Coffee Boosts Athletic Endurance, Report Suggests

A cup of coffee is likely to help improve a person’s athletic endurance, according to some research conducted by the University of Georgia’s Simon Higgins.

So put on your gym clothes, lace up your trainers, grab an espresso and hit the road.

The full study has been published in the most recent edition of the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, but we are going to do are best to summarise its fascinating findings.

Higgins, a third-year doctoral student in kinesiology, looked through some six-hundred academic articles and reviews and picked out those that referenced to caffeine improving athletic performance or endurance. After streamlining the criteria, just nine control trials that specifically used coffee during their experiments remained. From this base, Higgins went to work.

“Previous research has focused on caffeine itself,” Higgins has said. “So,” he continued, “this paper looked at the research surrounding its ergogenic benefits.”

Looking at these nine trials in detail, Higgins found that people who undertook physical activity after drinking coffee saw an improvement in their endurance.

There also appears to be a sweet spot in terms of the amount of caffeine (from coffee) that a person needs to consume: 3-7 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Caffeine intake between these levels typically helped increase an individual’s endurance capacity by 24%.

 “This is helpful for athletes because coffee is a naturally occurring compound. There is the potential that getting your caffeine by drinking coffee has similar endurance benefits as taking caffeine pills.”

So, if you are looking for a legal performance enhancer, then a shot of espresso could well be the answer!

These findings will hopefully challenge and change some conventional opinions.

“There’s a perception that coffee won’t give you the same benefits as pure caffeine,” he continued.

“[This] new research could mean that athletes could have a cup of coffee versus taking a pill.”

As usual, more research into the area will be needed – but, hopefully, it will be more forthcoming.