Coffee May be the Best Workout Supplement
If you are a coffee junkie then there is no need to convince you to drink anymore. But a new study will make you pretty happy about the advantages of sipping a cup of joe before your workout, no matter how much coffee you already drink a day.
The common assumption was that coffee can give you a boost before you workout, as long as you haven’t been guzzling the stuff every day for hours on end. Just makes sense, right? But coffee, that miracle beverage, may outperform expectations.
Researchers took 40 cyclists and broke them into groups by how much caffeine they consumed daily. Then they started having them cycle, coming in multiple times to do 30-minutes on a bike — sometimes they were taking caffeine pills and other times just placebos. By the end the caffeine consumers increased their speed by 2-3%, which could mean a few minutes of improvement. But what this all leads to is the most interesting result, according to this article:
The cyclists who usually chugged large amounts of coffee or other caffeine drinks every day received the same boost from caffeine as light coffee drinkers, even though they had not abstained from caffeine for days beforehand.
So that means two things:
- Don’t skip the java before you hit the gym — it’ll probably help no how much of a junkie you are.
- With that in mind, make sure you are not going overboard. Caffeine overdoses are real and very serious. Enjoy your coffee, but make sure you’re not suffering any adverse effects.
-Shane M.