and reviewed seven others (Lazebnik and colleagues, 1986). In 192 symptomatic cases of baking soda misuse reported to California poison control, mostly as an antacid, 12 people were admitted to hospital with electrolyte problems, metabolic alkalosis or slowed breathing (Al-Abri and Kearney, 2014).

How to Reduce the Stomach Problems

• Use a smaller dose and take it earlier. The ISSN lists 0.2 or 0.3 g/kg and about 180 minutes before exercise, and the 2026 symptom review suggests that 0.2 g/kg may reduce severity.
• Take it with carbohydrate. In the eight-protocol test, taking it with a high-carbohydrate meal gave the fewest symptoms, and the authors suggested taking it 120 to 150 minutes before exercise.
• Stage the dose. The IOC lists split doses over 30 to 180 minutes. In 12 of 17 tested split-dose studies, symptoms didn't differ significantly from placebo (Winter, 2026).
• Load over several days. The ISSN describes 0.4 or 0.5 g/kg a day, split across meals, for 3 to 7 days. It may spare your stomach on competition day, but it adds even more sodium.
• Use coated capsules. Delayed-release capsules cut symptom incidence by 45% compared with a solution (Hilton and colleagues, 2019). In a 4 km cycling test, 3 of 11 riders had symptoms with enteric-coated capsules and 7 of 11 with gelatin ones, with similar gains of 8.5 and 9.6 seconds (Hilton and colleagues, 2020). Enteric coating raised blood bicarbonate less in another trial (Hilton and colleagues, 2020), and an athlete of 70 to 75 kg may need 20 to 25 capsules (Antonio, 2026).
• Hydrogel delivery. Mini-tablets in a carbohydrate hydrogel caused fewer symptoms than capsules in 12 resting cyclists (Gough and Sparks, 2024). In 14 trained cyclists, they cut 54 seconds, or 1.4%, off a 40 km time trial with no more symptoms than placebo (Shannon and colleagues, 2024). The maker funded the first study and supplied the product for both, and one author of the second now works for it.

The 2026 symptom review found no direct comparisons of these strategies against each other, so they can't be ranked yet.

Who Should Avoid Baking Soda Before a Workout?

Talk to a doctor before you try it, especially if any of these apply. Most of the warnings come from MedlinePlus, the US National Library of Medicine's drug guide, and they were written for antacid doses, which are much smaller than the sports doses above.

• High blood pressure, heart failure or kidney disease. MedlinePlus asks you to tell your doctor about all three before using it. A typical dose expands plasma volume by about 6 to 8%, and high sodium may increase the kidneys' workload (Antonio, 2026). In 11 trained adults, a single 0.3 g/kg dose left systolic pressure unchanged and raised diastolic pressure by 3.3 mmHg, which the authors didn't consider clinically important (Kahle, 2013). That result says nothing about people who already have high blood pressure.
• A low-sodium diet. It raises the sodium in your body, so check with your doctor first.
• Pregnancy or breastfeeding. Tell your doctor. The poison control authors list pregnant women among the groups most at risk from misuse.
• Regular medication. Tell your doctor or pharmacist first. MedlinePlus says to take it at least 2 hours apart from other medicines.
• Children under 12. It's only for them if a doctor directs it.
• Long-term use. The ISSN warns that regular use at 0.3 g/kg may push sodium above the upper limit and says the effects on kidney function aren't yet known. A 2026 trial found no difference from placebo in urine markers of kidney injury after a single 0.2 g/kg dose, but it covered only 10 trained people (Specht and colleagues, 2026).

Common Misconceptions

Misconception 1: "If 0.3 g/kg works, more works better"

The ISSN found no added benefit from 0.4 or 0.5 g/kg over 0.3 g/kg, only more frequent and more severe side effects. Keep single doses inside the studied range, and only with your doctor's approval.

Misconception 2: "Mixing it with vinegar or lemon juice makes it work better"

We found no trial of that mix. Acids react with bicarbonate and release carbon dioxide, so you'd be using up some of the bicarbonate before you swallow it.

What the Research Suggests Going Forward

The firmest case is for trained athletes in events of about 1 to 10 minutes who've tested it in training first, which is what the IOC advises. Women need more research: only 20% of bicarbonate studies included them, and the pooled effect of 0.37 has an uncertainty range that crosses zero (Saunders and colleagues, 2022). The hydrogel results need independent repeats, and the long-term effects of repeated sodium loads are still unknown.

If you train at home with dumbbells and bodyweight, you're mostly outside the window where baking soda has helped, and a few extra reps aren't worth the stomach risk or the sodium. If you're looking at supplements, our reviews of caffeine and exercise performance and pre-workout safety are a better place to start.

What moves results for most people is training consistently, and that's a habit a supplement can't build for you. An AI personal trainer app can help with that part. FitCraft's 3D AI coaches guide you through each workout, demonstrate the exercises and adapt your plan as you progress, with streaks and leaderboards to keep you coming back.

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