I'm older and have been taking Ubiquinol for many years but more as a preventative than for performance. Off the top of my head, I think Macca said in "I'm Here to Win" that he took CoQ10 for heart health, and I think it was a recommended sup in the "Haywire Heart". That's good enough for me. I don't know squat about NADH.

Re: CoQ10:

"several studies have found that CoQ10 supplementation (60–100 mg/day for 4–8 weeks) improves aerobic power, anaerobic threshold, exercise performance, and/or recovery after exercise in trained athletes and untrained individuals"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...articles/PMC2315638/

Re: NADH:

In 1995 a study was conducted among competitive-level cyclists and long distance runners taking ENADA/NADH. A significant range of performance improvements was recorded such as increased oxygen capacity, decreased reaction time and greater mental acuity.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/...240eaeba98631770.pdf

But if you look around, it's not hard to also find studies to say neither has any effect!

Without looking at the particular studies, I generally dismiss them due to low sample size, funding bias, and the like. It's like saying Gatorade improves performance in hot and humid conditions but the control group gets water only or nothing. What athletes really want to know is whether Gatorade is better than Powerade, and so on. And when it comes to legal OTC sups, the performance data is twice as suspect especially since there are just too many factors to control for. But as I noted, there are reasons to take COQ10 apart from performance.

Yes, I agree.

What I'm really looking for is an alternative to caffeine tablets - which has proven benefits for athletic performance but also makes you want to pee!

No point taking two mins off your run time if you spend three mins queuing for the portapotty!

I don't take caffeine pills but I do use gels with caffeine. Because I'm a heavy sweater, I typically go through most IMs with a single stop to pee in T2. For IM, the race is too long to be caffeinated all day and still have an effect. So my breakfast and nutrition is caffeine free through about 1/2 way into the bike, then I start using gels with caffeine and increase the dosage each time and into the run.

I had dinner with some people heavily in the cycling scene and the key to a cyclists performance at the moment is a combo of caffeine, tramadol pain killers and nicorette nicotine gum is the binder. Was interesting and sad to hear that to what level of athletes were using it.

Caffeine is a very minor diuretic. If you regularly drink coffee it may have little or no diuretic effect. Of course like most things the effects can be very individual. Coffee doesn't make me pee but it does make me poop.

Are we talking pro cyclists? And they use the pain killers as way to deal with the mental strain of the cycling that is required at extremely high efforts or to push thru nagging injuries?

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It's to numb the pain associated with hard efforts, allows to to go deeper I've been told. I've never tried it, but it is widespread, even down into amateur ranks. Maybe not tramadol per see, but definitely opioids

Tramadol is an opioid.

Yes I know, I was saying that they might not specifically be using tramadol, but they would be using one opioid or another. Depending on where you live tramadol itself might not be as readily available

We are talking national level cyclists and even lower masters racers. It is purely performance based and I believe physical pain over mental for performance gain. My mates friend does medical research studies and asked a young up and coming national level cyclist before starting her research if he used anything and he said no. She pressed him and asked if he used tramadol knowing it is rife and he said no but it has caused crashes in the bunch due to it slowing peoples reactions and I can see a post below saying it is an opioid and obviously the reason. All I know after dinner is it is rife in competitive cycling here in Australia, I am told pros in Europe and people are still passing doping.