Are you a coffee lover who loves to workout? And, have you ever wondered how to reach your fitness goal easily with the help of coffee? If that’s the case, you know you’re at the right place now. Here, we come up with many supporting arguments that guarantee how you can enjoy your favorite coffee drink while enhancing your workout performance.
Of course, a cup of coffee is not only just a mainstream drink to wake you up in the morning or to boost up your day, but it is also an ideal drink that offers numerous benefits to your overall health and specifically your fitness regime. So, what are the benefits of consuming coffee for your workout?
To clear your doubt, we will illustrate the chemistry of coffee consumption proven by science that claims how coffee has that special kind of complexity for your exercise performance right now.
Contents
1. Advantages Of Coffee For Exercise Performance
Improve Mental Alertness Performance
Technically, coffee can wake you up in the morning and help you to stay focused within a certain period of time. More than that, research has shown that it even boosts your mental alertness as well. By binding the caffeine with the Adenosine, it creates an alert state in our brain, so that we are able to perform a more difficult workout and achieve our fitness goal. Meanwhile, the state of alertness is very important in almost every kind of aspect in our lives, no matter if you are driving, running, or working out, to avoid facing possible danger and lead to regret.
Enhance Workout Performance
People always want to enhance their performance no matter how minimal it is instead of having no improvement. Basically, drinking coffee before doing the exercise can enhance your performance in so many ways. This is because caffeine can increase your blood pressure and heart rate and break down fats. Meanwhile, a study has shown that coffee can increase 1% performance in working out. In addition, there was a report in Sports Medicine mentioned that caffeine is a powerful ergogenic aid that helps athletes to be able to train at a longer duration than those who do not drink coffee beforehand.
Decrease Muscle Pain
Attending a long workout training or working out will more or less lead to muscle pain in which we should not ignore or look down on those pain. Muscle pain is a signal alerting us that something has gone wrong. However, sometimes you may experience muscle pain when you just start doing the exercises after a long breaking period. There is a study shown that those who drink coffee in advance have less muscle pain than those who start working out directly without coffee consumption. Scientifically based, caffeine blocks the receptor of our brain called Adenosine that is involved in pain. Once the pain perception is being blocked, the natural pain-killing neurotransmitters, dopamine, and beta-endorphins will be released. Therefore, you will not feel pain.
Increase Physical Endurance
The consumption of caffeine will increase the physical endurance by up to 30% and enhance your speed from 2 to 5% if you attend the elliptical session. However, if you prefer a shorter workout experience, you will still get the benefit after drinking the coffee. It decreases the exhausted and painful feeling after or during doing the workout.
Burn Fat
One of the beneficial advantages of drinking coffee to help with exercising is its burning fat or calories. With the consumption of caffeine in a cup of coffee, your fat cells are forced to be used as energy sources rather than glycogen. Since black coffee has a large amount of caffeine, once you drink black coffee, your metabolism will be increased. Thus, it will burn more calories from your body compared to the other types of coffee.
Prevent Disease
Another benefit of drinking coffee before working out is to prevent yourself from diseases. The reason is that it has a large number of antioxidants protecting against damage from free radicals. A study in Food Science and Nutrition has indicated that coffee has a negative impact on diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and other forms of cancer. With such advantages, why not have a try on drinking coffee before you do the exercise.
Improve Workout Recovery
Some people may feel very exhausted, tired, and painful after working out. However, this problem can be solved with just a cup of coffee. It is found that to reduce the pain of working out effectively, it is recommended to drink coffee between 24 to 48 hours after exercising. Furthermore, drinking coffee at the post-work-out could even refill or restore the energy back and have 66% more glycogen than those who do not drink coffee and enables you to perform the exercise a lot harder for your next time.
2. Coffee Calories and Nutrition Facts
No matter what kind of coffee you consume, it more or less has some effects on your health and your workout performance. Do you know that there are no calories in black coffee? That’s why some people who are on diet with the aim of losing weight tend to drink black coffee rather than the other types of drink. Meanwhile, the black coffee itself has a small portion of sodium and potassium in it.
However, it does not mean you can drink black coffee with the additional cream or sugar in it freely. A small little thing does matter and changes the nutrition in your drink. If you put 2 spoons of cream to your coffee, it means you will consume 100 calories. While a spoon of sugar will add up to around 20 calories. On the other hand, if you are required to meet the requirement regarding the amount of coffee to consume, you are recommended to look at the calories in a pre-race.
Besides, you are suggested to drink black coffee before running because it helps to eliminate the chance of having stomach discomfort, decrease fat and calories content, and lower the saturated fat intake.
3. Myths About Coffee And Running
Although some people believe that drinking coffee before your workout will enhance your performance, make you feel that your running is not that difficult, coffee is not everything. It cannot maintain your energy or make you feel powerful during your running effortlessly. Drinking too much caffeine on the race can cause shakiness together with nervousness and detract your focus. If you happen to drink more than 1200 mg of caffeine, it will cause toxic effects. On the other hand, coffee cannot replace smart training. In order to perform well, what you need to do is to have yourself trained and perform well even though coffee can offer you some side benefits.
Besides, some people have claimed that there is a relation between coffee and dehydration. However, it does not true although coffee can enhance the need to urinate, it does not raise the possibility of dehydration because runners or athletes always need to hydrate themselves before or after doing the exercise otherwise they will be dehydrated. This is because while doing the workout, runners will lose a lot of energy, calories and end up having a lot of sweat which leads to dehydration. Thus, there is no relationship between coffee and dehydration.
How much coffee should you consume before your workout performance?
Although it is found that caffeine is the most effective way to boost your performance rather than the other energy drinks or medicines, you should not over consume it. A study recommended drinking only 4.5 to 6 milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight. For instance, you may consume 285 to 380 mg of caffeine or 1.2 ounces to 2.16-ounce cups of coffee if you have 140 pounds weight.
Conclusion
With the above-mentioned advantages of drinking coffee before running and another general workout, some of you may be surprised, some of you may want to drink more coffee to achieve the best results. However, you should not over-consume coffee because it does have some side effects on your health as well if you exceed the limit. Furthermore, although you have no feeling of exhaustion with coffee consumption, you should not work out exceed the maximum time to avoid being in a state of danger.
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