Coffee

[sal6781]

Just curious. Does coffee affect your scores ?

[JKR]

Yes. If I don't have my morning coffee I'm a total wreck!

[CamelNL]

Dont know, but i want my coffee or tea before i shoot.

[Rover]

I have the best of both worlds: I drink French or Italian roast. Full flavor, low caffeine.

[Coolmeester]

For me it affects very much to my hold.

[Gwhite]

It depends on what your body is used to. If you regularly have coffee, you may find that eliminating it right before a match causes worse tremors than continuing your normal dosage.

If you aren't used to it, having a big slug of caffeine from coffee, tea, or soda will definitely give you the shakes. The same goes to some extent with a sudden influx of sugar.

[SlartyBartFast]

Drink a litre and a half of the stuff every day. No way I'll go to the range in the morning without drinking a big mug...

[scausi]

Coffee increases your heart rate and adrenalin , that's why most coaches would steer you away from drinking coffee prior to a competition match , probably also when training, not the best thing for precision shooting.
That being said I am a coffee freak.
Cheers S

[-TT-]

Here's an actual study on the subject

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14668172

There was *no* effect on marksmanship, surprisingly.

[thirdwheel]

I'm now caffeine free but to get to that point I had to go cold turkey and it was not good, massive headaches (bone crushers my mum would have called them) and could not function at all while I had them.
It got rid of a lot of my tremor so I'm keeping off the stuff but I just love real coffee.

Good luck if you decide to give the stuff up.

[David Levene]

Here's an actual study on the subject

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14668172

There was *no* effect on marksmanship, surprisingly.

Hardly an in-depth study that can be applied to Olympic type pistol shooting I'm afraid.

[Gwhite]

You'd have to dig into the paper to see what they consider "marksmanship". In the military, hitting a man sized target at 300 meters from the prone position is often considered "marksmanship".

I'd rather see a test with an air pistol and an electronic trainer like a SCATT or Noptel. I suspect it's been done, but info like that is very hard to find. I think a lot of research like that is done by various national Olympic teams. The results are considered "state secrets" and are not published in the open literature.

I wonder if Yur Yev has anything to say on the matter? I took a quick look at the table of contents & didn't see anything obvious. It may be buried in there someplace.

[Rickhem]

Going back a couple decades, when I devoted more time to what was then called Bullseye pistol, it seemed to me that all the top guys in my area tried to be caffeine free. I tried that too for a while, as I was able to see a difference on our usual league night following our brief intermissions and coffee drinking breaks. I noticed that my dot, which would float slowly around the black for the first match or two, would then start moving a lot faster and more erraticly (sp?) after a cup of coffee or two. So total, cold turkey Decaff I went. Didn't really see much difference in score or in dot movement but I rationalized that it would have health benefits so I should keep doing it. So a few months of this go by, and one day we are all meeting to go to our local National Sectional match. It's late Feb, early March, and we're meeting at a Burger King before carpooling up to the range hosting the match. I had a cup of the BK Joe Decaf while we were there, and as soon as we started driving I knew that wasn't decaf I had just consumed. I shot that match with a little red comet pinging around inside my sight. It's a lot funnier now then it was that day. My lesson was that I would have a couple of cups of regular coffee at work every day and not worry about it. Like has been mentioned here before, you'll adapt and acclimate to whatever your norm is. It's the deviation from that norm which will cause you problems.
That's my 2¢, and you should probably not listen to me since I was never that good to start with.

[john bickar]

Everyone who has posted in this thread is correct...for themselves.

Caffeine affects everyone differently.

If you believe that you can't function without a morning cup of coffee - you can't.

If you believe that your hold is more stable without caffeine - it is.

You're better off having this conversation with your shooting journal than with random strangers on the Internet. Try going caffeine-free for six weeks and see how it goes. Take meticulous notes.

That first cup of coffee after those six weeks, though...