Does Nicotine Affect Stamina and Athletic Performance?

Nicotine’s effect on stamina and athletic performance is far less impressive than many athletes assume. Across roughly a dozen controlled studies, the majority found no measurable improvement in exercise capacity from nicotine delivered via patches, gum, or smokeless tobacco. A couple of studies did find benefits in specific tasks, but the overall picture is murky enough that researchers still cannot confidently call nicotine a performance enhancer. What nicotine does reliably do is raise your heart rate and blood pressure during exercise, and its growing popularity among professional athletes is driven more by habit and social factors than by any proven edge.

What the Research Actually Shows

The most frequently cited summary comes from a review in Sports Medicine that tallied ten studies examining nicotine’s effect on muscular strength, power, endurance, and high-intensity exercise. Of those ten, seven reported no change in performance, two found a benefit, and one found that nicotine actually hurt performance.¹ A separate systematic review of studies in nicotine-naïve individuals came to a similar conclusion: while nicotine clearly changes how your cardiovascular system behaves during exercise, beneficial effects on actual performance showed up in only one study for endurance and one for a specific strength measure.²

That two-out-of-ten hit rate is important context. Nicotine is pharmacologically active and genuinely affects your body during exercise, but “affects your body” and “makes you perform better” are very different claims. The research literature keeps coming up with the same disconnect: nicotine changes measurable physiological markers without translating those changes into faster times, heavier lifts, or greater endurance for most people.

Heart Rate and Blood Pressure Go Up

The one thing nicotine does consistently during exercise is push your cardiovascular system harder. When nicotine-naïve individuals received nicotine before anaerobic exercise, their heart rate and blood pressure rose significantly compared to placebo.³ A study using transdermal nicotine patches found that resting heart rate climbed from about 65 beats per minute to roughly 75 beats per minute, and during exercise, heart rate remained about 7 beats per minute higher on average with nicotine. Oxygen consumption, ventilation, and perceived effort during the exercise itself, however, were not significantly different.⁴

A separate small study using nicotine chewing gum confirmed the pattern: heart rate and blood pressure went up significantly, but exercise performance itself did not change.³ In practical terms, your heart is working harder for the same output. That is the opposite of efficiency, and for sustained athletic effort, it means your cardiovascular system has less reserve. If you are already near your limits during a race or a tough training session, asking your heart to beat faster without getting anything extra for it is not an advantage.

The One Positive Endurance Finding

There is one study that stands out as the strongest case for nicotine improving stamina. Researchers gave transdermal nicotine to male subjects and had them cycle to exhaustion. Ten of the twelve participants lasted longer with nicotine, and on average, endurance improved by about 17%. Interestingly, there were no differences in perceived exertion, heart rate, ventilation, blood glucose, lactate, or circulating fatty acids. The authors concluded that nicotine’s benefit was likely driven by a central nervous system mechanism rather than anything happening in the muscles or cardiovascular system.⁵

That 17% figure sounds impressive, but it is a single study with twelve participants. No other endurance study has replicated the finding. The systematic reviews consistently note it as an outlier. When researchers tested nicotine gum in healthy men during progressive exercise, neither nicotine nor carbon monoxide had a significant effect on performance, even though blood nicotine levels rose substantially and heart rate and blood pressure both increased. The body responded to the drug, but endurance stayed the same.

The theory that nicotine might help endurance through the brain rather than the muscles is plausible on paper. Nicotine activates receptors involved in attention and arousal, and it could conceivably alter how the brain regulates fatigue signals. But plausible mechanisms do not count for much without replication, and that replication has not materialized. For now, the honest answer is that one small study found a meaningful endurance boost, and the rest did not.

Strength and Anaerobic Power

A well-designed crossover trial gave active, nicotine-naïve men either nicotine gum or placebo and tested them on several strength and power tasks. Nicotine improved peak isometric and eccentric torque in leg extension, meaning the muscles could produce more force in certain contraction types. But countermovement jump height was unchanged, and anaerobic capacity on a Wingate cycling sprint was also unaffected. The pacing strategy during the sprint did shift, with nicotine users hitting a higher peak power but fatiguing faster.⁶

That pattern is telling. Nicotine might briefly sharpen peak force output, possibly through neural excitation, but the overall capacity for sustained high-intensity work does not improve. Hitting a higher peak but fatiguing faster is a wash at best and potentially a net negative in sports that require repeated explosive efforts, like team sports, combat sports, or interval-heavy training.

