How Caffeine Affects Exercise & Athletic Performance

caffeine is one of the most widely used psychoactive substances in the world now most of the time we think of caffeine as a stimulant that could help us feel more alert or awake or get us through the work day if you will however caffeine as a performance enhancer for exercise Sports and Athletics is getting more and more attention with people using energy drinks or pre-workout supplements that contain caffeine with the hopes in that it could maybe improve endurance or improve weightlifting capabilities or even just improve improve performance in certain Sports so in today's video we're

going to talk about if caffeine can actually improve exercise and athletic performance how it could possibly do this and the amount that you would need to take in order to get some of these potential benefits it's going to be a stimulating one so let's do this so let's start by answering the first big question can caffeine improve exercise and athletic performance now there have been count studies done on this a handful of which we'll include in the description below but the overall answer is yes caffeine can improve exercise and athletic performance and it seems that

these benefits of caffeine can be applied to a wide range of different exercises for example caffeine has been shown to improve Exercise capacity at prolonged submaximal exercise things lasting longer than 90 minutes like a long run or a long bike ride but has also been shown to improve it at the mid-range or more of a little bit higher intensity something that you might only be able to do for like 20 to 60 Minutes not only that it's been also shown to improve at the higher intensities like that high intensity interval timeline of 1 to 5

minutes so that you can see caffeine and these improvements can be applied to a wide range of cardiovascular dominant type exercise that requires a lot of output from the heart and cardiovascular system not only that caffeine has also been shown to improve movement velocity during resistance training so moving weights faster and also has been shown to improve reaction time so you can see how these characteristics or improvements in those two characteristics could be applied or be beneficial to weight training or sports that require explosive movements like throwing or jumping or maybe even a sport that

might require Improvement in reaction time like maybe you're a martial artist and you need to react to a Ninja Kick coming toward your head but how is caffeine doing this what is it doing inside of your body that is accounting for these potential performance benefits well we're going to take a look at two main mechanisms one is how caffeine is a stimulant of the central nervous system and the central nervous system or CNS in anatomy just includes the brain and the spinal cord and then we'll also look at how caffeine could possibly affect muscle tissue

so let's start with the central nervous system by zooming into to what we'd find in your brain now to be fair this is a very simplistic drawing of what you'd find in your brain really I just drew one neuron or one nerve cell but the reality is you'd find billions of these neurons throughout your brain and nervous system but we actually only need to take a look at one to understand how caffeine affects athletic performance so if we take a look at this extension from the neuron this is called the axon and I've drawn some

branches here and I've zoomed into one of those branches by drawing it up here it's called the axon terminal just the end of the axon and there are multiple receptors or chemicals that you'd find throughout your brain and nervous system but we're obviously going to focus on the receptor that has to do with caffeine and I've drawn this in as these little green y's and these green y's represent the adenosine receptor now the Blue Diamond is the actual adenosine molecule which will obviously bind to the adenosine receptor like a lock and key analogy you need

a very specific shaped key to fit into a very specific shaped lock in order to turn or activate that lock now it's thought that a Denine will build up on the outside of your neurons as the day goes on and maybe you've heard of something called ATP which stands for adenosine triphosphate ATP or Den Denine triphosphate is the energy currency for your cells and your neur neur actually burn through a lot of energy or ATP throughout the day so again that adenosine starts to build up on the outside of the neurons and then can start

binding to those adenosine receptors but what does that cause to have happen well when adenosine binds to the adenosine receptors it suppresses the activity of your neurons so your neurons will fire less frequently less intensely and to you that feels like you might feel a little bit more tired or fatigued less focused less alert but we we bring caffeine into the picture you ingest it in some way it gets into your bloodstream and we've got this nice little blood vessel coming into the brain here with our little red caffeine molecules and the caffeine will diffuse

from the bloodstream and bind to one of those adenosine receptors it's close enough in shape to the original adenosine but to bind but not close enough to actually activate the receptor maybe you've put a key into a lock that fits in there but not quite enough to actually turn the lock think of caffeine as doing that as getting in that lock getting in that receptor and blocking it so then a Denine can actually get into those receptors so caffeine blocks the effects of adenosine and therefore has these opposing effects instead of feeling tired less alert

more fatigued you get increased awareness increased alertness you're more focused and you can definitely apply those characteristics to athletic performance and Performing better in certain Sports to be more focused and more alert but it doesn't only just stimulate or increase awareness caffeine also suppresses your perception of effort meaning you're exercising at a certain intensity it will feel a little bit less of an effort or you be feel like you're putting less effort in than you would without caffeine now caffeine also suppresses your perception of pain to a certain degree and so if you also suppress

pain to a certain degree we've all had those moments when we've been exercising or playing sports where it's uncomfortable or maybe even causing a little bit of pain so if caffeine can also suppress the pain a little bit again you're going to be able to push it a little bit further and therefore increase athletic performance so hopefully that gives you a good Baseline understanding on how caffeine works on the central nervous system to help you feel a little bit more focused and alert during Sports and exercise as well as helps to diminish that perception of

effort and even pain and discomfort but how does caffeine affect your muscle tissue well there are studies that suggest that caffeine affects intramuscular calcium or the calcium inside of your muscles now this is significant because calcium plays a huge role on how your muscles contract so let's quickly explain this and then apply it to caffeine if you take a look at this biceps you can see that it's made up of multiple muscle fibers or muscle cells and if we zoomed into an individual muscle cell and into the myof fibral we would see that we have

these little contractile subunits called sarir and these sarir are stacked in to end to end lengthwise throughout the muscle and this is about what the inside of a sarle Mir would look like with our little whiteboard drawing here but this is where we can figure out how calcium works so taking a look at this picture of the sarle miror you can see the thick filament in red and it kind of looks like a bundle of golf clubs and each individual golf club would be a mein molecule which is a contractile protein now keep in mind

