Caffeine as a Preworkout

What is a pre-workout supplement?
A typical pre-workout is advertised as a dietary supplement that is used to enhance athletic performance. It is said to increase endurance, energy and focus during training. Pre-workouts contain a variety of ingredients. The main question though to such a product has always been, “Is it necessary?” More recently, there have been two main branches of thought. One holds pre-workouts as a means to improve fitness and provide the energy you need to power through challenging workouts. The other side of the coin claims that while pre-workouts may be taken, they are no more than a cup of coffee or a granola bar giving you a stimulant of energy before training. But is it really the same?

Let us explore the validity of a stimulant for a pre-workout. Caffeine is a stimulant to which different individuals have different tolerances. One has to always be aware of the dosage of caffeine that is being taken into the body. Many fat loss supplements have around 200mg of caffeine per serving. The idea here is that the body burns fat in response to the thermoregulation process where it needs to create energy due to continued stimulus being provided exerginically over time. It does have a short term effect but many long term harms. Although this is a discussion for another article.

Caffeine is known extensively to promote alertness and this effect does in fact contribute to the human body being a little better equipped at committing to more training. A recent umbrella review, Jozo Grgic et. al., looked into 11 reviews and looked at many aspects of exercise and physical performance affected by caffeine. The only limitation of this review is that it only consisted of males and a younger sample of athletes. This is a limitation that the writers do declare themselves. The findings of the article is that caffeine is a valid ergogenic aid to your exercise. Here the word aid is used in its truest sense. It is only present as a helper and does not actively increase your metabolic output in any way. The aid is provided to different components of exercise performance including aerobic endurance, muscle strength, muscle endurance, power, jumping performance and exercise speed. The magnitude of the effect of caffeine is seen to be more for aerobic exercise compared to anaerobic exercise.
Now, we need to keep in mind another limitation. Many of the published works that bring to light caffeine intake for performance are done with anhydrous caffeine powders and pills which brings a primary difference to simply having coffee as a drink as a source of caffeine. Here it is important to know that the vehicle that provides the stimulation matters greatly. This is a very important disclaimer to this article. The theory and applications therefore do not match very well with one another. The caffeine dose received from coffee depends on many factors including coffee bean, preparation method, and size. It is known that there are disparities in the amount of caffeine in different brands of coffee and in the same brand of coffee over different time scales. An average cup of coffee has around 100mg of caffeine.

We are now clear on 2 things.

1. Coffee is a useful ergogenic stimulant when taken in an anhydrous manner for a variety of exercises.
2. Coffee intake does not have the same effect and there is a huge variety in the caffeine that is found in a single cup of coffee.

Now, is it possible to consume coffee to produce the effect that caffeine does, without the need for a pre-workout?
The umbrella review comments on this as well. They claim that two cups of coffee, consumed approximately 60mins before exercise, should exert an ergogenic effect in most individuals. This is a very broad rule of thumb.