What the ingredients do, how much do you need, and which ones are worth your money.
Pre workout containers are deliberately confusing. Long lists of ingredients (mostly either under-dosed or completely pointless) accompanied by over-hyped claims (pre workouts are not regulated by the FDA, so they don’t have to be effective, they just aren’t allowed to kill you). While most pre workouts contain dozens of ingredients, very few of these have been reliably shown to be consistently effective when used acutely before training.
Two of the most important roles of a pre workout are to provide a short term burst of energy and to improve muscle pumps. Individuals vary in their preferences here, and it is not possible to pick one pre workout that will fully optimise either goal because the active ingredients responsible for both actions should ideally be consumed at different times. Caffeine can also cause transient vasoconstriction, which directly conflicts with the actions of the ingredients intended to improve muscle pumps (which act via vasodilation, or widening of the blood vessels.
Caffeine is responsible for most of the ‘buzz’ you get from your pre workout, despite what each individual company may claim about the revolutionary properties of their “stimulant matrix”. One notable exception here is DMAA, though this has now been banned because it was a little high on the ‘lethal side effects’ scale. Speaking from personal experience, I can attest that this was extremely effective, but did make you feel like a recovering crack head for several hours after use.
Recommendations:
I would recommend a moderate dose of caffeine (3-5mg/ kg of body weight), which for an 80kg man works out at up to 400mg per serving, and should be ingested 30 - 60 mins prior to training. If you are new to pre workout use, have a low caffeine tolerance, train in the evenings or would simply like to prioritise muscle pumps, anywhere from 0-3mg/ kg of body weight would be ideal (up to 240mg for our 80kg example). Tolerance to caffeine builds quite quickly, and it is very easy to fall into the habit of slowly upping your dose overtime. L-theanine is often included as it works synergistically with caffeine to improve focus, and may mitigate some of the side effects of Caffeine. Taking more than a moderate dose has not been shown to significantly improve the benefits of caffeine (reduced perception of pain, greater time to exhaustion etc), but it does drastically increase the likelihood of negative side effects (heart palpitations, feeling jittery, sleeplessness etc), so I would recommend avoiding upping your dosage over time, and instead take regular breaks from stimulant use in order to reduce your tolerance. I personally do not take pre workout during my deload weeks, which has the added benefit of preventing me from pushing too hard in these deliberately lower intensity sessions.
The second genuinely effective ingredient to look for in your pre workout is Citrulline Malate. This is the major player when it comes to facilitating vasodilation (and therefore muscle pumps) which it does by converting to Arginine and then to Nitric Oxide. One issue here is that Citrulline Malate is very expensive, and therefore tends to be heavily under-dosed. The effective dose for this ingredient is around 6-8g, and I have only found a few pre workouts that meet this threshold in over a decade of using them. The second issue is that it takes around an hour for Citrulline Malate to convert to Nitric Oxide, so banging it down your neck 5 minutes before your first set is unlikely to provide much benefit at all. I get around these issues by having a large serving of watermelon (500g +) an hour or so before training, which contains a small serving of naturally occurring Citrulline Malate. Nitrosigine has also been shown to be effective at increasing Nitric Oxide levels and therefore vasodilation, and it only requires a dose of around 1.5g taken 15-30 mins prior to training.
Most pre workouts also contain Creatine and Beta Alanine, which have both been consistently proven to be effective supplements when used correctly. Creatine is one of very few legal supplements consistently shown to improve strength levels, and it also improves cellular hydration amongst multiple other benefits. Beta Alanine causes increases in muscle Carnosine concentration, which acts as a buffer to Lactic acid, and can therefore increase high intensity exercise performance. That being said, they both require consistent supplementation on a daily basis, and offer no acute benefit (it takes days of consistent supplementation for serum levels to reach quantities high enough to provide any measurable benefit). That being said, if you train 5 days a week or more, a dose of more than 2.5g of each could eventually accumulate enough to provide some level of benefit.
To get the most out of Creatine monohydrate it is best taken daily at a dose of 5g, and Beta Alanine requires a daily dose of up to 6g. It is worth noting that while Beta Alanine provides no immediate benefit, it does cause that tingling effect that you’ve almost certainly felt before (paraesthesia). This provides a placebo effect, because it makes it feel like your pre workout is “doing something”, but the immediate onset of this sensation can encourage people to take their pre workout immediately prior to training, which means that the genuinely effective ingredients do not have time to kick in.
Other Supplements:
There are of course many other supplements that offer marginal benefits, including nootropics, and ingredients that improve the absorption of other compounds, such as bioperine, but the majority of the noticeable benefits will come from adequate doses of Caffeine and Citrulline Malate. It is worth noting that pre workouts have been so far shown to have no negative effects on cardiovascular health, but they are definitely not good for your teeth. If you don’t want to erode your teeth, you would actually get more benefit from individual supplementation of Caffeine, Citrulline Malate, Creatine Monohydrate and Beta Alanine, though the dosing protocols are far more fiddly than the easy compromise of a single serving of pre workout.
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