Strength training: is sex the night before a no-no?

The Peking Olympic Games are done and dusted, and in line with tradition, the Chinese provided the athletes with condoms, despite rigorous social distancing rules. Since the very first Olympic Games in Ancient Greece and Rome, athletes have been warned against sexual activity due to its perceived potential to reduce performance.

Pre-competition coitus has been a hotly discussed topic for many years now. Coaches often recommend that athletes don’t have sex before a big game or tournament because they’re concerned that it could impair their performance. One of the main proponents of this theory was Muhammad Ali [1]. The widespread theory is that abstaining from sex evokes aggression, which leads to improved athletic performance. On the flip side, activities that lead to an orgasm are frowned upon because they lower testosterone levels, which can be detrimental to performance during sport [2].

There’s also a stubbornly persistent theory that sporting performance goes down due to the toll sex takes on energy levels. On the other hand, energy consumption during sex is relatively low in young men (approximately 4.2 kCal/min) and young women (3.1 kCal/min) [3].

What impact does sex have on muscle strength?

Valenti et al. [4] studied the effects of having sex twelve hours before leg strength training. To do this, they recruited twelve sexually active men with experience in strength training (25.6 ± 3.8 years). The strength of the knee flexors and extensors was measured twice. Once in the morning after the participants had had sex and again on a morning when they hadn’t.

The participants weren’t prescribed a standardised way of having sex. Four of the twelve participants reported at the time of the test that their sexual activity the night before lasted longer than 30 minutes. For the remainder of the test subjects, it lasted fewer than 30 minutes. On average, the participants spent six and a half hours sleeping before each test. This figure didn’t vary between trainings, regardless of whether they’d had sex beforehand or not.

The result? Having sex twelve hours before the strength test had no effect on force production during knee extension or knee flexion (see figure).

So it seems that sexual activity doesn’t have a negative effect on muscle strength. However, the study has several limitations – one of them being the small sample size. Furthermore, only the knee joint was examined. Therefore, it’s still not known how having sex the evening before doing so-called whole body sports such as swimming or cycling impacts performance. In addition, participants were free to have sex in whatever way they chose. It’s pretty plausible that different sexual positions could result in different levels of leg fatigue, but this wasn’t tested either.

That said, the data suggests that having sex twelve hours before a strength test has no effect on performance.

On that note, I’m happy to let you, the reader, draw your own conclusions.

References

1. Fischer G. Abstention from Sex and Other Pre-Game Rituals Used by College Male Varsity Athletes. J Sport Behav. 1997;20: 176.
2. McGlone S, Shrier I. Does sex the night before competition decrease performance? Clin J Sport Med. 2000;10: 233–234. doi:10.1097/00042752-200010000-00001
3. Frappier J, Toupin I, Levy JJ, Aubertin-Leheudre M, Karelis AD. Energy Expenditure during Sexual Activity in Young Healthy Couples. PLoS One. Public Library of Science; 2013;8: 79342. doi:10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0079342
4. Valenti LM, Suchil C, Beltran G, Rogers RC, Massey EA, Astorino TA. Effect of Sexual Intercourse on Lower Extremity Muscle Force in Strength-Trained Men. J Sex Med. Elsevier; 2018;15: 888–893. doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2018.04.636