There have been several reports in the news lately of healthy athletes dropping dead due to a sudden heart attack. A couple of these reports, including the most recent Boston Marathon death have mentioned athletes having caffeine in their system and some have claimed the athletes are taking a supplement which contains caffeine and the amino acid L-arginine. Caffeine alone should be used with caution in endurance training, since it can be a strong stimulant based on your metabolism and your genetics”
Read More below if you're interested
Read More below if you're interested
Arginine, Dehydration and Low Blood Pressure
If you’re already dehydrated from sweating, your blood pressure will drop pretty low, if you add arginine into the mix you’re blood pressure will drop even lower. When your blood pressure drops too low and the hypotensive triggers (things that decrease blood pressure) are gone, eventually you can get rebound hypertension. This effect is seen in surgery when a patient is purposely put into hypotension with medications that dilate the blood vessels (the same effect arginine has). Once this drug wears off, with the body’s intention of bringing the blood pressure back to homeostasis, the blood pressure elevates higher than normal (rebound hypertension). I suspect that this effect is why these athletes usually die once they are resting or right after the event.
How Caffeine and Arginine Affect Your Heart
Think about how hard your heart will have to work if you dilate all of your blood vessels and take caffeine. To start, you take arginine which will lower your peripheral resistance and help blood flow easier through the body. Now your blood pressure is lower because it doesn’t have to work as hard to pump to the rest of the body since there is less resistance. Now you start physically exerting yourself, increasing the demand for oxygen and nutrients to your tissues (Muscles, skin, etc…). Your heart works harder to pump blood to these tissues but because the path is wider it takes more blood to transport the oxygen and nutrients. Now your heart is trying to pump more blood than usual to these tissues. This scenario is dangerous enough and now we’ll factor caffeine into it. Caffeine simulates stress, so it puts us into the stimulated fight or flight mode. This increases the heart rate even more and increases the demand of the tissues that the heart needs to pump oxygen and nutrients too. On top of all of this our lungs have to compensate and oxygenate this increase in demand. These are sure determinants to lead to heart failure.
Factors that Influence How Preworkouts Affect You
- Temperature
- Caffeine factors (how each individual metabolizes caffeine, route of caffeine administration, other ingredients, etc…)
- Underlying heart conditions (most go undiagnosed until a cardiac mishap takes place)
- How hard the athlete pushes themselves
- Duration of the athletic event
- Hydration status
- The Condition the athlete is in
- Dose and administration of arginine
- How well the liver and kidneys are functioning
- Genetics
- There are several other factors that need to be considered as well.
Highway Analogy for Caffeine and Arginine
Regularly your blood vessels are like a 1-lane highway. Traffic will congest the 1-lane highway and the main street that cars are entering it from. You take arginine to vasodilate your blood vessels into a 3-lane highway. Now the cars have a calm steady flow and the pressure is taken off of the main street. Now picture all of these cars as ambulances trying to get to accidents at all the different highway exits. It’s a blizzard out there and as time goes by there’s more and more demand for these ambulances. The Hospitals are sending out as many ambulances as they can but they can’t keep up with the demand because the accidents are so far apart. Eventually the Hospitals run out of ambulances and now that the arginine has worn off the highway is back down to 1-lane highway and all of the ambulances start smashing into each other.
Preworkout Advice
- Rely more on proper hydration rather than banking on “performance-enhancing” supplements.
- See a licensed health professional about proper training and supplementation
- Just because something is natural or over-the-counter doesn't mean it is safe.
- I've had a lot of patients come in on preworkouts and not even realize they're taking one. Be careful!
To make a long story short:
- Dehydration and arginine reduce your blood pressure. When low blood pressure is combined with stimulants it can be fatal, especially once the body tries to maintain homeostasis and rebounds into hypertension.
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