Caffeine can shave seconds off race times. The effective dose is 3-6 mg per kilogram of body weight, taken an hour before activity. For a 68 kg athlete, that's roughly 200 mg, which means three cups of coffee or a caffeine gum or shot.
Caffeine can take seconds off of your time and can be the difference between winning and losing a race. So is it okay to use coffee as your form of caffeine? In order to see the performance benefit that caffeine can actually give you, you need to have at least 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, and you need to take it about 1 hour before your performance. So for example, me, a 68-kilogram female, the minimum amount of caffeine for my performance that I would need to be taking is 200 milligrams 1 hour before. One cup of coffee only has about 80 milligrams of caffeine, guys. Therefore, I would need to have about 3 cups of coffee within 1 hour of my performance, which is going to be a lot of fluids and probably going to be unsettling for my stomach. Therefore, I would use a different caffeine supplement such as caffeine gum or maybe even a caffeine shot that's made for performance so that it'll be way more effective and way easier to get the amount that you need to help you see the benefit.
