Former Olympic gymnast Nastia Liukin says she always has coffee before she works out. Here’s what a pre-sweat cuppa can do, and how to get the most out of it.

Nastia Liukin shot to fame in 2008 when she became the Olympic individual all-around champion in gymnastics. She’s now retired from the sport, and the 26-year-old says in a new interview that it took her a while to find a new fitness groove.

Now, she tells New York magazine, she wakes up around 5 a.m. to squeeze in a workout—Pilates, running, spinning, or hot yoga. “I like to eat something very small beforehand, whether it’s a banana or a piece of fruit, and I have coffee,” she says. “It was the same when I was in gymnastics.”

Eating a little something makes sense, but is swigging a cup of coffee before your work out really a good idea? Surprisingly…yes.

“It’s a great idea—it’s very helpful,” Albert Matheny, M.S., R.D., a certified strength and conditioning specialist at SoHo Strength Lab and Promix Nutrition, tells SELF. The caffeine in coffee is a central nervous stimulant, which makes it good for athletic performance with aerobic sports like running and cycling, he says.

Matheny points to research that’s found coffee can improve sprint performance, as well as cycling and running time trial performance. It also can improve your endurance because it delays the onset of muscle fatigue and central nervous system fatigue.

One study published in the British Journal of Sports Science also found that people who drank coffee before running 1,500 meters on a treadmill finished their run 4.2 seconds faster than those who didn’t have coffee beforehand. Basically, having a cup of Joe before you work up a sweat can get you revved up and stay that way, giving your workout an added boost.

A little pre-workout coffee can also help you burn more calories since it increases your heart rate, but Matheny says it’s only a very tiny amount. Plus, it may make your workout more enjoyable.

How much are we talking about here? Matheny says an 8-ounce cup of brewed coffee, which typically has anywhere from 95 to 200 milligrams of caffeine, pre-workout is fine, but he recommends having no more than 200 milligrams. “Anything above that is too much—you’ve lost the performance benefits of the coffee and you’ve overstimulated yourself,” he says.

Just be wary of trying this in the evening. Performance nutritionist Samuel Accardi, R.D., lead dietitian for The Charge Group, tells SELF that the half-life of caffeine is five to six hours, meaning it takes five to six hours for half of the caffeine content to leave your body. If you have a 10 ounce cup of coffee at 5 p.m., by 10 p.m., it would be the same as if you drank five ounces of coffee.

New York City registered dietitian Jessica Cording agrees that you should keep your caffeine portions small and early. “I would keep it to a small amount to avoid getting jittery,” she tells SELF. And, if you’re more sensitive to caffeine but still want a little boost, she recommends trying matcha tea. “To give the caffeine a little time to get into your system, aim to have it 30 minutes to an hour beforehand,” she says.

That’s one easy workout tweak we can get behind.