This is the best pre-workout supplement for maximum gains

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:37 Caffeine

03:03 Combined pre-workouts

04:02 Caffeine-creatine interaction

06:23 My Online PT Course

07:19 Energy drinks

09:50 Beta-alanine

11:23 L-citrulline

13:01 Conclusion

Transcript:

What is the best pre-workout supplement for maximum gains? I’ll give it to you straight: The vast majority of supplements are nonsense. Garbage! Bunk! Hogwash! However, there are some that initially appear promising, and then usually later it turns out they are like vegan pastrami. It’s baloney, yeah? Still, there are some supplements that have at least a shred of scientific evidence behind them. So let’s look at these to determine what the best pre-workout is for your gains.

Number one on everyone’s list should arguably be caffeine. Caffeine is the GOAT. There are numerous studies and meta analyzes showing that caffeine supplementation before a workout can improve strength and strength endurance. So you can typically do at least some more repetitions and maybe lift a little bit more weight. However, most of this effect is mental. It’s psychological. Caffeine increases your motivation. It’s like a pharmaceutical kick up the butt to make you go all out in the gym. Research also finds that watching pornography before squatting increases maximal squatting strength, even in train lifters. So there’s a big psychological component to strength. And caffeine basically helps you get everything out of your willpower. However, it doesn’t do that much physically, and indeed, research finds that there is no dose response effect of caffeine.

I’ve previously done a video on caffeine, explaining in detail how most of the effect is psychological, and why you probably don’t want to use too much of it. There are some scenarios in which caffeine actually physiologically increases your neuromuscular ability to produce force, such as in the mornings when your core body temperature is not yet at the levels of the afternoons, and when you are sleep deprived, which for many people is a lot of the time. Outside of these circumstances, what caffeine does is mostly the same as pornography, is it gets you amped up and physically aroused, which can increase your ability to produce force via motivational and mental effects.

Regardless of why caffeine works, it does work. Still, there is a problem with using caffeine as a pre-workout supplement. Caffeine does not like to share. Caffeine seems to have negative interaction effects with many compounds that are found in popular pre-workout supplements and coffee. Two studies have found that caffeine, pure anhydrous caffeine like a pill or a capsule or a powder, is more effective to improve performance than the same amount of caffeine in coffee. Now, one study found the opposite, but that was probably because of the realization effect of the participants knowing that they were drinking coffee while they were not aware that they were consuming caffeine in the other condition.

A subsequent study found that if you have people drink decaf coffee and you then supplement anhydrous caffeine on top of that to equate for the same caffeine content as you would have had in the coffee, you actually get a greater performance benefit than if you only drink the coffee. So it seems that some of the compounds in coffee have a negative interaction effect with caffeine, causing the total performance enhancements to be at least a little bit greater when you consume just a caffeine than when you consume the caffeine in coffee form. Caffeine also seems to negatively interact with many of the other most popular pre-workout ingredients. One study found that consuming pure anhydrous caffeine was more effective for bench press performance than consuming the caffeine in a combination supplement with most of the most popular pre-workout ingredients, including L-Citrulline, Beta-Alanine, Arginine and Taurine.

Another study found that caffeine on its own improved leg extension strength, but supplementing the caffeine with arginine no longer improved leg extension strength. And a third similar study found that caffeine on its own, but not combined with sodium bicarbonate, improved strength training performance. Not all research finds negative interaction effects. In other research these multi ingredient supplements are just equally effective as caffeine, meaning they are essentially useless because they don’t do anything on top of the caffeine, but they don’t seem to have a negative interaction effect at least. Overall, though, the literature is clear that the common shotgun practice of just getting every ingredient into a pre-workout that might have a shred of scientific evidence behind it is not very effective.

Perhaps the most concerning negative interaction effect of caffeine is with creatine. Creatine is arguably the closest thing to a must have supplement that there is. It’s well established to improve muscle growth and strength development, at least in responders, and at least a little bit. If you’re not impressed with creatine there is really nothing else that is going to impress you. Problematically, if you are supplementing creatine and you’re using caffeine, you seem to have a negative interaction effect, at least according to some research.

