# Caffeine myths



## geardepot

Caffeine is one of the most widely consumed supplements in the world, but there are still a lot of myths about what it does. Do you believe any of these?

 1. Caffeine dehydrates youPeople think that because coffee makes you pee it dehydrates you. I never really understood that logic, it is missing a lot of steps and doesn’t really make any sense when you think about it. For example, drinking water makes you pee but drinking water is how you hydrate. The body’s fluid balance system is a lot more complicated than that. Honestly, sometimes journalists’ logic baffles me at times. This is where science is important. We can actually ask and answer the question of, “Does caffeine dehydrate you”? A recent study looked at a dose response of caffeine and diuresis (making more urine) and found that daily intakes of caffeine at 3 and 6 mg per kg per day over a span of 11 days does not have a real effect on fluid balance and hydrations status. 

 2. Caffeine is a good fat burner
 Caffeine is marketed as a fat burner pretty heavily. The thing about it is that it can be a fat burner. . . but it likely doesn’t work the way you think it does.
 The old version of caffeine being a fat burner goes something like this: caffeine causes fat cells to release fatty acids which is then burned for energy. This is kind of true but not really. The data is a little more complex than that.
 When you really get down to the nitty gritty, it looks like caffeine increases lipid mobilization by a significant amount but most of that fat isn’t actually burned, about 75% of it is actually recycled, meaning it’s “released” from fat cells and then stored again without being used. 
 So caffeine probably won’t directly increase fat loss but it may increase your training capacity, making increased fat-loss a byproduct. In addition to the fact that most of the “mobilized” fat is simply recycled, caffeine loses its efficacy over time. Much like alcohol or drugs, your body habituates to caffeine and eventually it loses its ability to be stimulated by caffeine. At some point it becomes a “return to normal function” supplement.

 3. Caffeine is good for performance
 People often tout caffeine as the ultimate performance enhancer. This is true to some extent. It is the most effective, legal, ergogenic aid we have on the market, For example, people who are not habituated to caffeine can see increases in strength and power from pre-exercise caffeine supplementation. Sadly, there is a very large “habituation” effect and caffeine loses its efficacy overtime. In fact, if you want to really maximize your caffeine you should cycle on and off it regularly. This is part of the reason you only get that “first time I took pre-workout feeling” once in your lifetime. The other reason caffeine may not help your performance is the type of exercise you engage in. Caffeine is a known stimulate than can increase heart rate. In certain cases an elevated heart rate is actually a good way to ruin your performance. In “metcon” style workouts where your goal is to sustain a relatively high workload for an extended period of time a higher resting rate will actually decrease your time to fatigue, which is the opposite effect of what you want.

 So...Caffeine is awesome. It doesn’t dehydrate you. It isn’t the key to getting shredded. It can help power production and fatigue in some situations but can hurt you during metcon style workouts. Cycling on and off is probably the best idea if you want to use caffeine to augment your performance.
 GD


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## davidg

It's interesting because all the articles wrote that caffeine eliminates water from the body, which means you need to drink more water if you drink coffee. But that seemed like nonsense to me, too. Thanks for a post like this, something to think about.


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