Coffee can reduce exercise pains
Coffee might not exactly be known as a common health drink and it doesn?t share the status of being great for diets like Green Tea, but it could be just the thing you need if you?re planning on a doing some exercise, as a study shows that a cup of coffee before your workout really can help your progress.
Robert Motl is a professor of Kinesiology and Community Health the University of Illinois in the United States. He?s also a former cyclist and used to drink coffee every morning before his regular training sessions, believing that it helped in push harder, but never quite understanding why. Motl began a series of tests in order to discover why this happens.
Early results found that caffeine works to block the adenosine system in the brain. Adenosine is directly involved with pain processing. This led to Motl speculating that coffee could reduce pain during exercise, which further studies have confirmed. Motl wants to do more tests to see how far this pain reduction can go in improving performance in sport.
Interestingly, further studies by the professor have shown that your level of caffeine intake has little effect on the ability of the drug to reduce pain. People who regularly drink caffeine in quantities as high as four cups per day saw the same amount of effects from the drug as people with low or zero normal caffeine intake. As of yet, nobody knows exactly why.
Despite further questions being asked, Motl was excited about the progress of his research: ?One of the things that may be a practical application, is if you go to the gym and you exercise and it hurts, you may be prone to stop doing that because pain is an aversive stimulus that tells you to withdraw. So if we could give people a little caffeine and reduce the amount of pain they’re experiencing, maybe that would help them stick with that exercise.?
Athletes have already been taking caffeine before exercise along with other substances because they believe that it helps metabolise fat quicker, but now there might be an all new reason to enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning.