What Nicotine Does to Your Body
Nicotine is a stimulant, which means it gets your body revved up by boosting norepinephrine levels and keeping it around longer. This kicks your sympathetic nervous system into gear, making your heart race and your blood pressure go up.
It also helps with focus and memory, plus it releases dopamine, which gives you those feel-good vibes. But all this can lead to addiction.
You can get nicotine not just from smoking but also from stuff like snus, snuff, or even nicotine gum and patches. Athletes sometimes use these alternatives thinking they’ll get some benefits. But since most folks smoke, let’s start there.
How Smoking Affects Your Endurance
You might think that since smoking raises your heart rate and pumps more blood, it could help with aerobic exercise. More blood means more oxygen for your muscles, right? Not quite.
After smoking, carbon monoxide levels in your blood go up, which messes with hemoglobin’s ability to carry oxygen. So, smokers actually get less oxygen, which can really hurt their performance, especially in leg-heavy sports like running, cycling, and skiing. Studies show that smokers tire out way faster when using their legs compared to non-smokers, but there’s not much difference when it comes to arm workouts.
This is because your legs have more slow-twitch muscle fibers that need oxygen to function. So, if you smoke, you’ll get tired quicker and won’t be able to push yourself as hard.
How Smoking Affects Strength Training
When it comes to strength training, the impact of smoking isn’t as obvious as with endurance sports. Smokers can actually tense their muscles a bit better, but that doesn’t really help with overall strength.
Research shows no major differences in max strength, muscle size, or short-term endurance between smokers and non-smokers. But when it comes to strength endurance—how long you can keep producing force—smokers fall behind. Their muscles get tired faster, likely because smoking lowers the activity of an enzyme that helps create energy in your cells. A study on twins showed that even with the same genetics and muscle mass, the smoking twin’s muscles fatigued quicker.
So, if you’re lifting heavy weights with low reps, smoking might not hurt you much. But if you’re doing high reps, you’ll struggle more than a non-smoker. This effect doesn’t depend on how many cigarettes you smoke or how long you’ve been smoking. If you smoke, your muscles will tire out faster.
The good news? If you quit smoking, that enzyme activity can bounce back to normal in about a week to a month.
How Other Forms of Nicotine Impact Performance
A lot of athletes in team sports like hockey and football use non-smoking forms of nicotine, hoping for a boost. But a review of studies found that nicotine doesn’t really help performance. Out of 16 studies, only two showed any improvement—one found a 17% boost in endurance, and another a 6% increase in peak power. The rest showed no effect.
These studies involved people who weren’t addicted, and even they didn’t see much benefit. So, if you’re used to nicotine, don’t expect it to do much for you.
That might be why the World Anti-Doping Agency doesn’t ban nicotine—there’s really no point if it doesn’t help.
Can You Smoke and Still Play Sports?
If you can quit, do it! It’ll boost your performance and overall health. But if you’re not ready to quit yet, just keep exercising. Staying active can help lower the risks of serious health issues linked to smoking, like cancer and heart disease.
While working out won’t help you kick the habit, it can at least lessen some of the risks.
