From high school to the pros, athletes are in love with this trendy energy drink. Their trainers? Not so much.
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Christian Anderson was having a season: 18.5 points a game for top-five-seeded Texas Tech, the NBA draft in his future, the sole reason — it sometimes seemed — that the Red Raiders were favored to advance from the first weekend of the NCAA tournament.
He was also exhausted. With the Sweet 16 in sight, the practices were growing heavier, nights longer. In a 40-minute game, he was playing 38.3 of those suckers. So one morning, the day before the first round, a manager handed him an aluminum can.
“Thanks, man,” Anderson said, pulling the bottle to his hip, blocking it from sight and wandering into the locker room. Minutes later, he was joking with teammates about the tournament’s first day of games, a transformation from the baggy-eyed guard who had walked off the team bus in the previous half hour. “I’m not sure what it is. I can kind of turn my energy on and off,” he explained. “It’s magic.”
After the buzz died down, he walked toward the changing stalls past a trash bin, tossing something out along the way. A glance in the bin, and there rested his sorcery: a 12-ounce can of Celsius.
The popular energy drink has gradually captivated athletes from high school to the pros in recent years, offering a boost before late-night practices and early-morning games. Yet because it was once rumored to cause failed drug tests — and because it remains the bane of sports nutritionists’ existence — many athletes are hiding their consumption from their bosses. What’s developed, in the words of one NFL player, is “the Celsius Code of Silence.”
“What guys consume for energy is their thing,” Washington Nationals all-star James Wood explained. “But it’s wild.”
Across professional and Division I sports especially, athletes exist in a never-ending battle with exhaustion. Every major American professional sports team averages more than 8,000 miles of travel each year. The NBA and NHL’s finest eclipse 40,000 miles most campaigns.
Their facilities, in turn, frequently serve as caffeine corner stores, with many operating pop-up coffee shops while stocking freezers full of energy drinks. Some offer pouches and strips, which players can put in their mouths for an immediate jolt. Others have specific caffeine plans for their athletes, monitoring intake to avoid rattling their sleep schedules or consumption habits. Often, the primary stock is Red Bull.
“Athletes believe Red Bull was handed to Moses,” said Ben Desbrow, a professor of nutrition and dietetics at Griffith University’s School of Allied Health Sciences in Australia. “God’s finest creation, in their eyes.”
But with new companies constantly thumbing for routes into the American caffeine machine, trendy new drinks are common. Enter Celsius, an energy drink that markets itself as a zero-sugar, rapidly metabolizing pre-workout hit.
Its silver cans feature pictures of kiwi and grapefruit — despite no fruit or fruit juice in the drink — an image intended to position it as a “healthier” energy drink choice. Dallas Wings guard Azzi Fudd, U.S. soccer star Weston McKennie and Florida Panthers all-star Aleksander Barkov all have Celsius marketing deals. Dozens of NCAA athletes told The Washington Post they swear by it.
“Guys always want to find any edge they can,” Texas Tech guard Tyeree Bryan said. “So if they see someone else drinking or eating something, and it seems like it’s helping them, they’ll start without thinking about it that much.”
“Its slogan is ‘live fit,’” Desbrow added. “That catches the eye of athletes. They’re susceptible to gimmicks.”
Bryan said a freshman, “as it usually is,” showed him Celsius when he was playing for Santa Clara University in 2024. Searching for ways to manage a 15-credit semester during the basketball season, he gave it a try. A year later, he brought the drink to Lubbock, Texas, and teammates started inquiring.
“It’s just, like, the thing right now,” said a Power Four college football wide receiver, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid a frightening text from their team nutritionist. After being shown the beverage’s caffeine content, he added: “I probably should’ve looked into it more. But it really makes you feel energized. I’ve never had anything as powerful as it.”
Professional athletes, whose health is their financial stability, have been slower to adopt it.
“We watch anything new they’re consuming like this,” said Jennifer Gibson, the Chicago Blackhawks’ head of performance nutrition and a former U.S. Olympic Committee dietitian. “Professional athletes care about what they consume, so they largely won’t just pick something like this up. Your body is your job. … Not to mention, Celsius is relatively new, and its effects haven’t been perfectly weighed.”
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But some have begun quietly downing the drink after their younger teammates put them onto it, according to a handful of professional athletes. Many intentionally avoid drinking it in their locker rooms, they said, as to avoid judgment from team officials or teammates.
Before a Boston Red Sox game in late June, right fielder Wilyer Abreu finished a can as he walked into the locker room, tossing it into a trash bag in a Fenway Park hallway.
“Can’t help myself,” he said. Asked if he knew what’s in it, he said, “I’m not sure, but it makes me feel faster.”
He recorded a hit and an RBI later in the evening, and when he rounded onto first base, he smiled and leaped.
Washington Commanders running back Kaytron Allen brought some habits from his last four years at Penn State, including the occasional caffeinated drink. In the last year, for him and his teammates, that could be Celsius.
Yet he wasn’t quite sure how any of this worked, so he started talking with one of the Commanders’ experts. The subsequent half-hour, he said, was eye-opening.
In a 12-ounce Red Bull can, there are 114 milligrams of caffeine, about 30 mg more than a standard home-brewed cup of coffee. Red Bull’s caffeine is also entirely synthetic, meaning it’s laboratory-produced and draws from a singular, measurable source.
A 12-ounce can of Celsius weighs in at 200 mg, a mix of guarana seed extract, green tea extract and caffeine anhydrous — natural, plant-derived caffeine ingredients.
“Which is why athletes think it’s healthier,” Gibson said. But those elements have no recognizable health benefits, she said.
About a year ago, rumors swirled that the drink would make athletes fail drug tests because of its caffeine content. The NCAA prohibits athletes from competing with more than 15 micrograms per milliliter of caffeine in their system, which would cause one to fail a drug test. For most athletes, two to four cans of Celsius would cross that barrier.
“When you have multiple factors contributing to the caffeine total, it becomes difficult to track and ensure an athlete isn’t over-caffeinating themselves,” Gibson said. “Not to mention, 200 mg of caffeine is, well, a lot.”
Most learn quickly that they can’t consume Celsius after a certain hour in the middle of the day without disrupting their sleep. Everyone metabolizes caffeine at a different rate, though its average half-life is five to seven hours.
“I was up until 5 a.m. once because of one of those things,” tennis player Ben Shelton, who made a run to the U.S. Open finals a few weeks ago, said at a tournament this summer. Shelton said caffeine is an occasional part of his regimen, but he preached caution. “If you want to be playing something like this for a long time, you need to take care of yourself.”
The central question for most athletes, then, is complex: How do you weigh the benefits of such a strong peak versus the detriments to your functionality in all other hours — setting aside the well-documented, long-term cardiovascular and metabolic strains, such as Type 2 diabetes, that can accompany frequent energy drink consumption?
Allen, for one, said he won’t be eyeing any more energy drinks. But for some in pursuit of a boost in the late innings or quarters or periods of a weeknight game, caffeine has become a matter of existence rather than aid. And Celsius definitely offers the most.
“Exhausted, dude,” Anderson groaned, back in March, to a nearby teammate after his opening-round game. He leaned back in his seat and put his hand over his eyes, head tilted toward the wall. “Feel like I’ve just been hit by something.”
Yet as the team exited for the bus, some 15 minutes later, he was bouncing again.
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