Caffeine is all over the place, in foods, beverages, and supplements, and the use for fitness and bodybuilding does have its merits.

Caffeine is derived from plant sources as it’s a natural insecticide. Found in beans, leaves, roots, it can be easily assimilated by the body through eating or drinking. Coffee is the most popular and regular form of caffeine ingestion. It goes back a long way along with tea, thousands of years.

Nowadays the modern way of extracting caffeine allows for supplements and drinks to be produced to deliver a powerful dose that the bodybuilding athlete needs.

It’s been proven that caffeine improves physical performance, so much so, that it is banned in many competitive sports. That doesn’t stop people from using it and with bodybuilding, it doesn’t have negative results when taken responsibly. Moreover, there are several studies indicating that coffee can also work as a Testosterone booster that further helps with body building.

Caffeine will allow for alertness, neural response, and recovery if it isn’t abused. For the bodybuilder, this is of high importance because bodybuilders have the most stressful workouts of all sports. Bodybuilding encompasses everything that one needs to do regarding fitness and involves battling gravity and using gravity to shape and contour muscles as well as building mass.

The only way a bodybuilder gains that muscle is by tearing down existing muscle fiber and allowing it to repair itself thus producing more muscle. If a plateau is reached, more energy to lift more weight is required and that energy is provided by caffeine.

There are supplements that can do this and are specifically designed and engineered by companies to do so. Not all are top quality so it takes some studying to get the right company that provides natural sources of caffeine and is not filled with dubious ingredients.

If you’re a bodybuilder that wants that caffeine but only from organic or natural sources, you always have teas. Even green tea can do wonders. Talk to the folks at the local tea houses. Do some research online regarding which teas and coffees are natural and organic. If you don’t like teas and coffees you always have chocolate. Yes, chocolate. Chocolate has an abundance of wondrous ingredients including caffeine. Make sure to get chocolate that is 70% or more cocoa. You can get these at stores or online. Processed chocolates have sugar and you want to avoid those. You can actually make your own chocolate products thus controlling the caffeine content you desire.

Remember, caffeine lasts a long time in your system. You need to take it at least an hour before your workout and it will remain in your system for about 5 to 6 hours.

Overall, the right amount of caffeine and the right bodybuilding regimen will turn out beneficial as long as you don’t overdo it. Too much caffeine can cause sleep problems and bring on anxiety. Be careful and you’ll do just fine.

One final thing, teenagers should stay away from caffeine. They’ll want to use it to bring out top performances but their bodies aren’t built to handle that kind of additional stress. There are far too many sports drinks and soft drinks with ridiculous amounts of caffeine in them that have and can cause harm, even fatally if there is an underlying condition. If your teenager wants to bodybuild and use caffeine, then let that caffeine source be from natural plants and veggies.