Pre-workouts are supplements or combinations of supplements, often in powder form, that you take before a workout session in order to improve your performance and boost training adaptations. As fitness culture has exploded and grown by leaps and bounds, so have the available pre-workout products that promise to boost your workout performance. Some of the things that pre-workouts claim to do: Improve energy utilization Increase muscle protein synthesis Boost the anabolic response Provide fuel for muscles Improve performance But does pre-workout work? Let’s go through some of the most popular and common pre-workout ingredients and see if they actually help as advertised. Creatine Creatine helps us store more phosphocreatine in the muscles, which is one of the most potent fast-acting energy systems for high-intensity rapid movement like weight lifting. Taking creatine: Improves performance in every lift that’s been studied, particularly more complex multi-jointed compound lifts like squats and deadlifts. Improves strength and muscle gains, even in elderly. Improves sprint performance. Creatine works. It improves strength training performance, and it’s one of the few remaining supplements I still take on a daily basis. Creatine is especially important for vegans and vegetarians who aren’t getting any dietary creatine from meat and fish. L-citrulline L-citrulline is an amino acid that increases nitric oxide synthesis and improves endothelial function. In short, it improves blood flow. This enhanced blood flow to your heart and muscles: Improves performance during intense activity. Improves the “pump,” that feeling of your muscles being engorged with fluid and blood. Important subjective feedback that makes lifting more pelasurable. Arnold Schwarzenegger famously compared the feeling of the pump to the feeling of sex. Exercise scientists generally discount the importance of the pump, but I find it correlates strongly with a better workout and improved adaptations. L-citrulline works. Enhancing blood flow to all areas of your body is great for performance—in all areas, not just the weight room. Beta-alanine Beta-alanine is most effective in longer sessions. In bouts of exercise lasting under 60 seconds, it doesn’t seem to help. In bouts of exercise lasting over 60 seconds, beta-alanine begins to show beneficial effects on performance and capacity. You know beta-alanine is working when you get the “tingly” feeling in your muscles. It’s not necessarily a pleasant feeling, but it does mean you’re ready to start training and if you have a great session, you’ll learn to appreciate the tingles. Given the overall modest effects of beta-alanine in the literature, I’d wager that the tingles act as a placebo of sorts and provide a psychological signal to your muscles that they’re ready to work hard. That isn’t to discount them. Caffeine Caffeine might be the most effective pre-workout supplement in the world. It’s certainly the most ubiquitous. I wrote an entire post about using caffeine before a workout, but here’s the gist of what it can do for you as a pre workout: Enhances upper body strength in women. Improves the desire to workout. A funny illustration of just how effective a pre-workout caffeine … Continue reading “What Does Pre-Workout Do?”
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