Skip to main content

​
Bottling: fill & mix

What it is. An athlete’s Setup describes the vessels they carry, their carriage, and how each one is filled and mixed. Saturday maps the per-hour prescription onto that carriage, so the athlete knows what goes in each bottle and when to drink it. When to change it. When the athlete’s gear changes, such as more or fewer bottles, a bigger flask, or a feed zone on course. When a mix that is too concentrated is causing stomach trouble. When what they carry does not cover the session’s duration. What the athlete gets. A concrete bottle plan with fill volumes, scoop counts, and a drink cadence, with none of the math left to them. The question it answers. “How much do I put in each bottle, and how often do I drink?”

​
How carriage is structured

Carriage is stored per sport, not globally, and an athlete can keep several named carriage Setups for one sport, such as a road Setup and a gravel Setup, optionally tagged with the disciplines each is for. A carriage Setup is an ordered list of slots. A slot is one vessel with a maximum volume, and the order is the fill priority: Saturday fills slots top-down, each with the largest container the athlete owns that fits, until the prescribed fluid is covered. When the athlete bottles a session, the app lists Setups tagged with that session’s discipline first, then untagged ones, with a pinned default leading within each group, and the athlete can pick a different one at that step. So “how many bottles” is at most the Setup’s slot count, and “how big” is each slot’s volume ceiling.
The athlete chooses how the mix is spread. At the top of Make your bottles. the athlete picks a filling method. With three or more containers, Concentrate puts the carbohydrate and salt in as few bottles as possible and keeps the rest plain water, Goldilocks (the usual default) keeps some bottles plain water and mixes the rest the same, and Evenly puts the same, more dilute mix in every container. With two containers the choice is Keep 1 Fresh H₂O or Evenly. The totals never change between methods, only where they go, and a very strong mix carries a warning such as “Try hot water to mix!”. To make every bottle less concentrated, the athlete picks Evenly, or you give them more fluid capacity to spread the same carbohydrate across.

​
What you do as a coach

  • Read it first. Open the athlete’s current carriage before changing anything, so you are adjusting from ground truth rather than a guess.
  • Edit the slots. Pick which of the athlete’s Setups to edit, then add, remove, or resize its slots, one to six per Setup, choosing bottle, flask, bladder, or handheld. Saturday re-maps the consumption plan and shows a one-line impact preview as you go. See The Setup.
  • Pre-fill for a new athlete. For an athlete who is less comfortable with the app, you can dial in their bottling from your roster before they ever open it, so they arrive to a working plan.

​
See also