New study finds caffeine helps sprinters run faster

In sports, any competitive advantage you can get over your competition is monumental, especially when it’s legal. A new study out of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan, further supports caffeine as a performance enhancer–particularly for sprinters.

World Athletics recommends caffeine as a performance-enhancing supplement that all athletes can use, but until now, it was assumed to benefit distance runners, primarily. Exercise and physiology professor Takeshi Hashimoto addresses the lack of research with a new study that analyzed the energy boost caffeine had on 13 male sprinters.

Researchers looked at the amount of time it took for each athlete to reach peak blood plasma while consuming caffeine, then tested the athletes over two 100m trials–once after using caffeine and once using a placebo supplement, monitoring sprint velocity and sprint time.

The 100m time of those who took the caffeine supplement was significantly faster than in those who took the placebo. There was an average time reduction of 0.14 seconds. Although it may seem like a fraction, when it comes to top-level sprinting, every hundredth of a second matters.

The study also found that the average sprint velocity of those who took the caffeine supplement was greater than the placebo for the first 20 metres, which suggests that caffeine can help athletes reach their top speed faster and ultimately finish sooner.

This research is the first of its kind that serves as evidence to directly support the recommendations for caffeine usage by World Athletics.