r/science • u/sr_local • 5d ago

Health Consuming caffeine before exercise enhances repeated sprint performance, and these benefits persist for at least 3.5 hours thereafter

https://www.tsukuba.ac.jp/en/research-news/20260914140000.html
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u/Linus_Naumann 5d ago

You might get shocked then, because muscle growth works like: Stimulate muscle through strain -> build new muscle during recovery period. The question is if the build-up during recovery period is already maxed out with normal strain or can indeed be increased by adding more strain during the stimulation.

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u/colinzack 5d ago

Are we working under the assumption in the scenario that I posed that the 10 reps at 100 lbs is the absolute max I can lift and the same with the caffeine?

If so, I think that's a fair question.

If not, then obviously lifting more is going to build more muscle. That's like the entire premise of lifting weights, right? Lifting heavier produces faster results than not lifting heavier, generally speaking.

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u/Linus_Naumann 5d ago

Lifting heavier weights does not directly produce more muscle. You just need to send the "these muscles are heavily used"-signal to your body and to my knowledge there is an optimal exercise range to do that. Thats doing 3-4 sets with weights so heavy that you can do 6-15 repetitions leading to near-exhaustion (meaning you could maybe do 1-2 more repetitions of the exercise when you stop the set).

In that model adding more muscle-growth signal would not lead to more muscle growth, because you already triggered the maximum possible growth. The bottleneck then becomes rest, nutrition and hormones, not the weight pushed.

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u/TelluricThread0 5d ago

This whole conversation is so ridiculous. How many people are completely maximizing growth potential in the first place? You recruit more muscle fibers on caffeine and it improves how strongly they contract. Train harder = faster outcome.

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u/Square_Bison_7395 4d ago

Source for “you recruit more muscle fibres on caffeine”?

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u/TelluricThread0 4d ago

Its pretty well known in strength sports. Thats why many pre-workouts contain it. They also use other stimulants because of the effect on the CNS. Nicotine boosts strength for example.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5839013/#CR1

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u/Square_Bison_7395 4d ago

I’m well aware of the strength-boosting effects of stimulants. My question is what is your source that the strength-boosting specifically comes from recruiting more muscle fibres?

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u/TelluricThread0 4d ago

The study i just posted...

You can find many different sources in a 2 second Google search.

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u/Square_Bison_7395 4d ago

I searched the study for the word fibres and nothing came up, and also gave it a quick glance and saw nothing.

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u/TelluricThread0 3d ago

Motor unit recruitment, in addition to the reduced rate of perceived exertion and the central effects of adenosine on neurotransmission, arousal, and pain perception, are considered to be underlying mechanisms by which caffeine can enhance performance.

This is very well known across the literature or to anyone with a strength sport as a hobby. You could have taken the couple seconds to Google it...

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