Does Caffeine enhance Performance?

Does Caffeine Enhance Performance?
Several research studies showed improvement in endurance performance followed by caffeine intake. Caffeine increases endurance and speed, but not maximal VO2max and related parameters.

How much?
A minimal dose of 5 mg/kg of body weight (BW) is necessary to induce performance enhancement. However, higher doses of 9 or 13 mg/kg of BW did not show a greater enhancement than the dose of 5mg/kg of BW.
So, a person weighing 60 kg needs to intake 300 mg of caffeine 1 hour before the event to have improvements in his/her performance. Considering that 1 cup of brewed coffee contains 115 mg of caffeine, one pill of caffeine supplement contains 84 mg of caffeine and 1 “espresso” contains 80 mg of caffeine, a 60 kg person would need to drink 3 cups of brewed coffee, or 4 espresso shots OR take 4 pills of supplements or any combination of these drinks (example: 2 espresso shots normally included in 1 largo Latte at Amante + 2 pills of supplements).

There is no advantage to ingesting higher doses of caffeine than outlined above for performance. In fact, ingesting large amounts of caffeine can have deleterious health effects.


Read more on :
http://www.davanticycling.com/Creatine&Caffeine_doc.pdf

Have a great week!
Look for my next posting Monday, February 23!

Training Zones and Physiological Adaptations

Do you know that when you exercise, the intensity level of your session or your interval determines the physiological adaptation you are stimulating in your body?
This is one of the reasons why sporadic and random exercising at different levels of intensity for sporadic and random periods of time will not be very effective in improving your fitness and enhancing your performance.

• How do you know which physiological adaptations you need?
• How do you know your own Training Zones?
• How do you know at which level of intensity you need to train to develop the specific physiological adaptation?
• How do you know how long you need to exercise at a specific training zone to stimulate the desired physiological adaptations?
  How do you know how to make these suggestions specific to your needs, goals, body and current ability?
  
• Answers are at : http://www.davanticycling.com/documents/TrainingZonesandPhysiologicalAdaptations.pdf

Visit me every Monday morning and you will find a new weekly training tip