Caffeine, bodybuilding, and blood pressure

We all know that coffee/caffeine is a stimulant. Its why I have always recommended coffee as the #1 best bodybuilding ‘supplement’, it gives you that drive to push that extra rep. What I was not aware of is that with my high coffee consumption it was affecting my blood pressure.

Coffee is good for you! (?)

Coffee has anti-oxidants! Coffee makes you less likely to develop Parkinsons! Coffee helps protect the liver. Coffee makes your risk of colon cancer decrease!

All this is wonderful BUT, if it keeps you from getting a good 8 hours sleep that negative health effect will outweigh all the good the coffee is doing. Also, if your coffee is a sweet pumpkin spiced machiato with 600 calories then the health problems caused by the obesity will outweigh all the good the coffee is doing. Even a splash of cream and a few spoons of sugar daily can add up to 5lbs of fat gain yearly.

Also, too much of a good thing is almost always bad as I discovered …

What I discovered about coffee consumption and blood pressure

I stumbled upon the relationship between coffee consumption and blood pressure by accident. Because I’m an engineer, I like data so two weeks before every yearly physical I chart my blood pressure. I would always take the readings mid morning after my breakfast and coffee but one day, I took it when I first got up. Hmmm, way lower. Fluke? Bad reading? Although I have only been charting for one week, the results are too startling to ignore:

The 7 day experiment was enough to point out something really obvious, I am consuming way too much coffee. With 9tsp of instant coffee a day, even if my blood pressure is only elevated temporarily, its just too high. The average of the four readings measured after drinking the coffee was 134/84. The average of the four readings taken before drinking coffee was 110/74.

The Harvard School of Medicine makes this claim:

Coffee does raise blood pressure in people who are not used to it but not in regular coffee drinkers.

I have found this statement to be untrue but perhaps their study did not include anyone drinking bathtubs full of coffee.

Sleep and coffee

If you have trouble getting to sleep, staying asleep, or in sleeping a full 8 hours the first thing you should do is stop all caffeine consumption, not even in the morning. The problem with caffeine is that it has a half life of 5 hours. What this means is that if you have four shots of espresso at 5pm before your workout that when you try to go to bed at 10pm, you still have two shots of expresso making your brain spin in circles. Going out to dinner, how many times have you heard this at desert time from your friend who is ordering coffee with desert?

“Coffee does not affect me at all, I fall right to sleep!”

That is probably true, the DO fall right to sleep because they are dead tired and their intense fatigue overpowers the caffeine. The trouble happens at 2am when they wake up to pee and cant get back to sleep. After having slept a few hours, the fatigue is no longer sufficient to overpower the caffeine remaining in their systems. They are simply fooling themselves that the pre-bedtime coffee has no effect on them.

If you cannot get 8 hours of good quality sleep, the first thing you should try is limiting your coffee consumption to morning only. If that does not work then try cutting it totally out.

Who needs to be concerned about excess coffee consumption?

High blood pressure is an important predictor of heart attacks and stoke. Its a good idea to get a home blood pressure setup from your local drugstore and charting the results for a week because its really hard for a doctor to tell what is going on with just one reading taken at the office, especially if you are drinking a lot of coffee that makes your blood pressure vary a lot.

Further experiments

Like any research, this little accidental experiment of mine gave some insight about coffee but it made me think of even more questions that need to be answered. Here are the questions I would love answers to:

1. Is the elevation in blood pressure proportional to coffee intake? Repeat the 7 day data collection for intake between 1 cup and 10 cups.

2. How long does blood pressure remain elevated after coffee consumption? What I really need is hourly readings for a week to know this.

3. Is something else in the coffee other than caffeine affecting the blood pressure? A great experiment would be to do a week of measurments with each of the following:

   1. regular coffee

   2. caffeine tablets containing same amount of caffeine as the coffee

   3. decaf coffee

   4. no caffeine consumption of any kind