A study in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism has shown that sports people who drink coffee in the morning experience less muscle pain, and therefore can undertake more punishing endurance exercise.
The study was conducted on cyclists. Professor Robert Motl of the University of Illinois, said that the effects were just as great for habitual caffeine users as for those who did not take caffeine.
“What we saw is something we didn’t expect – caffeine-naive individuals and habitual users have the same amount of reduction in pain during exercise after caffeine,” he says.
“If you regularly consume caffeine, you have to have more to have that bigger mental-energy effect but the tolerance effect is not ubiquitous across all stimuli.”
This finding is not a direct health effect of caffeine. If a caffeine user doesn’t exercise, then the analgesic effect has no health benefit. However, it is merely the latest finding about the positive effects of caffeine.