Pain Tolerance and Perceived Effort

Nicotine has a mild analgesic effect in laboratory settings. In a recent placebo-controlled study using nicotine vaping, participants tolerated cold pressor pain and ischemic pain (the kind caused by restricted blood flow) for longer after nicotine compared to placebo.⁷ The idea that this might translate to pushing through discomfort during exercise is appealing, but the link is weak. When researchers tested whether nicotine changed perceived exertion during low-intensity activity, they found no effect. Heart rate and blood pressure went up, confirming the cardiovascular stimulation, but subjects did not report feeling that the exercise was any easier or harder.⁸

The distinction matters. Pain tolerance in a lab task with your hand in ice water is not the same as reduced perceived exertion during a 10K run. Exercise discomfort is regulated by a complex interplay of metabolic, muscular, and psychological signals that laboratory pain tests do not replicate. So while nicotine might dull certain types of pain slightly, that has not convincingly translated into athletes reporting that their workouts feel easier.

Nicotine Makes Heat a Bigger Problem

One of the clearer negative findings involves exercising in warm conditions. A randomized, double-blind study in trained men found that nicotine progressively reduced skin blood flow during exercise, and this effect was worse in warmer environments. Blood pressure rose and stayed elevated throughout. The researchers concluded that nicotine increases thermal strain and raises the risk of exertional heat exhaustion by blunting the body’s ability to shunt blood to the skin for cooling.⁹

For any athlete training or competing in hot weather, this is a concrete risk. Your body cools itself by routing warm blood to the skin surface where heat can dissipate. Nicotine constricts those blood vessels. If you are a runner doing summer training, a cyclist in a hot-weather stage race, or a football player in preseason, using nicotine before or during activity in the heat is actively working against your thermoregulation. This is not a subtle theoretical concern; heat exhaustion is a real and sometimes dangerous outcome.

Tremor and Fine Motor Control

For sports requiring precision, nicotine introduces another problem. Smokers show greater hand tremor than nonsmokers across a range of tasks including drawing, using a spoon, and finger-to-nose movements, even after accounting for age and caffeine intake.¹⁰ And the effect is not limited to chronic smoking. When researchers compared the acute tremor induced by smoking a cigarette versus chewing 4 mg nicotine gum, both produced comparable increases in hand tremor.¹¹

In target sports like archery, shooting, or golf, or in any skill that demands steady hands, this is a direct performance liability. The stimulant properties of nicotine that might theoretically help with alertness come packaged with increased neuromuscular jitter that works against fine motor precision. This tradeoff is rarely discussed in the athlete-nicotine conversation, which tends to focus narrowly on endurance and strength.

The Withdrawal Trap

One of the most important findings in this area is something researchers call baseline performance reversal. If you are already a regular nicotine user, the “performance boost” you feel from a nicotine pouch or patch before training might just be your body returning to its normal baseline after a period of withdrawal. A study of snus-using athletes found that after overnight abstinence, taking snus increased time to exhaustion by about 13%. That sounds like an ergogenic effect, but the study’s authors point out that twelve hours without nicotine had already degraded metabolic, cardiovascular, and muscle oxygenation parameters. The snus was likely just reversing withdrawal, not enhancing anything beyond normal function.¹²

A meta-analysis looking at nicotine withdrawal and exercise performance supports this interpretation. Short-term withdrawal of 12 to 24 hours tended to impair reaction time and sustained attention. But longer-term withdrawal of 48 hours or more was associated with improved sports performance, particularly aerobic capacity.¹³ The implication is uncomfortable for athletes who use nicotine regularly: the drug creates its own demand. Once you are dependent, you need it to feel and perform normal, and the short-term withdrawal window makes it seem essential. But if you push through the initial 48-hour dip, performance actually tends to come back stronger.

A recent review put it bluntly: perceived cognitive improvements from nicotine pouches likely stem from relief of withdrawal symptoms rather than genuine enhancement.¹⁴ Athletes who believe nicotine sharpens their focus are often experiencing what happens when a dependent brain gets its fix, not a genuine cognitive upgrade available to anyone.