Two studies have found that consuming caffeine during a creatine loading phase negated the positive effect of creatine on muscle strength. It’s unclear why exactly caffeine and creatine would have a negative interaction effect. Some hypotheses include a negative opposing effect on muscle relaxation times, and there was also some evidence indicating that if you combine both you get negative effects on the digestive system. Unfortunately, we have only one long term study that looked at the effect of supplementing creatine or creatine combined with caffeine on body composition. This study found more favorable effects of consuming simply creatine than consuming creatine on top of caffeine. For muscle thickness of the quads, this effect was actually statistically significant. The creatine only group had greater gains than the control group, and the group consuming creatine and caffeine. Overall trend for measurements of strength and body composition also favor to the group only consuming creatine, but the effect was not statistically significant for most of the other measures.

So, this study leaves us with some doubts, but the overall trend in the literature is that, yes, caffeine works and creatine works, and if you add them together they do work together, but they might work together a little bit less well than you would expect based on their added individual effects. One way you might be able to reduce the negative interaction effect between these supplements that you arguably both want to take is by not supplementing them together in the same meal. In fact, creatine should not be a pre-workout supplement because creatine doesn’t have acute effects. Creatine can improve strength and performance, but it does so by accumulating in your muscles and giving your muscles more stored creatine inside them, which they can essentially use as fuel. So you don’t need to have your creatine pre-workout. Caffeine should be consumed pre-workout because the effects are acute. However, creatine, according to some other research, is actually best consumed post-workout when insulin sensitivity is higher and creatine stores are a bit depleted so your muscles can soak up all the creatine more effectively. Plus, it separates the caffeine and the creatine, thereby potentially reducing a negative interaction effect between these two supplements.

Now at this point you might protest: “Hold up, hold up, hold up hold up… If caffeine has all of these negative interaction effects with all of these other compounds, why do I feel my energy drink so much more than if I just shot some caffeine?” There are a couple good reasons for that. In double blinded research we very consistently see that none of the other ingredients, B vitamins, taurine, tyrosine, whatever, in energy drinks have any additive or effect in isolation on cognitive or physical performance. Moreover, energy drinks that are decaffeinated don’t have any positive effect on performance. So all the other stuff in energy drinks in double blinded research does not have any effect on how you feel or how you physically operate. in practice, when you consume a drink like this,you do know what you’re consuming.

So there is a big placebo effect, and there’s quite some research that indeed the placebo effect is responsible for most of the effects of both caffeine and generally most of these types of energy drinks. That’s also why Red bull and the like are so adamant in their advertising on associating with extreme sports and all these cool things, and why for Coca-Cola it’s so important to be associated with feel good vibes and a good mood and everything like that. Because then when you consume their drink you mentally have this association and you start feeling like in the ads. This is in fact the basic premise of most advertising – creating positive associations.

For energy drinks specifically the effect is also bolstered by the carbonation. Some research actually finds that the carbonated effect, while on its own carbon dioxide is negative for how your brain functions, when you add it to an energy drink, it creates a feeling of freshness, and it feels like, you know, there’s something happening. It’s fizzy and tingling and that’s generally seen as a good thing. That’s also why shampoo foams and your toothpaste has menthol in it. These things don’t actually improve how your shampoo or your toothpaste work, but they make it seem like it’s doing something and if you just put some stuff in your hair and nothing happens, if you have ever used a non foaming shampoo, you know how that’s like – it doesn’t have the same effect. Energy drink also has citric acid which creates some acidity and further creates a feeling of freshness. So combined with the taste which should improve mood, if you consume something that you like very well, you can have a very positive overall experience and then you add the effects of the advertising and it’s not surprising that some people have a very large placebo effect when they consume energy drinks.

