New Study Says Chocolate Can Actually Help Your Workout

Yes, there was that brilliant hoax about how chocolate helps you lose weight a while back, but this one looks like it may actually be true: dark chocolate may help your endurance when working out.

Yes, this nearly unbelievable good news comes from a new study that looked at chocolate and cyclers. Researchers had eight bike riders eat chocolate, four of them dark chocolate and four of them white. The reason for this is because dark chocolate contains epicatechin and that (so some believe), is what allows more oxygenation in the blood which allows for better performance.

So half the bikers had their dark chocolate, and the others had their white, then got on bikes to test how well they did after two weeks. And what happened? Well, pull out your dark chocolate bars because those who ate dark chocolate “utilized less oxygen to ride at a moderate pace, a change that would generally allow them to ride longer or harder before tiring; and they covered more distance during a two-minute, all-out time trial, meaning that their anaerobic, sprinting ability had been enhanced.”

We know, that seems too good to be true. And maybe it is. This is miniscule amount of subjects for a test and more research needs to be done. Also, dosages have been far from perfected. The 40 grams that the bikers ate over two weeks seems okay, but if you’re worried about weight gain, or aren’t putting in the kind of intensity they are, it may be too much.

Either way, keep an eye out for follow-ups. And maybe don’t feel too bad about munching on a little epicatechin-rich chocolate before a workout.

-Shane