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Caffeine: your best
friend fitness or your secret enemy?
Why can some people
take their pre-workout booster and exercise training, while others can take the
same shaker and feel no effect?
The answer can be
deeply rooted in your DNA.
Nowadays, weight
training and caffeine go together like The Rock and Kevin Hart. But not
everyone reacts the same way with 300 milligrams of caffeine. In fact,
depending on your genetic makeup, it can even exhaust you, or ruin your
session.
New scientific
research in Canada has looked very closely at how the human body metabolizes
caffeine. (1) Nutritionists, statisticians and kinesiologists at the University
of Toronto recruited 101 male athletes aged about 25 years.
The group included
cyclists, marathon runners, rowers, cross-country skiers, boxers, baseball
players and weightlifters.
Using saliva
samples, researchers were able to determine how fast each athlete's body
metabolized caffeine.
Here's how: Our
bodies contain a gene called CYPA1A2. Changes in the gene's DNA sequence can
make CYP1A2 more or less effective at metabolizing caffeine. Based on these
results, they divided the group into fast metabolizers and poor metabolizers
and showed that caffeine performance is either in your genes or not.
That the test
begins!
Once a week for 3
weeks, the athletes went to an examination center where they swallowed a
capsule containing caffeine or placebo.
The athletes rested
for 25 minutes, did some warm-up exercises, then performed a predetermined
combination of vertical jumps and hand grip tests, a Wingate test to measure
advanced anaerobic power and a time trial of 10 km.
At the end of the 4
weeks, the researchers compared the stress test results to the CYPA1A2 results
and discovered that:
• Caffeine helped
49 of 101 athletes (fast metabolisers)
• Caffeine to
improve their performance by 6.8%
• 44 athletes (poor
metabolisers) observed no change in performance
• While 8 slow
metabolisers saw their performance decrease to 14%.
All because of the
way their CYP1A2 genes treat caffeine.
Does caffeine work
for you? Are you sure?
If you pay
attention to your physique, you may already know if a pre-workout booster
containing caffeine helps or hinders your performance. And if you are a slow
metabolizer, then caffeine will probably not solve any problem. It will simply
give you poor sleep and stress your adrenal glands.
If that sounds
familiar to you, well, there are still plenty of pre-workout boosters without
stimulants that could help you do more repetitions, which is not the case with
caffeine.
If you can not tell
if caffeine is working on you, well, you're not alone. When asked at the end of
the 4 weeks whether the pills they had received contained caffeine, only 3 in
101 athletes were right and said they received 2 doses of caffeine and 1
placebo.
Over 80% of
athletes said they did not think they had been given caffeine.
If you are not sure
that your genes make you the best or the worst person who can consume caffeine
before a training session, there is a gene test that can be done and that will
give you a precise answer. Or, keep taking pre-workout boosters for all the other
ingredients, but do not expect magic.
After all, doing
dozens of quality training sessions is much more important than what happens in
each of them.
Even if you are
sure that you are a fast metaboliser, remember that caffeine does not come into
the blood for 30 to 45 minutes after taking it. So, take it while you go to the
room to help you with your first exercises, or maybe for your entire workout