Moreover, it’s definitely worth noting that many supplements in independent lab research have been reported to have some 20% more caffeine than what’s on the label. You know which other popular pre-workout supplement seems very effective because it gives you the tingles but doesn’t actually do that much? Beta-alanine! Beta-alanine became very popular in evidence based fitness circles as a pre-workout supplement, because there’s reasonably robust evidence indicating that it improves strength endurance. It buffers against fatigue from the glycolytic system. So if you have to use a lot of carbohydrates, that creates a certain type of fatigue and beta-alanine essentially helps you buffer against that type of fatigue, thereby delaying the onset of fatigue and allowing you to have higher performance.

Unfortunately, most of that fatigue only happens for activities that last over a minute. So for strength training in a gym, most of the sets don’t last that long and the effect is marginal. Indeed, we have a 2022 meta analysis showing that beta-alanine supplementation does not improve long term body composition outcomes or strength developments in lifters. And a subsequent study confirmed this result. Even in athletes of strength endurance sports, where we theoretically expected the greatest benefits, the performance trends for greater gains in terms of body composition, strength or some measures of performance is marginal, with most studies finding no significant effects. While the overall trend is a little bit positive, I would say that even for athletes, beta-alanine is a maybe and for people that just go to the gym to lift weights the effect is near zero and probably not worth bothering with. Especially considering that some research has found a negative interaction effect with caffeine, which does improve performance somewhat reliably.

It’s also worth noting that the industry sponsored studies on beta-alanine typically find more favorable effects than the independent ones. Another highly popular pre-workout supplement is L-Citrulline. L-Citrulline became popular because it has some scientific evidence behind it to improve repetition performance and, for some people at least, it tends to give you better pumps in the gym. So it seems like it works and there’s research reporting that it at least does something. L-Citrulline is a nitric oxide booster. And of the NO boosters L-Citrulline is arguably the most effective and the most promising in current research. However, the effect on performance is quite marginal, usually amounting to something like 1 extra repetition across multiple sets. Moreover, just like with beta-alanine, it’s questionable if delaying fatigue is actually a good thing for your gains. Local neuromuscular fatigue can be positive in the sense that it lowers the recruitment threshold of high threshold motor units, thereby letting your type two fibers and a higher threshold motor units kick in earlier. So some degree of neuromuscular fatigue is not necessarily detrimental, possibly even beneficial, and what might happen with these compounds that delay fatigue is that you just have to perform more repetitions to get the same gains.

In the research we have, which isn’t much on L-Citrulline, we find no significant effects on long term muscle growth or body composition outcomes. Unfortunately, we have only one study directly looking at the effect of supplementing L-Citrulline and they only used a dosage of two gram per day, which is on the low end of what’s effective. However, if we extend the research to other nitric oxide boosting supplements like nitrites, we typically see no significant effects on long term body composition outcomes, or strength development, even though there might be some acute improvements in performance. So overall, I’m not very optimistic about nitric oxide boosters as performance enhancing supplements. At least not for strength training. The promise for strength endurance type outcomes is a bit greater.

In conclusion, the literature on pre-workout supplements is like literature on most supplements. While a lot of supplements came on the market and initially appeared promising in some research, mostly industry sponsored research, most of them turned out to be like vegan pastrami – baloney. The most evidence based supplement, at least for acutely improving performance, is arguably anhydrous caffeine, which means you consume the caffeine in pill or powder form, not in the form of coffee or an energy drink. It’s very cheap, but not very exciting. And I should note that even for caffeine supplementation, the long term studies on caffeine supplementation do not find significant improvements in strength gains or body composition outcomes. So while caffeine, anhydrous caffeine in particular, can improve short term performance, it doesn’t really seem to translate into greater long term gains. This is likely due to the development of tolerance and the effect just being too small to make an impact on your long term gains. However, the upside of the literature is that most of the effects appear to be placebo, and in practice we are not consuming a placebo controled drink.

So I would just lean into the placebo effect and consume whatever you prefer. If you like drinking energy drink, then have energy drink. If you like your coffee, have your coffee, and if you love the pumps that you get from L-Citruline then sure, keep supplementing that. Just don’t expect any miracles from it in the long term. Everyone wants the magic pill, but it just doesn’t exist. If you enjoyed the no nonsense disillusionment of this video, then check out my videos on caffeine and what to eat before your workouts. Also, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.