Did you guys ever know that caffeine can help you with your running? Caffeine helps speed up the metabolism and releases fatty acids into our bloodstream. When you do long distance running, your muscles like to use fatty acids instead of sugar as the fuel because you get much more energy out of them. The release of the fatty acids into the bloodstream takes about 1 hour, so if you drink coffee 1 hour before running there should be more fuel availability for your muscles to take up.
As you all know, a big problem with marathon runners is that they hit a point of glycogen depletion during their run. However, using caffeine provides more of the alternative fuel, the fats, so you have more glycogen to spare and therefore can run a further distance.
By no means am I suggesting to drink coffee before running but this is something cool I learned in metabolism class and thought I should share :P
Do you guys ever notice the effect of coffee on your exercise performance?
This is very interesting!! I'm not a coffee drinker, but perhaps I could experiment with mass amounts of chocolate ;)
ReplyDeleteHaha! I'm not sure if it'll be the chocolate that will help you run or the sugar rush but let me know how that goes :) Also, green tea is supposed to increase your running endurance because the catechins in the green tea also release fatty acids into the bloodstream
ReplyDelete