After intense exercise, you might sometimes feel soreness in your waist and legs or all over your muscles, feel exhausted, and also feel extremely thirsty. At this moment, wouldn't an ice-cold Coca-Cola be your favorite? Perhaps, before you decide to chug it, you should find out if we can drink Coca-Cola during exercise.
Generally, Coca-Cola contains caffeine, carbon dioxide, and phosphoric acid. Because consuming or drinking large amounts of caffeine-containing medications or beverages can help athletes enter a state of high excitement, thereby improving their athletic performance, this year, the World Anti-Doping Agency revealed that any medication or beverage containing caffeine will be banned, which includes Coca-Cola.
However, the caffeine content in Coca-Cola is relatively low. For ordinary people, as long as it is not consumed in large quantities, its "excitatory" or "inhibitory" effects on the nervous system are not particularly significant.
But in addition to caffeine, Coca-Cola also contains carbon dioxide and phosphoric acid, and it is these two ingredients that determine that Coca-Cola cannot be recommended as a beverage for exercise.
An adequate amount of carbon dioxide in beverages can have a bactericidal and bacteriostatic effect, and it can also take away body heat through evaporation, playing a role in cooling the body, which is why you feel "so refreshing" when you drink it. However, the carbon dioxide in Coca-Cola, while we enjoy the cool and stimulating taste, can also bring some stimulation to our digestive system. Especially when consumed before exercise, it may cause gastrointestinal bloating, leading to problems like abdominal pain during exercise.
After a certain amount of exercise, everyone will more or less feel physical fatigue and soreness. This is because our bodies produce acidic substances during exercise, and the accumulation of these substances leads to body fatigue. At this point, if you replenish your body with Coca-Cola containing phosphoric acid, it will increase your body's fatigue level, prevent the body's acid-base balance from being neutralized, and make it harder to recover from fatigue.
The expert advice is: do not drink Coca-Cola for at least half an hour before or after exercise. Because the body loses a large amount of electrolytes during exercise, drinking an alkaline beverage containing electrolytes after exercise is the correct choice.