Coffee is great for pulling an "all nighter" or to improve your focus when driving long distances but it's not for athletes and bodybuilders! You may have a coffee before you go to the gym or for a run.
This may be because you have read that it increases your strength and endurance.
Well, sorry Starbucks, but it doesn't! Now it is true that caffeine has been proven to enhance endurance, strength, power and speed.
Unfortunately, when you get it from coffee this isn't the case.
When Dr Terry Graham (who's done almost 70 separate studies on caffeine) and colleagues gave runners either caffeine with water or the same amount of water with coffee, only the water/caffeine group had higher performance.
They also had higher levels of an energy hormone called norepinephrine.
So obviously there is more here than meets the uniformed eye.
You see, coffee is a complex brew of chemicals like diterpenes, chlorogenic acid, minerals and oils and all of these can have their own effects on the body and on each other.
The best guess is that one or more of these chemicals blocks the performance-enhancing effects of caffeine, so when it comes to a performance boost, you might as well be drinking yak piss! Therefore my best advice on this one is that if you want the benefits of caffeine (which also include helping release more fat from fat cells by the way), you need about 200 milligrams (some people are more sensitive than others though) at least 20 minutes before exercise.
You can either drink several cups of tea (which contains about 50 mg of caffeine per cup), have a caffeine pill or a caffeine-containing "pre-workout" supplement.
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Reference: http://www.
ncbi.
nlm.
nih.
gov/pubmed/9729561