Kelsey HigginsonSports Nutrition Coach and Founder at Clutch Day Coaching

Is coffee okay for athletes

4 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this short video, the speaker explains how caffeine can improve athletic performance by shaving seconds off race times, but emphasizes that to see a measurable benefit an athlete must consume 3–6 mg of caffeine per kilogram of body weight about one hour before competition. Using herself—a 68 kg female—as an example, she calculates a minimum effective dose of roughly 200 mg, which would require about three cups of coffee (each ~80 mg) taken within an hour. She argues that this volume of fluid is impractical and may cause stomach upset, and therefore recommends using performance‑specific caffeine products such as caffeine gum or caffeine shots, which deliver the required dose more conveniently and reliably.

Chapters

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.