Background information
Strength training: why gyms are always full on Mondays
by Claudio Viecelli
Strength training: is sex the night before a no-no?
10.3.2022
Translation: Katherine Martin
Support: Patrick Bardelli
Many coaches advise strength athletes against having sex before a competition. The abstinence recommendation goes right back to ancient times – and still persists today. But does sex really diminish your strength?
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.
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).
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.
![Change in average torque during single-leg knee extension (A) and flexion (B) with and without intercourse. All values are mean (SD). Adapted from Valenti et al. [4]](/im/Files/5/9/4/0/7/0/2/2/Unbenannt.jpg?impolicy=resize&resizeWidth=1600)
