I got asked this on live chat last week and realised I'd never actually written about it. I've run Ecigone since 2014 and I've trained 4-5 days a week since I was 18, mostly bodybuilding with some cardio thrown in. I also vape all day, every day. 10mg nic salts, chain-vaping between emails, on the way to the gym, basically any time I'm not asleep.
So yeah, I've got some skin in this game.
In 2024, Manchester Metropolitan University published a study that put actual numbers on what a lot of us suspected. Vaping does affect your training. Here's what they found and what I've noticed from my own sessions.
The Manchester Met Study: What They Found
Sixty people in their twenties, split into three groups of twenty. Non-smokers who didn't vape, vapers with at least two years' use, and smokers with the same timeframe. All had normal lung function on paper.
They stuck everyone on a stationary bike and pushed them to failure. Peak exercise capacity came out at:
- Non-users: 226 watts
- Vapers: 186 watts
- Smokers: 182 watts
Vapers consumed 2.7 litres of oxygen per minute at peak effort. Non-users hit 3 litres. Both vapers and smokers showed impaired blood vessel function, higher lactate, and more breathlessness before they even reached maximum effort.
Dr Azmy Faisal presented the findings at the European Respiratory Society Congress in September 2024. He was blunt about it. Vapers and smokers had measurably excessive breathing during testing and were less fit overall.
Now, it's 60 people. The researchers said themselves that proving causation from this alone isn't possible. But it lines up with earlier work on nicotine and blood vessels. And it matches what I've felt in the gym for years without being able to put a number on it.
Does Vaping Affect Running
This is where the data hurts most. Cardio performance depends on oxygen uptake and how well your body moves it to working muscles. A 10% drop in peak oxygen consumption is a big deal over a 5K or a half marathon.
That could mean hitting the wall earlier, fading on intervals, or watching your pace fall apart in the back half of a race. It won't stop you lacing up your trainers. But if you're chasing times, vaping is costing you something.
Customers who run and vape tell me the same thing. Sessions feel harder after heavy vaping. A few have tried leaving the vape at home for a couple of hours before a run. Most say it makes a noticeable difference. Not transformative, but enough to feel.
Does Vaping Affect Gym Performance
Different story to running because you're not sustaining max output for 30 minutes. Resistance training is bursts of effort with rest in between, so your cardiovascular ceiling matters less rep to rep.
Where it shows up is lactate. The study found vapers had higher lactate and more muscle fatigue at lower intensities than non-users. That burning feeling during a high-rep set? It's coming earlier and hitting harder if you vape. Drop sets, supersets, giant sets, anything that keeps you under tension without enough rest. That's where it catches up with you.
Heavy singles and triples with three minutes between sets? Probably not going to feel much difference.
What I Tried Myself
I'm a chain vaper. I'll admit that. ADHD, running a business, and just being wired the way I am means my vape is basically glued to my hand. I usually train around 2pm and I'll be vaping right up to the gym car park.
A couple of weeks ago I tried something different. Trained first thing, around 6am, straight after my first meal. Hadn't touched my vape since the night before. The difference surprised me. I felt stronger, hit more reps, and my breathing felt more controlled through the whole session.
Then I tried a less extreme version. Stopped vaping at 1pm, trained at 2pm. Not the same eight-hour gap, but still noticeably better than my usual walk-in-vaping-until-the-last-second approach. I've stuck with it since.
I'm not pretending this is science. It's one bloke in a gym in the north of England. But the study data on vasoconstriction supports it. Nicotine narrows your blood vessels and raises heart rate. Give it an hour to clear and those acute effects die down. You're still carrying any longer-term vascular changes, but you've taken the edge off.
Vaping vs Smoking for Fitness
Those Manchester Met numbers put vapers and smokers almost level on exercise capacity, and the headlines wrote themselves. But the full picture is different.
Public Health England's position, backed up again in 2024, is that vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking. The NHS still recommends it as a quit tool. That 95% covers the big stuff: cancer risk, respiratory disease, tar damage, carbon monoxide exposure. Exercise capacity is one slice of a much larger pie.
Smoking shoves carbon monoxide into your blood, where it fights oxygen for space on your red blood cells. It coats your lungs in tar. Vaping doesn't do either. But nicotine affects your blood vessels and heart rate no matter how you take it in, and that's what the exercise data is picking up.
If you're smoking now and thinking about switching, do it. I smoked from my teens and the difference when I switched was night and day. Morning cough gone within weeks. Breathing during cardio improved fast. Customers tell me similar stories all the time, people going from wheezing up stairs to running 5Ks within a few months.
If you don't smoke or vape, the Manchester Met research is one more reason to keep it that way.
Getting More Out of Your Training
Drop your nicotine strength. I'm on 10mg nic salts and I notice less impact than when I was on 20mg. Higher nicotine means stronger vasoconstriction. With a refillable pod kit and nic salt e-liquids you can step down at whatever pace works for you.
Put the vape down before you train. An hour minimum. More if you can manage it. I know it's hard. Trust me, I know.
Drink more water than you think you need. Propylene glycol in e-liquid absorbs moisture. You're already losing fluid through sweat. Double up.
Actually track it. Log your workouts. Compare sessions where you vaped right beforehand versus sessions with a gap. Your own data will tell you more than any study.
