A Canadian study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology compared the effect of coffee on run time to exhaustion. A group of men took part in a variety of trials where they took regular coffee, a placebo, caffeine capsules, and decaffeinated coffee an hour before a run. Their performance times were up to 10 times longer with the caffeine capsules, with no differences in times when using the other variables. Although these results suggest that caffeine capsules work better than coffee, I’m still going with the coffee. I think I would be more nervous to take a straight shot of caffeine than I would having the comfort of the coffee that surrounds it. Maybe it’s just my own perception.
It’s important to remember that caffeine is a stimulant to the central nervous system and elevates your heart rate and blood pressure. The unpleasant side effects can be headaches and irritability, to name a few. Adrenaline is your body’s “fight or flight” response to danger, so having it in your blood stream for too long is not a good thing. Another important point is that coffee is a diuretic so people with small bladders, such as myself, should not drink very much of it. I always get the smallest size I can as too big of a size results in disruptive visits to the bathroom during my workout.
All I can do is speak from my own experience. I have used coffee when I needed a pick-me-up before a workout and it has never failed to result as such. I would be concerned if I felt like I needed to drink coffee before every single workout. But for those times when I feel exhausted or unmotivated and know that I still need to get to the gym anyway, coffee is a great, cheap performance enhancer with little side to no side effects.
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