Coffee — The Ultimate Drinking Guide
The benefits, the drawbacks, and how to make it work best for you.
--
Around 3 billion people worldwide will have a cup of coffee today.
The average number of cups per person per day is 3, and this hasn’t changed since 1999. It’s safe to say that most of us love our coffee. And fortunately, coffee is one of the healthiest things you can consume, with benefits for nearly every aspect of your health.
In this in-depth guide, I want to illustrate both the benefits and the potential downsides of coffee, and how we can use coffee in a smart way to improve our health, our performance (both physical and mental), and ultimately, improve our lives.
The Benefits of Coffee
There are numerous benefits to coffee, and these seem to increase linearly with the number of cups consumed in a day. There are many more benefits than drawbacks to drinking coffee, and in fact, coffee has been scientifically proven to be “remarkably” safe to drink in moderate amounts (up to 4–5 cups, depending on body weight).
Here are some of the key benefits.
Mood
Coffee has been shown to improve mood and contentment, and this effect is increased when you consume coffee regularly.
Performance
Coffee can improve performance in every regard, whether cognitive, physical, social, or other. Unlike some of the other benefits of coffee, this one is mainly attributed to the caffeine content, rather than the coffee itself.
Caffeine has been shown to decrease perceived effort during a workout, and thus improve performance in the gym. It also increases time-to-exhaustion, muscle strength, and sprint power.
For maximum effect, drink a cup or two of coffee one hour prior to a physical performance, whether going to the gym or competing in a sport. This is the point where the performance effects peak.
Caffeine is also the most widely used stimulant and neuro-enhancer in the world. It improves cognition — memory, attention, and reaction time all improve when drinking coffee.
“The powers of a man’s mind are…
