I love coffee, but not after training!

Today’s post is about coffee…‪#‎sweetnectarofthegods‬. If you know me, you know how much I love a good cup of coffee…caffeinated or not. But as an individual with very heavy training program and school schedule, I need to be very specific with caffeine ‘timing’. We’ve all heard about our sympathetic nervous system or ‘flight or flight’ response. Our body evokes this signaling system in response to both good stress, like working out, and ‘bad’ stress, like running from a bear or chronic stress at home or work. Coffee has a similar effect on our body and believe it or not, this can be beneficial for training, potentially even modulating pain and allowing us to train harder or longer. A lot of us are not as familiar with our sympathetic nervous system’s sibling, the parasympathetic nervous system. Its tag line isn’t quite as sexy (‘rest and digest’), but its role is crucial, especially when it comes to enabling recovery from a killer workout. These two systems generally work in opposition to each other, with only one active at a given time. While the sympathetic nervous system allows us to run fast, jump high, and focus with laser-sharp precision, it does so at the cost of normal operations such as nutrient digestion and absorption as well as tissue growth and repair; these normal operations are crucial for workout recovery and long-term progress and health. My general thought, is that you’re only as strong as what you can recover from; it follows then that as soon as you finish training, your focus should be on promoting recovery through actions that foster muscle growth and/or repair, and overall relaxation. Drinking coffee or any caffeinated beverage post-workout for that matter is not one of those actions. All of this is to say that going for a cup of joe right after your training session may not be the best idea! If you need something warm and soothing after you train, try to get your hands on something non-caffinated, like herbal tea! Try it for a week, and see how you feel! ‪#‎coffeebeforetraining‬ ‪#‎smarttraining‬ ‪#‎smartrecovery‬ ‪#‎nerdout‬‪#‎sundaybrunchwillneverbethesame‬