Research

Hormonal

Repeated dosing of smaller caffeine amounts (e.g., 2 mg/kg) is superior to a single large dose (e.g., 6-10 mg/kg) for maintaining performance during long-duration competitions with rest periods.

For long competitions with long breaks between lifts, don't take your whole caffeine dose at once. Split it into smaller doses (e.g., 2mg/kg) taken before each lift to keep the performance boost steady.

LimitedQualifiesLOW confidence
Ingesting smaller, repeated doses may be superior to one large dose, given that smaller doses would not saturate the P450 system... Smaller, repeated doses might help maintain a moderate, but stable concentration of caffeine in plasma through several hours.
Jozo Grgić et al. · Journal of Human Kinetics · 2019

Why this rating

Direct evidence in powerlifting is lacking; inference drawn from combat sports (wrestling) studies.

Source

Caffeine Supplementation for Powerlifting Competitions: an Evidence-Based Approach

Jozo Grgić et al. · Journal of Human Kinetics · 2019

DOI 10.2478/hukin-2019-0054

narrative_reviewCited 21×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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