Doping, steroids, anabolics. All enhance your performance in those very important seconds of your life if you are an athlete running the 100-metre sprint. Ready, set, GO! It's time to go, outperform everyone, even yourself using supplements. Illegal, ofcourse, that is why professional athletes get tested for drugs before/after the game. But what if you could enhance your performance a little in a more innocent way. In a cosy-cup-of-coffee way. Caffeine stimulates the nervous system. This is known for quite some time now, but researchers still had to measure the exact effect of caffeine on sprint performance. Hence why they tested it. After various trials with a caffeine or a placebo supplement, the performance of the athletes increased significantly. The running time after getting caffeine decreased by 0.14 seconds! This might not seem like a lot, because it isn't for non-athletes, but 0.14 seconds can very well determine the difference between a gold medal or a mere 4th place. The increased speed was mostly observed in the first 20 metres of the sprint. With there being no difference in running speed in the last 40 metres compared to controls. The study suggests that caffeine enhances performance by making the acceleration more explosive. So coffee can make you run just a teeny tiny bit faster.
