Coffee's Power To Boost Performance

Athletes of all levels are catching on to coffee's power to boost performance. Increasingly popular in gyms and among endurance athletes, coffee is a better fuel than sweetened sports beverages, as it has no sugar, few calories, and these incredible capabilities:

*  Improves speed and power during exercise

*  Preferentially burns fat while you exercise

*  Combats oxidation of free radicals

Coffee is the best training aid I've encountered in my years as a competitive Nordic skier, cyclist, marathoner, Ironman participant, alpine racer, and big-ocean stand-up paddler. By increasing your anaerobic threshold, coffee allows you to work at a higher pace, harder and longer than you otherwise might. While you're working harder, longer, and faster, caffeinated coffee can even help you burn fat instead of sugar. Caffeine frees up fatty acids from your fat stores, so you can burn them immediately as fuel. Preserving sugar stores in muscle this way is the secret to going faster and farther in endurance sports.

While helping you burn fat, coffee also can increase speed and power during exercise.

Sports scientists in the United Kingdom studying this potential in coffee discovered groundbreaking results in 2013. As simple a change as drinking coffee an hour before a maximum endurance test, called a time trial, spurred cyclists to ride significantly faster, with notably greater power.6

How hard does exercise feel to you? Scientists measure this as perceived exertion. While numerous studies have demonstrated coffee's ability to increase power, speed, and endurance, the research we conducted with Dr. Nieman at NCRC showed that coffee can also make exercise feel easier. We studied high-phenol coffee's influence on performance as well as mood and found amazing results in perceived exertion. An hour after drinking a cup of either high-CGA or placebo coffee, our athletes participated in fifty-kilometer cycling time trials. Thirty minutes into the workouts, when the coffees were exerting their maximum effects, we measured perceived exertion. Athletes who'd had high-CGA coffee found that their workouts felt much easier, even at their highest levels of exertion. The implications of these preliminary findings are simple and powerful: A cup of high-phenol coffee before a workout may make your exercise seem much easier!

We know for certain that coffee can upgrade your athletic performance, but the benefits don't stop there. Coffee also aids recovery. Athletes and exercise fans have known for years that intense and prolonged exercise places a great deal of oxidative and inflammatory stress on the body. The production of energy by muscle cells during exercise generates an excess of one of the most powerful and damaging known oxidants: the superoxide radicals. The harder you exercise and the more oxygen you consume, the more superoxide spews out. This can slow recovery, increase the risk of injury, and decrease the intensity or duration of exercise. With their potent antioxidant properties, the phenols in coffee act as a fire extinguisher to quench superoxides. At the end of our time trials, the cyclists taking high-phenol coffee had higher levels of antioxidants in their blood than those taking the placebo.

Phenols™ anti-inflammatory effect supports recovery, too. They can almost take the place of ibuprofen says Dr. Nieman. Extensive research has shown that caffeine supports performance by working on the central nervous system, but new studies are focusing on phenols. The purple color in blueberries, the green in broccoli, all the colors are the polyphenols' explains Dr. Nieman. “Most go to the colon and bacteria break them down. But if you exercise, that opens the door and they come flooding back. They relax the blood vessels to improve blood flow, so the muscle gets better oxygen delivery.” You'll read more about how athletes can benefit from coffee in chapter 5, The Coffee Lover's™ Diet.

Source: The Coffee Lover's Diet Bob Arnot