I will mention some of the names here but you actually don't have to memorize all these names to understand the concepts I'm just going to mention the names for all the anatomy and physiology nerds out there but those mein molecules or the mein heads where you'd actually hit the ball with the golf club want so badly to bind to the thin filament which is in green and it looks like little circular beads slightly twisted and each little bead or Circle would be an actin molecule another protein now the problem here is that the masin and

the actin can't bind together yet because that blue line that's wrapping around the thin filament those actin molecules this is called the troponin tropomyosin complex or just TTC it's blocking those binding sites and this is what a muscle actually looks like at the microscopic level in the resting state but when the nerve sends the signal to the muscle to make it contract what happens is is calcium within the muscle cell and therefore within the sarum will actually be released and binds to the TTC that blue line and shifts it slightly out of the way so

now myosin and actin can bind and myosin ratchets and you get this ratcheting effect throughout all those sarir and that in turn would shorten the muscle and create the contraction so what does this calcium have to do with caffeine well there are studies that suggest that caffeine can enhance and increase the amount of calcium released within the muscle cell and therefore within the sarer thereby enhancing the contraction of the muscle and this could in part explain why they were seeing increases in contraction velocity during resistance training when people were supplementing with caffeine and you could

obviously apply this to being beneficial to weight training and even sports or athletic events that require explosive movements like we mentioned earlier throwing jumping sprinting Etc caffeine can also affect the cardiac muscle tissue within the heart causing that cardiac muscle to contract with more force during each beat and therefore delivering more blood and oxygen to your skeletal muscles throughout your body and you could see if you get more blood and oxygen to working skelet muscles there could be multiple benefits or enhancements to different types of exercises and athletic events so how much caffeine do you

need in order to get some of these benefits well it used to be thought that you needed to take as much as 5 to six milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight so I weighed in at about 184 lbs this morning and if we converted that to kilogram that' put me at just under 84 kilg and so if I went with a 6 milligram of caffeine per kilogram of body weight that'd be 6 * 84 and I would be taking over 500 Mig of caffeine now I don't know about you but that amount of

caffeine for me would be a lot and I'd likely just be bouncing off the walls now luckily the more recent research has shown that you need much less than that to get some of these performance benefits almost half of that like two to three milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight so if I went with a three I'd be taking about 250 milligrams if I went with a lower end at two I'd be taking in about 167 is milligrams of caffeine now most of the pre-workout supplements actually have about 200 milligrams of caffeine which

is a pretty good starting point but if you're one of those that's very caffeine naive you don't take a lot of caffeine or maybe you're a little more sensitive to it you could start even lower at like a 1 to 2 milligram of caffeine per kilogram of body weight and and these levels that we're talking about 2 to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight are all well studied and are relatively safe for most people but if you continue to push the level eventually you're just going to get to creating side effects and even potential

safety concerns because caffeine does not have what we'd call a dose response relationship meaning the more you take the more performance benefits for exercise and Athletics that you're going to get you're going to get to a point where that Peaks out and then you're just going to be dealing with side effects and again potential safety concerns and another thing we need to mention is timing when should you take the caffeine caffeine is rapidly absorbed with about 99% of it making it into the bloodstream with within about 45 minutes of ingestion so you should take it

about 30 to 60 minutes prior to exercise or whatever sporting or athletic event you're trying to get some of these caffeine induced benefits from but what if you're like me and you don't like to take caffeine every single day maybe you don't drink a lot of coffee or other caffeinated Beverages and personally I just don't like the idea of feeling beholden to something that I could potentially develop a tolerance or dependence too and that can happen with caffeine anyone who's been on caffeine consistently or for an extended period of of time and then they've cut

it out cold turkey has likely noticed some of those withdrawal symptoms like headaches irritability and other potential withdrawal symptoms now even though I don't like taking caffeine every day it's still extremely hard for me to ignore some of these potential performance benefits so what do I do I tend to selectively pick and choose when I'm going to take about 200 milligrams of caffeine and they're generally centered around more competitive days so on my regular training days I don't usually take any caffeine but if I know I'm going to run say like an obstacle course race

on a Saturday or maybe have a really competitive game of basketball with my friends I'll take some caffeine 30 to 60 minutes prior to those events and so for me I'm taking it at most one to two times a week and that's more of just a personal choice for me to try to kind of avoid any um or reduce my risk of developing any dependence or tolerance to caffeine now that does not mean that you can't take caffeine every day plenty of people do it plenty of people take pre-work out almost every single day drink

their coffee every single day and that's okay and that works for them you just have to also realize that if you decide to cut back on it or cut it cold turkey there is some of the risk to developing some of those potential withdrawal symptoms so hopefully that gave you a good understanding of how caffeine can help with exercise and athletic performance and I want to leave you guys with an incredible learning opportunity and that's by saying thank you to the sponsor of today's video brilliant brilliant.org is an amazing interactive online learning platform for stem

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previously that goes into a little bit more in of the interactions in the central nervous system and talks a little bit more about the potential side effects so we'll link that to this video and I also want to say thank you all so much for your support and watching all of our crazy anatomical and physiological videos we really appreciate it and we couldn't do this without all of you so if you want to like we definitely appreciate that if you're not subscribe when you want to go ahead if you feel the need and of course

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