Threshold Performance Club | The fitness newsletter

Threshold #10 | Understanding coffee

For year’s I’ve experimented with diet, food groups, supplementation and have quasi-religiously drank coffee.

A few years ago I came across bulletproof coffee by Dave Asprey, my first insight to using coffee for more than a having a good tasting drink.

Recently I’ve been delving into coffee, the nutritionals, effects on the body & how it may be impacting me.

Historically I can drink coffee at any point in the day, even at 10pm at night and I’ve never experience conscious sleep impacts.

But now I’m beginning to understand the subconscious effects.

What is coffee

There are two ways to describe coffee. Firstly, it’s a drink prepared from roasted coffee beans billions of people consume every day. Secondly, it’s a drug, specifically a stimulant.

But is it a drug? From a scientific point of view coffee isn’t, but the compound found within coffee - caffeine - is.

The effect of caffeine on the body does not actually contain a taste profile. In the dose of a cup of coffee or two, the taste we believe is caffeine is actually the roasted coffee beans. The brain connects the taste of coffee beans to caffeine and hence people reach for coffee when they need their caffeine hit.

This is important to note as caffeine can be sourced from other drinks such as green tea, or energy drinks, coffee is not the only drink.

How it impacts you

Caffeine affects the body by interrupting adenosine production in the body. Adenosine is a natural compound found in everyone’s bodies which is created each day. Adonosine creates the experience of feeling sleepy. An increase in adenosine increases a person’s need for sleep. This is why as the day goes on, people tend to feel more tired as adenosine starts to build up.

When we consume caffeine, it interrupts adenosine production hence interrupting the body’s build up of sleepiness. Put another way, caffeine stops the body feeling sleepy. This is why people report not being able to sleep when drinking coffee.

Due to this coffee can be seen as a way to increase alertness when feeling tired, and can be used as a way to increase alertness before training.

Taking caffeine laced energy gels before training with this in mind is not just marketing, it may actually increase performance by interrupting the build up of adenosine. However if caffeine is taken in large doses for continuous hours, the crash can be strong as adenosine rushes back.

With this in mind I now understand when to take caffeine energy gels or a coffee before training.I also try to lengthen the time between waking up and consuming my first coffee to maintain my body’s natural circadian rhythm. Once I’m already feeling ‘awake’, that’s when I’ll consumer coffee.

What are the alternatives

Coffee is just one source of caffeine, you can also reach for matcha tea & green tea in the morning to refresh the morning hot drink routine. One thing I am looking into is the potential to drink coffee with additional compounds present, such as mushrooms & adaptogens. As the retail industry has opened up to the health & bio hacking community, mainly through the advent of direct to consumer brands - companies selling direct from their websites - so has the ability to source products which can’t traditionally be found in mass market supermarkets.

Link to more information:

So, that’s what I’ve learned about coffee & how I’m changing my daily behaviours.

Shop natural supplements formulated to enhance performance: 

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Z2 running session: 15km by 3x 5km

Warm up:

• 5km @ Z1/Z2 heart rate zone

Main set:

• 5km @ Z3 heart rate zone

Recovery

• 5km @ Z1/Z2 heart rate zone

Thanks as always for tuning in. This is the first newsletter exclusively focussed on nutrition. This information has truly helped me understand what coffee does to me, whether I cognitively feel it or not.

You can follow my weekly training on Strava.

Have a great week.

Robert