Can Caffeine Boost Your Workout Performance?

you build that muscle, you’re also more resistant to injury, which is a great thing.

Also, muscle increases your natural resting metabolism. Throughout the day, someone with a lot of muscle mass will burn more calories while just sitting down and working than a person with less muscle mass, because muscle is an active tissue that requires so much energy to maintain.

Dennis: Another thing, just to piggyback off that, is people don’t realize that lifting weights burns three times the fat that cardio does.

Kevin: Yes, and cardio can also increase your appetite. So when people think they will just do cardio for a half hour a day, they don’t realize how much it’s going to increase their appetite. There’s also the psychological aspect of thinking you did something so you get to reward yourself with some food or drink. A lot of times, this leads people to eat way more than the cardio burns—where they might not have that problem when they focus on lifting. Dennis: It’s really like you said about listening to your body and figuring out what’s working for you. There are people who can get on that treadmill and just go for three hours without it impacting their food choices, and then there are those who don’t do any cardio and only lift. So we really have to figure out what works for each of us. But no matter what, getting started is important, so what are some good starting lifts for people who don’t have a lot of experience with weight training?

Kevin: There are about five key lifts that I think guys should consider doing. Each of these has been chosen because it’s effective, practical and very easy to do.

The first is pull-ups. Some people call them the king of exercises. To do them, all you need is the bar. You hop on that bar and rip out some pull-ups. They work your lats, which is great for looking a little wider. They work your biceps and your forearms. It’s a functional exercise that can come in handy in your everyday life. If you’ve never done them before, get some exercise bands or use the assistance machine that a lot of gyms have until you can do one without assistance. And then from there, just do more and more.

The second exercise uses a small piece of equipment that’s probably a hundred years old. It’s a power twister bar, and you can find it on Amazon. It’s a bar about three feet long with handles on the ends and a big spring in the middle. All you do is bend it in half. You can alternate your grip to vary the resistance, and you can target the lower chest by bending it a specific way. It targets your chest the same way bench presses do, but without the shoulder strain and equipment.

The third one is doing lat raises with 10-, 12.5- and 15-pound dumbbells. Watch a couple of videos on how to do lat raises. They’re great for your shoulders. That’s another point that you want to target.

Then, there are squats. If you’re trying to see results quickly, squats are great for just about everything. Squats make your whole body stronger, and they really target the glutes, the quads and the hamstrings,

but they also help make your upper body stronger.

The last exercise I would add in is some kind of cardio. I think people should focus more on weights, but do have some kind of cardio in there, whether that’s running, jumping rope, biking, basketball, soccer or tennis.

Dennis: What are some measures that people making fitness goals should follow?

Kevin: I love the concept of making SMART goals. The acronym SMART is for making specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely goals. In other words, you’ve got to come up with specific goals. You have to hold yourself accountable to some kind of timetable and make it realistic. It can’t just be a goal to look like a certain influencer. That’s way too low resolution. How are you going to get there? Is that even a reasonable goal to have? Because if you’re 35 or 40 and out of shape, you’re probably never going to look like this influencer—and that’s fine. You do not need to. what goals are going to work with your lifestyle and balance all your other priorities. Also, you’ve got to really get down to the nitty-gritty and come up with some specific steps that you can measure. Because if you can’t measure it, it’s not going to get done.

In terms of reasonableness, you also have to think about what happens to your body as you begin working out. A lot of people set their eyes on a goal of losing a certain amount of weight, but is it really about the weight, or the body composition? Also, when you’re gaining muscle, you’re going to be gaining weight. A person who starts out 200 pounds could be working out for two months and then see they’ve hit 202 pounds. If they are focused on weight loss, they will not see the results they are looking for, but in reality, they may have gained five pounds of muscle and lost three pounds of fat, which is a great achievement.

Instead of looking at your weight, you can get some skin-fat calipers to measure body fat. No one’s ever going to know their specific body-fat percentage, but this is the best way to measure if you’re making progress with losing fat. These really simple calipers can be used to measure yourself in a few different places such as the triceps, abs and thighs. Add those numbers up and track the changes after a few weeks or months. Then you can focus on losing a certain number of millimeters from your raw score.

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While most of us think drinking a cup or two of coffee in the morning is a good way to relax and start the day, the caffeine in the dark liquid can cause some side effects if too much is ingested. For instance, caffeine can increase your heart rate, cause jitteriness, and heartburn from increased stomach acid production, and make you more anxious. Regular consumption of coffee or other liquids containing caffeine however can reduce these symptoms as the body gets used to the same amount of stimulant on a regular basis.

Endurance effects

However, caffeine has some other effects in the body which can enhance workout performance. While not known exactly how it works, research has proven that caffeine reduces the rate at which muscle glycogen is used by the body by as much as 50% during the first 15 minutes when engaged in an endurancetype workout. This is important because as long as muscle glycogen is available, the body can still use fat as fuel and not experience exhaustion as quickly. By reducing the rate glycogen is used, exercise endurance is prolonged allowing for increased workout times. Strength training and weightlifters reported an increase in performance ranging from 9.5% to as high as 20%.

Also studies have shown that caffeine reduces the feeling of how hard one is working out – called the rating of perceived exertion (RPE). Study participants showed on average a 6% decrease in fatigue (and pain) when having consumed caffeine before working out, as they did doing the same workout without caffeine.

Timing is important But to get the enhanced endurance effect, timing of the ingestion of caffeine is important. Because the body gets used to it over time, caffeine consumption should be reduced or avoided until the day of the workout. Some people feel the effects of caffeine with as little as 20mg; maximum performance seems to be at 200mg. An interesting note is that performance actually decreased with over 200mg of caffeine per day. To get the maximum effect, drink up to two cups of coffee three to four hours before exercising.

Over considerable studies, the ingestion of caffeine has consistently proved that it enhances workout performance. Those perceived innocent couple cups of coffee in the morning are helping you achieve more from your workouts than you thought. And because it allows you to workout longer, due to the reduced feeling of fatigue and it reduces the use of muscle glycogen, you end up burning more fat than you would have otherwise, thus losing weight over time. Here’s to your cup (or two) of Joe!