Have you kicked caffeine? Or are you still addicted?
What role does your exercise play vs. caffeine?
I gave up caffeine. Cold turkey. Twice.
Yeah, caffeine has been shown to enhance performance in everything from sprinting, to 1 rep maximum weight lifting, to endurance running. So why give it up?
I've had migraines for the past 15 yrs.
Let me back up.
Probably like you, I've had different cycles in my life when I've been more or less serious about my weight training and physical health. As a grad student, I was pretty serious about a regular workout routine. And I never drank coffee, just an occasional soda.
Then, probably also like you, I fell in love and had children. When you've got young kids, sleep and exercise are rare luxuries. So what did I do? I reached for that coffee!
I spent a few years doing little exercise and getting addicted to caffeine. And my health suffered.
I was getting migraines regularly, and I was gaining weight. Caffeine has some weird duality where it can relieve a migraine in low doses, but can cause migraines in higher doses.
I'll save all the gory details of those years and my battle with migraines for another story, but let me get to the point: I've twice gone cold turkey in kicking the caffeine habit.
And the best way to kick caffeine is to replace it with intense exercise.
Depending on how much caffeine you are used to (I was up to 10 cups a day at one point), you may suffer a huge backlash when you quit. Headaches, moodiness, cravings, sluggishness, poor sleeping. These withdrawal symptoms usually start about 24 hrs after quitting and last for about 3 days (depending on the intensity of your addiction). And then the cravings for caffeine continue for weeks.
The best way to deal with this is to dive into intense weight training, early in the morning.
Most people have their most intense caffeine cravings in the morning. But sometimes you have that afternoon hump to get through. Whenever your hardest time is, that's when you need to exercise. You can even exercise twice a day for those first few days (yes, twice a day! but just for those few withdrawal days).
But make sure it's intense both times, or else it won't help relieve the withdrawal symptoms as much.
Replace that morning coffee with a set of deadlifts.
Switch some heavy squats for that soda.
Go for a 30 minute run with sprints to shake off that morning headache.
Do 20 minutes of hardcore bodyweight exercises to get through the 2:00 slowdown.
Intense exercise relieves the immediate withdrawal symptoms and reduces the cravings for weeks after you've kicked the physical addiction.
I've gone cold turkey twice in the past 10 years and the way I did it was by rededicating myself to intense exercise at the same time that I kicked the habit.
The first time I beat back the beast was about 8 years ago and I planned out the 3-day period by running on morning 1 and morning 3, with a general full body weight workout on morning 2.
That caffeine-free period lasted about 5 years.
Then, after an intense period at work with long hours, I got re-addicted to caffeine and so 2 yrs ago, I kicked it again. Solution: same thing but reverse: morning 1 and morning 3 were weight training, with a long run on morning 2. I resumed my regular workouts thereafter.
Both times worked like a charm. Very little headache and successful battle against the addiction.
Of course, there a lot of other things you need to do to kick the caffeine addiction all day long:
Water (try seltzer water if soda is your caffeine delivery vehicle).
Drink decaf coffee.
Go for walks.
Taper rather than cold turkey.
Chew gum.
Etc.
But the best thing is intense exercise.
Why does this work?
I've going to keep this very simple.
At a very simple level, exercise is a vasodilator for the muscles being worked (so the blood flow increases) but is a vasocontrictor for the non-working parts of the body (so they get less blood flow.
For example, as you bench press, you get more blood flowing to your pecs and other secondary muscles. But blood flow to your organs (like your brain) is slightly constricted.
Caffeine is an overall vasoconstrictor. (It's also a stimulant, but that's a different phenomenon.)
Headaches are caused (generally by increased blood flow to the head (vasodilation).
So it works like this: you are used to caffeine, which artificially restricts blood flow. When you give it up, the blood flow to your head is higher than you are used to. So you get a withdrawal headache. By lifting weights, you force extra blood to your muscles, thus reducing the blood flow to your head. This reduces the severity of the headache.
This is an oversimplification for sure!
I'm not a doctor, and I know there are a lot more physiological things going on in the body than I've mentioned above. But this should suffice for our purposes.
Nowadays, I might have one "dose" of caffeine per week usually in a coffee (or sometimes in an energy gel if I'm doing a 12+ mile run). I love not being addicted to it and being able to start my mornings without it.
Darrin Clement runs http://worldfitnessnetwork.com , a fitness site covering the Art and Science of Building Lean Muscle Mass and An Awesome Physique read by over 30,000 people every month.
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