Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
Options
Coffee?
![[Deleted User]](https://w5.vanillicon.com/532b980d44a3ae9aed2c60ec5136a782_100.png)
I heard that drinking one cup of coffee about an hour before training can help your metabolism work better, so that you get more 'fat burning' effects from your session.
Apparently this only works if you don't drink a lot of coffee anyway.
I'm not saying its a good idea, but if anyone (a medical person?) can confirm/deny, I'd be quite interested...
Thanks
Apparently this only works if you don't drink a lot of coffee anyway.
I'm not saying its a good idea, but if anyone (a medical person?) can confirm/deny, I'd be quite interested...
Thanks
The materials in this website are in no way intended to replace the professional medical care, advice, diagnosis or treatment of a doctor, qualified personal trainer, therapist, dietitian or nutritionist Runners's World, Part of the Hearst UK well-being network © Copyright 2017
Comments
(not quite what you were thinking of :-) )
I know that coffee in too great a quantity is bad - I'm jsut very curious.
And Chaos - yup, that good old diuretic effect - marvellous!
I suspect this may be a wild goose chase in any event!
These effects are much reduced (and debabably not present) in people who regularly take in caffeine.
It is worth mentioning that increasing caffeine intake can have negative side effects like nausea, headaches, irritability and increased heart rate - something to be aware of it you are not a coffee drinker and decide to sink a cup before your next run.
His theory is that the caffeine may act as a mental stimulant and may delay the perception of exhaustion.
Mind you - it's a ruddy big book and I've not read it all, nor understood all that I've read.
Sadly not- your body builds up a caffeine tolerence and the benificial effects are lost.
Research performed has suggested that abstainance from caffeine for 4-6 days prior to competition could be long enough to counter this tolerence, but that's just based on one research paper so I don't know how reliable the evidience is.
Oi. You,
Don't know when Lore of Running was published, but the research I was talking about was Costill et al (Med Sci Sports 1978 10:155), supported by more recent papers which I won't bother listing! They've demonstrated that caffeine increases lipolysis and plays a role in significantly improving exercise performance. This is under lab conditions tho so maybe Tim Noakes was saying there's no direct evidence that it works in a real life situation.
For instance, if I've got to drive when I'm tired I find that coffee is useless for keeping me alert, but Red Bull is excellent and I'm pretty sure it's not just due to the sugar boost. That said the coffee will still stop me going to sleep afterwards!
I think I need to go back and re-read the bits I've read, and check that I understand before moving on. Alternatively I might try buying a 2nd copy and strapping one to each leg as ankle weights while training.
Oi You - that's the best idea any of us have had... i'm off to buy 2 copies and a roll of duck tape - Never knew a cup of coffee could cause so much controvesy!
Popsider the ref for a build up of tolerence is:
Van Soeren MH et al. Caffeine metabolism and epinephrine responses during exercise in users and nonusers. J Appl Physiol 1996; 80:999
And the ref for effects after abstainence of 4-6 days is:
Van Soeren MH, Graham TE. Effect of caffeine on metabolism, exercise endurance and catecholamine responses after withdrawal. J Appl Physiol 1998; 85: 1493.
Don't know if you can access these papers from a public computer without paying a subscription fee, but you'll be able to pull up the abstracts on a medical search engine.
Overall from things i have read a cup of coffee can improve endurance ( or other source of caffeine/etc.. ) due to alertness and poss lipid effects.
A lot of the ultra marathoners drink flat coke/etc. for this reason.
However as said too much is bad- and caffeine withdrawal can be nasty.
"It is concluded that increased endurance is unrelated to hormonal or metabolic changes and that it is not related to prior caffeine habituation in recreational athletes."
and
"In summary, variable periods of short-term withdrawal from dietary caffeine had no effect on caffeine-induced increases in endurance during high-intensity exercise compared with no withdrawal."
Although it is a bit heavy going to say the least so I might be interpreting it wrong!
Changed other things as well, but limiting coffee has been one of the most beneficial.
I just re-read the whole paper and it's not something that you can critically analyse or draw conclusions from unless you really know the subject.
