Coffee Before Exercise: Just Do IT.

Too many people appear to be under the impression that coffee is bad for you; to you I say, “listen not to what the naysayers preach, put down your sparkling waters and come to the dark side. After all, once you've had black, you just can't go back...or something like that.”

In keeping with my lifelong love of bullet points and blatant literary lethargy, I give you a couple of reasons to have a little bit of the good stuff before you lace up your boots. I will try my utmost not to ramble. If your concentration does start to wane, skip to the bottom bullet points.

Harder & Longer

• Caffeine ingestion before a workout improves performance, fact. You can read the 74 studies on this or you can just accept that one's athletic performance ameliorates (my word of the day) by as much as 12.4%. This is seen predominantly in endurance sports - professional cyclists are among caffeine's biggest admirers, fact.

Nurofen in a cup

• You don't feel so tired. Exercise is perceived as being around 6% less painful after a double espresso.

How does this work?

• Caffeine is thought to slow down the muscles' consumption of glycogen (muscle fatigue kicks in once you exhaust glycogen stores). It does this by releasing fatty acids into your blood stream, thus using both fat and glycogen as energy sources, which means you now burn through your glycogen stores a little slower. This is know as “glycogen sparing”.
• You don't feel the effects of lactic acid as much: not only because you've started “glycogen sparing” but also because the pain receptors are receiving caffeine molecules in place of actual pain stimuli...basically blocking the pain receptors. All this science is starting to slip away from us, I know, back to innuendos and camp humour I say.

How much should I enjoy before exercise?

• The studies on this are numerous and varying, some say 150 mg of caffeine, others 250 mg and I believe the blurb that comes with your sturdy London Marathon Runner's Pack states you can take as much as 500 mg before feeling effects of dehydration.
• They say the optimal dose is around 2-3mg of caffeine per kilogram you weigh. So, if I weigh 83kg....OK, fine, 85kg.....all right, that's enough! 87kg...I'm a little stressed these days, what with no responsibility and a general laissez faire attitude to life...anyway, I should aim at 261mg, which equates to a double espresso, roughly.

Hit me with high street statistics...

• A cup from Starbucks has only 51 mg of caffeine; Starbucks is to coffee what non-alcoholic beer is to, well, beer.
• An espresso from Costa has 157 mg, which is why, after a double, I feel the urge to fight Charlie Sheen, naked, then wrestle a mountain lion.
• Most independent sellers, put their regular cups (not espressos) at a around 200mg.

Again, but this time in English, please...

Drink an espresso 45 minutes to an hour before exercise and the following WILL happen:

• You'll feel less pain during exercise.
• You'll see an improvement in performance (sporting and otherwise).
• You'll burn more calories.
• You'll burn more fat.
• You'll shake ever so slightly.

If you haven't cottoned on to this yet, it ought to be made clear that I do not endorse half-fat frappuccinos...that only use ice flown from Lapland...and vanilla harvested by domesticated jungle Lemurs - you are not a coffee drinker; you are the equivalent of the person at the bar ordering Bacardi Breezers, because they think “it tastes like lemonade”.