Does 5-Hour Energy make you swim faster?

We’ve all seen the commercials of a magical shot of energy that can boost your success.  5-hour energy is a product that promises to enhance focus.  It contains a bunch of vitamins and nutrients (consult their website, www.5hourenergy.com for details).  At Dobkanize, we have watched 5-hour energy become more and more popular since we saw it in 2004.  Could it be the easy-yet-legal performance enhancer we have been searching for?  We set up an experiment to find out.

I have to admit the product has a funny name.  The title has “energy” in it, but the product has very little of anything that resembles energy.  It possesses a tiny 4 calories, or 16.7 kilojoules, or 15.9 Btu’s.  Here is what puts these numbers in perspective.  If you are burning energy at a rate of 750 calories per hour, as you would in strenuous exercise, you would blast through the calories in a 5-Hour Energy shot in just 20 seconds.  I’m sure the company has a good reason for the name they chose for their product.  It is a bit of an eye catcher.

The company does not say its products have any sort of fuel.  Instead, it claims that a massive infusion of vitamins and nutrients are what the body needs to be more efficient at using the energy it already has.  By this logic, it should allow improved energy output (horsepower), and improved concentration at applying that output.  Your raw swimming speed also has little to do with how many calories you have in your system.  Actually, very few triathlons depend on your calorie storage capacity, other than Iron distance events.  It is all about how good your technique is, and how fast you can apply that technique. 

To evaluate 5-Hour Energy, I suited up and swam a total of 4 - 25-yard freestyle sprints, as fast as possible, with full recovery (approximately 8 minutes rest).  Then I drank a single shot of 5-Hour Energy (Lemon-Lime flavor) and did four more sprints.  After taking the 5-hour energy and before doing the second set of sprints, I waited 30 minutes to allow the product to take effect.  The results are shown in the chart below. 

The results show no difference between sprints with or without 5-hour energy, to 95% confidence.  The fastest sprint with 5-Hour Energy was only slightly slower than the fastest without.  But the standard deviation of sprints with 5-Hour Energy was high.  Why?  Because the stuff really upset my stomach!  I have to admit I have never taken 5-Hour Energy before, and my stomach has never been the most tolerant of complex ingredients. 

Just 5 minutes after drinking the stuff, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.  My gut hurt pretty bad, and I got that general feeling of weakness you get from swallowing something that you are not supposed to.  I did wait 30 minutes and the feeling was gone by then, but the distraction was enough to affect my concentration.  On repeat 2 with 5-hour, I successfully forced myself into a zone and went as fast as expected.  But on the others, I couldn’t find a feel for the water, or I would find it 20 yards into the sprint (which in a 25-yard race is useless). 

Maybe I would have gone faster on 5-hour Energy if I didn’t get sick.  Maybe I should have tried out the stuff before sprinting with everything I had.  The results from this experiment suggest it may not make much of a difference.  Even when I was able to feel fast with 5-hour energy, my maximum speed did not improve.  But the sample size in this test is not enough to know for sure. 

So, what does this all mean to you?  If you are considering trying 5-hour Energy, I suggest you test it out with moderate exercise first.  And always make sure your physician gives you the okay with any supplement, including this one.  Your body can have funny reactions to a large volume of vitamins, even when they are good for you.  Stick with it if it helps you.  But don’t worry about it if you already feel fast and alert.  Chances are, a 5-hour energy shot won’t make you any faster all by itself.