Caffeine reduces muscle pain during exercise
THAT CUP of coffee in the morning can help you feel less pain during your morning workout. That's what researchers at the University of Georgia have found in a recent study exploring why muscles hurt during exercise. Muscle contractions produce a host of biochemicals that can stimulate pain.
The researchers' latest study, published in the Journal of Pain, found that caffeine reduced thigh muscle pain during cycling exercise. Participants in the study, young adult men, cycled for 30 minutes on two separate days. The exercise intensity was the same on both days and purposefully set to make the riders' thigh muscles hurt. Participants in the study took either a caffeine pill or a placebo pill one hour before the exercise. The riders reported feeling substantially less pain in their thigh muscles after taking caffeine compared to after taking the placebo.
This observation suggests that prior reports showing that caffeine improves endurance exercise performance might be explained partially by caffeine's hypoalgesic properties, according to researcher O'Connor.
``Not all analgesics or combinations (acetaminophine and caffeine) are effective for every type of pain or every individual,'' he said. ``Much of this is due to biological variation among people in receptors for the drugs as well as variation in pain receptors in different body tissues. For instance, brain tissue has no pain receptors so surgery can be done on the brain without anesthesia. Of course it will hurt getting through the skin and cranium.''
Caffeine seems to work less well for heavy caffeine users who habituate because of a change in receptors with caffeine use, O'Connor said.
Prior research has focused on other types of pain, like headaches, joint or skin pain, toothaches or pain in damaged muscles at rest, maybe a few days after injury during exercise. The UGA researchers' work focuses on pain that occurs naturally with muscles contracting during exercise.
. ``Evidence suggests that caffeine works by blocking the actions of adenosine, however, we don't know yet whether the caffeine is acting on muscles or the brain.''
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