Why Athletes Use It Anyway

Despite the thin evidence for performance benefits, nicotine use is common and growing in professional sports. A cross-sectional study of English professional footballers found that 18% of men and 22% of women reported current snus use, with lifetime use reaching 42% and 39% respectively.¹⁵ Motivations were a mix of socializing, boredom, relaxation, craving management, and stress relief. Notably absent from that list: a belief that it makes you run faster or last longer on the pitch.

This is a pattern seen across sports where oral nicotine products have taken hold. Ice hockey, football, rugby, and baseball all have substantial user populations. Athletes describe nicotine pouches as a way to manage nerves, suppress appetite, and stay alert during long periods of downtime between events. The athletic performance angle is more of a post-hoc justification than the actual driver. Social dynamics within a team matter enormously: if senior players use snus, younger players are more likely to start. The spread looks more like the spread of any social habit than the adoption of a training tool.¹⁴

Why the Research Is So Inconsistent

The review literature consistently flags several factors that make studying nicotine and performance frustratingly messy. The delivery method matters: a transdermal patch delivers nicotine slowly and steadily, gum provides a faster but more variable dose, and snus or pouches produce rapid absorption through the oral mucosa. Different delivery methods produce different blood nicotine levels over different time courses, making study-to-study comparisons unreliable. Whether participants are regular nicotine users or nicotine-naïve is also critical; a habitual user and a first-timer are essentially in different pharmacological states. Individual variation in how quickly the liver metabolizes nicotine adds another layer of noise.¹

Study sample sizes are also small. Most of the trials in this space involve somewhere between nine and twenty participants. Statistical power to detect a modest performance effect in that range is low, which means both positive and negative findings should be treated cautiously. The field genuinely needs larger, better-controlled trials, and the systematic reviews keep saying so. Until those arrive, any strong claim about nicotine and athletic performance, in either direction, is ahead of the evidence.

WADA’s Position

Nicotine is not banned in competition. The World Anti-Doping Agency placed nicotine on its Monitoring Program, which means it tracks how commonly athletes test positive and whether the pattern of use suggests it meets the criteria for prohibition: enhancing performance, posing a health risk, and violating the spirit of sport.¹⁶ So far, it has remained on the monitoring list rather than the prohibited list, which itself tells you something about how WADA’s scientific advisors read the performance evidence. The monitoring data does show that nicotine metabolites are extremely common in athlete urine samples, confirming widespread use, but prevalence alone is not grounds for a ban.

For athletes subject to drug testing, this means nicotine use will not result in a doping violation. But the monitoring status is a reminder that the conversation is not closed. If future research produced clearer evidence of ergogenic effects, the regulatory calculus could change. For now, the decision to use nicotine sits in the same gray zone as caffeine: legal, widely used, and with performance effects that range from modest to nonexistent depending on the individual and the task.

Practical Considerations for Different Sports

The effects of nicotine are not uniform across athletic contexts, and thinking about them sport by sport is more useful than looking for a universal verdict.

• Endurance sports: The single positive endurance study is intriguing but unreplicated. Elevated heart rate with no change in oxygen consumption is a net negative for long efforts. The heat strain finding makes nicotine particularly risky for outdoor endurance athletes in warm climates.
• Power and sprint sports: A small boost in peak torque is possible, but anaerobic capacity and jump performance appear unaffected. The altered pacing strategy of higher peaks and faster fatigue could hurt in repeated-sprint scenarios.
• Precision sports: Increased hand tremor from acute nicotine is a direct liability for shooting, archery, golf, and similar disciplines. Any alertness benefit would need to outweigh visibly shakier hands, and the evidence does not suggest it does.
• Team sports: The social spread of snus in football and hockey reflects habit more than strategy. The withdrawal-reversal dynamic is especially relevant here, since match-day use among dependent athletes is likely just maintaining normal function rather than gaining an edge.

The delivery method also shapes the practical picture. Inhaled nicotine through smoking is clearly harmful to lung function and endurance, a separate issue from isolated nicotine use. Patches deliver nicotine too slowly for a pre-game boost but steadily enough for research settings. Gum and pouches are fast-acting and dose-controllable, which is why they are the most popular among athletes. But faster delivery also means sharper cardiovascular spikes and a more pronounced tremor effect.