Ever gone back for a second coffee before a race because the first didn’t feel like enough?

Caffeine works — that part is not in dispute — so the reasoning writes itself: if a moderate dose helps, a bigger dose must help more.

The evidence says it doesn’t — and past a point, more caffeine quietly starts working against you.

What the evidence actually shows

The International Society of Sports Nutrition concluded that caffeine consistently improves performance when taken in doses of roughly 3 to 6 mg per kilogram of body weight.^[1] For endurance specifically, pooled analyses put the improvement at a few percent — meaningful at the sharp end of a race.

The ceiling nobody wants to hear about

Very high doses of caffeine, in the region of 9 mg per kilogram, are associated with a high incidence of side-effects and do not seem to be required to produce the performance benefit.^[1] The curve flattens; the side-effects don’t. The minimal effective dose may be as low as 2 mg per kilogram.^[1] The useful window is narrower, and lower, than most people assume.

Why “more is better” feels true anyway

Caffeine produces sensations that feel like performance — alertness, elevated heart rate, a buzz. Those feelings scale with dose. Performance does not. It is easy to mistake feeling more stimulated for performing better, and a bigger dose reliably delivers the former while quietly failing to deliver the latter. That gap is the entire engine of this myth.

Why the ceiling matters more in Singapore

Caffeine mildly raises heart rate and core temperature, and has a diuretic effect at rest. At moderate exercise doses in habitual users, caffeine does not appear to cause meaningful dehydration on its own. The more relevant issue in the heat is that it adds to cardiovascular and perceived-heat load.

Training in Singapore means working in mean annual relative humidity around 82%, with afternoon temperatures commonly above 32°C in inter-monsoon periods.^[2] A dose that felt fine in a temperate climate can tip toward the uncomfortable end here — more reason to stay in the moderate window.

Where Nomad gels sit — the honest version

Two Nomad gels contain caffeine: the Beetroot gel around 30 mg from organic guarana, and the Cocoa gel around 25 mg of added caffeine. The other three contain none. For most athletes the evidence-based range works out to a few hundred milligrams — and a single Nomad gel, at 25 to 30 mg, sits well below that on its own. We are not going to pretend otherwise. Claiming one gel is a performance dose of caffeine would fail our own evidence test.

What a modest, known amount of caffeine is good for: a predictable top-up you can count precisely — which matters, because the ceiling is a daily total, not a per-gel number.

Getting it right instead

Aim for the moderate evidence-based window, taken roughly an hour before you need it,^[1] and rehearse it in training. The non-caffeinated Nomad variants exist precisely so caffeine is a choice rather than a default.