Only really wake up after a cup of coffee? Or overcome the afternoon slump with a can of energy drink? It is no secret that caffeine can affect our energy levels. In fact, the majority of the Dutch consume one or more products containing caffeine every day. This makes it without doubt the most well-known, cheapest and most easily available performance-enhancing substance. You can read in this blog exactly how it works and how you can actually use this substance to your advantage.
In summary:
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Caffeine is one of the most well-known and most researched performance-enhancing supplements in sports. The correct intake of caffeine increases alertness, focus and pain threshold and can therefore yield a performance advantage in a wide range of sports.
- The optimal dosage varies from person to person and lies somewhere between 1 to 2 and 5 mg per kg of body weight. In order to find an individual optimum, the intake of caffeine should be regularly practised in training.
- The substance is absorbed into the blood around 45 to 60 minutes after ingesting a product containing caffeine, at which point the performance-enhancing effects can be experienced.
- Regular caffeinated foods have various disadvantages when it comes to getting the intended intake in a good way. For example, the exact caffeine content may be unknown, or other ingredients may cause stomach or intestinal complaints. Energy gels or a pill/capsule with caffeine is therefore the best choice in many cases.
About the effect of caffeine
Once absorbed into the body, caffeine stimulates the central nervous system. It does this by preventing the substance adenosine from doing its job. This stimulates alertness and focus, for example, and temporarily increases the pain threshold. Furthermore, there is scientific evidence that caffeine can play a positive role in making muscles contract more efficiently. The positive effects on athletic performance were discovered and extensively researched in the 1980s and 1990s. This research shows performance-enhancing effects in a wide range of sports: endurance efforts can be sustained for longer, time trials can be completed faster, but also short maximum efforts such as in strength or team sports can be improved. For this reason, caffeine was on the doping list until 2004, but since then the use of this performance-enhancing substance has been completely legal.
Dosage and timing
However, it takes more than just drinking a cup of coffee or having a can of energy drink shortly before a competition. The correct dosage and timing of intake are crucial to achieve the desired effects. Let's start with the optimal dosage: this varies from person to person; how sensitive we are to the effects of caffeine is genetically determined. The performance-enhancing range therefore runs from +- 1 to 2 to 5 mg per kg of body weight.
In other words: from 100 to 350 mg for a person weighing 70 kg. However, you can easily find your individual optimal dosage by testing the use of caffeine in training sessions. Start lower in the range and gradually increase to a higher dosage until you experience the above-mentioned effects optimally. Be careful that a higher dosage is not always even better: too high a dosage can, for example, make you feel restless or rushed. In addition, it should always be remembered that caffeine can have a negative effect on sleep duration and quality. Some people are more sensitive to this than others, but reduced sleep inevitably results in reduced recovery and reduced performance the following day. Especially during multi-day sporting events with a competition/finish late in the day, it is therefore important to make the right trade-off between optimal performance and optimal sleep.
From coffee to energy gels and pills
There are various products you could take to arrive at your optimal dosage. A cup of coffee will undoubtedly be the best-known form of this. In addition to the fact that it is not practical to drink coffee in many situations (especially during exercise), the caffeine content in a cup of coffee varies enormously. This is due to differences in bean varieties, for example, while the grind and preparation also have a significant influence. On average, a cup of coffee contains about 50 to 60 mg of caffeine, but peaks well above 100 mg are certainly no exception. This makes it impossible to rely on a cup of coffee to carry out your competition protocol in detail. It is much better to choose an energy gel with caffeine and/or a caffeine pill. The advantage of the former is that it can easily be integrated into a competition nutrition plan. However, this can also be a disadvantage in another situation: if you are aiming for a relatively high caffeine intake, you will not be able to achieve this through gels alone without consuming too many carbohydrates. In such a case, a caffeine pill could be a better choice (or supplement). Examples of the caffeine content for a number of products can be found in the table below.
| Product | Caffeine | Timing | Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coffee | 40–200 mg | 45–60 min | – | – Difficult to dose – Difficult to use during exercise |
| Energy drink | 80–200 mg | 45–60 min | – | – Difficult to use before/during exercise – Contains unwanted additives that increase the risk of stomach/bowel issues |
| Energy gel | 50–75 mg | 45–60 min | – Provides energy and caffeine simultaneously – Precisely dosed | – Harder to reach higher dosages |
| Pill or capsule | 100–200 mg | 45–60 min | – Easy to take – Higher dosages easily possible | – Difficult to dose accurately – Higher chance of side effects |
| Chewing gum | 50–80 mg | 15–20 min | – Very fast effect – Precisely dosed | – Harder to reach higher dosages |
What is the ideal caffeine intake?
While the dosage per person may vary, the optimal timing of intake is always the same. Whether you drink a cup of coffee, a caffeinated energy gel or take a caffeine pill, it takes about 45 to 60 minutes for the caffeine to be absorbed into the bloodstream through the gastrointestinal tract. Therefore, make sure you take your caffeinated product less than an hour before the competition (or its final). The only exception to this is chewing gum containing caffeine: this is absorbed directly into the mucous membranes in the mouth, so the effect can be felt within 10 minutes. The half-life of caffeine is approximately 5 hours, which means that half of the ingested dose is still present in the blood 5 hours after ingestion.
