How and when do I use it?
Over the last 15 years a large number of studies have refined our understanding of caffeine’s performance enhancing effects. If there is a dose–response relationship between caffeine intake and exercise performance (i.e. the bigger the dose, the better the performance outcome), the plateau seems to occur at a dose of ~3 mg/kg or ~200 mg. This offers athletes (both male and female) the opportunity to consume caffeine for performance benefits at doses that are less likely to cause side effects increases in heart rate, impairments or alterations of fine motor control and technique, and anxiety or over-arousal), well within normal population caffeine use patterns, and from the caffeine doses provided by a range of well accepted foods and sports foods.
It appears that a variety of protocols of caffeine intake that can enhance performance. These include the consumption of caffeine before the exercise bout, spread throughout exercise, or late in exercise as fatigue is beginning to occur. Different protocols may achieve optimal performance outcomes even in the same sport or individual. Suitable or optimal protocols may be dictated by the specific characteristics of the event, the practical considerations of consuming a caffeine-containing product, and the individual characteristics/preferences of the athlete. Athletes intending to use caffeine to enhance sports performance should work with their high performance team providers to develop a protocol(s) and trial these t in training or less important events to determine the protocol(s) which best suit their individual needs.
Performance benefits have been observed following caffeine administered in capsules, coffee, sports and energy drinks, gum, gels, bars and dissolvable mouth strips. Mouth rinsing with caffeine or aerosol caffeine administration appear less likely to produce an ergogenic effect. In addition, studies now show that benefits from caffeine occur soon after intake and are not reliant on the achievement of peak blood caffeine concentrations which typically occur around 60mins.
There is doubt about the value of withdrawing from caffeine use prior to using it for competition to “heighten” the subsequent effect on performance. Observations of a greater performance improvement following a period of caffeine abstinence may be an artefact – caffeine withdrawal may impair general well-being and performance and the apparent increase in benefits when caffeine is reintroduce is partly explained by the reversal of these negative effects. Well-designed studies show that there is no difference in the performance response to caffeine between non-users and users of caffeine, and that withdrawing athletes from caffeine does not increase the net improvement in performance achieved with caffeine supplementation. While most studies of caffeine and performance have been undertaken in laboratories, (fewer investigations on elite athletes using field/real-life sports conditions), there is sound evidence that caffeine is likely to enhance the performance of a range of sports, including:
- Endurance sports (> 60 min)
- Brief sustained high-intensity sports (1-60 min)
- Team and intermittent sports – work rates
- Team and intermittent sports – skills and concentration
- Single efforts involving strength or power
In summary, athletes are able to ingest performance-enhancing doses (~200 mg) of caffeine from common foods/beverages. Athletes who want to use caffeine to enhance sports performance should develop supplementation protocols that use the lowest effective caffeine dose.