What it means by "In summary, variable periods of short-term withdrawal from dietary caffeine had no effect on caffeine-induced increases in endurance during high-intensity exercise compared with no withdrawal." is basically that no statistically significant differences were found between the two groups. But, prior to this statement it explains WHY these results have not shown significant results - basically due to the mechanisms involved in caffeine uptake and utilisation and the fact that they don't actually know the full mechanisms behind what is happening and why. And also there's a host of intersubject variability that needs to be accounted for - it mentions one subject who had a severly anomolous result that skewed the entire data set... so there's no black and white answer.
"Robertson et al. found that prior caffeine use resulted in attenuation of the caffeine-induced increase in plasma epinephrine concentration, and a 4-day period of abstinence was used to restore the expected epinephrine increase after acute caffeine ingestion" This quote form the paper basically means that habitual use of caffeine reduces the response that your body evokes after stimulation with caffeine, and abstainance for 4 days is enough time to allow the body to readjust so that when it is stimulated by caffeine after this 4 day break the response will be heightened, back to the level of a non-caffeine user.
The paper is saying that the theory behind abstainance is sound and previous experiments have explored and validated parts of it, but due to the extreme complexity of the mechanisms and inability to standardise or successfully blind the subjects, reliable data is very hard to get and further research is required.
There is substantial published information on this topic in Exercise Physiology books if you want to read up on it, just make sure you get a latest edition so that you have as much up to date info as possible.
thanks for the explanations.
Do the studies quantify the beneficial effect of caffeine before training? Is the only benefit the impact on use of fats? Are you aware of other studies which consider other factors which influence the use of fats?
I don;t want any arguments boys and girls.
All this science - I need a coffee...
;¬)
Tell me, do you even understand half of what is in the paper, or the implications that it infers?
I apologise to the other readers for this, but I'm really unhappy with the way that I've been slated by someone who hasn't got a clue! Yes I'm young, but aswell as having 2 World Championships and numerous European competitons under my belt, I have a BSc (Hons) in Sport and Exercise Nutrition and I'm currently in my 4th year of Medical School. I'd say i'm pretty well up to speed with Physiology and it's applications in sport, so excuse me for being a bit jacked off.
Popsider, go away and educate yourself.
What exactely are you after? Are you trying to find a method of burning fat to lose weight, or is it more to do with using a greater % of fat when you run to spare the carbohydrate so you can go for longer?
Let me know and I'll have a think,
SC
Anyway with that pathetic attempt to calm things down out of the way; I was always a bit curious as to why Isostar put caffeine in what I thought was meant to be a carbo/electrolyte sports drink. Was it for fat-burning, fatigue-delaying or just a marketing ploy because people would feel a bit more buzzy when using it?
It clearly doesn't back up what you are saying - I've quoted you the relevant sections.
The article is on the web - just search for the journal title and go from there - anyone can read it and make their own mind up.
SC - if you want to reply please quote me where in the article it backs up your initial point - so far you haven't - which makes me think you know you are wrong.
Thanks Chaos, you made me laugh
the role of caffeine in sports drinks is:
1) increase of fatty acid release (ie it increases breaksown of fats and release of them into the bloodstream so they are an available source of energy for metabolism)
2) affects central mechanisms (ie brain and CNS) to increase alertness
3)improves performance
so there you are
it also says too much caffeine leads to dehydration, and decrease in appetite -both really bad in a race as you will fatigue much earlier as well as screw your body over - so don't OD on me!
OK hotshot, go read McArdle, Katch and Katch Exercise Physiology then come back to me. Until you've done that I'm not going to waste my time on you. Your ego doean't seem to be able to get around the fact that YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE.
" Individual differences in caffeine sensitivity, tolerence, and hormonal response from short and long term patterns of caffeine consumption also effect it's ergogenic qualities. Interestingly the ergogenic effcts of caffeine are lower for caffeine in coffee than for the equivalent dose in a caffeine tablet in water. This suggests that componants of coffee actually anatagonise caffeine's actions.
Benificial effects do not occur consistantly in habitual caffeine users, indicating that an athelte must consider 'caffeine tolerence' rather than assume that caffeine provides a consistant health benifit to all people. From a practical standpoint, the athlete should omit caffeine-containing foods and beverages 4-6 days before competition to optomise caffeine's potential for ergogenic benifits.