Performance Nutrition

Most Pre-Workouts Are Just Expensive Caffeine

A review of the 100 best-selling formulas found the average product hides nearly half its ingredients inside proprietary blends — and underdoses most of the ones it does disclose. Here is what actually belongs in the scoop, and the one benefit nobody markets.

A patient came in last year with a resting heart rate eleven beats higher than eighteen months earlier and a blood pressure that had walked from 118/74 to 138/88. Fifty-two, training four days a week. Nothing in his panel explained it.

Then I asked what he drank before the gym. Sixteen ounces of an energy drink on the way there, a scoop out of a tub with a cartoon on the lid once he arrived, and on bad-sleep days both plus coffee. Two years of this, and he had never once filed it under "things I take." It lived in his head next to Gatorade.

It is not next to Gatorade. It is a stimulant dose stacked on a stimulant dose, five days a week, on an empty stomach, right before he raised his heart rate on purpose. And almost nothing else in that tub was doing meaningful work.

That is the real problem here, and it is not the one people argue about online. The problem is not that pre-workouts contain stimulants. It is that in most of them, the stimulant is the only ingredient present at an amount that does anything.

What the labels actually say

In 2019 a group led by Andrew Jagim at Mayo Clinic Health System did something unglamorous and enormously useful: they pulled the 100 best-selling pre-workouts, read every Supplement Facts panel, and compared each dose against the published research.¹

The average product listed 18.4 ingredients, with roughly 8 buried inside a proprietary blend at undisclosed amounts — 44.3% of all ingredients across the sample. On nearly half of what you are drinking, the label gives you a blend total and nothing else.

The disclosed amounts were not much better. Beta-alanine: in 87% of products, averaging 2.0 grams against a studied 3.2. Citrulline: 71%, averaging 4.0 grams against 6 to 8. Creatine: 49%, averaging 2.1 grams against a 3-to-5-gram maintenance dose. Caffeine: 86%, averaging 254 milligrams — and caffeine, unlike the others, was right where it needed to be.

Read that pattern again, because it is the entire business model. The one ingredient you can feel in twenty minutes is dosed correctly. The ones that cost real formulation money and work quietly over weeks come in at half to two-thirds of what the research used. The authors said it plainly: the average amounts did not align with clinically supported dosing.

You are not imagining that your pre-workout works. You are feeling 250 milligrams of caffeine.

What a pre-workout is supposed to do

Strip the marketing off and there are four systems worth paying for. A formula that ignores three and hammers one is not a pre-workout. It is a caffeine delivery vehicle with a flavor package.

Neural drive

Adenosine accumulates in your brain across the day and makes you want to sit down. Stimulants occupy the receptor it binds to, so the fatigue signal never lands. Real, useful, and the part every product gets right — often too right.

Blood flow

Nitric oxide relaxes the smooth muscle in your vessel walls, widening the vessel and improving oxygen and nutrient delivery into working tissue. More in, byproducts out faster. That is what people mean when a pump holds between sets instead of fading.

Buffering — the one nobody markets

This is the mechanism I care about most, and the hardest to sell, because you cannot feel it on day one. The burn that shuts down set four is rising acidity inside the muscle fiber. Carnosine is your primary buffer against it, and beta-alanine is the rate-limiting building block for carnosine.

Think of carnosine as the size of the sponge inside the muscle. A bigger sponge does not make you stronger on any single rep — it moves the point where the burn shuts you down. Two more reps before failure. A rest period that still feels long enough at forty-five seconds. One more set at the end of a session you would normally have cut short. Training volume is a primary driver of adaptation, so a supplement that adds volume at the same perceived effort compounds on you every week, silently.

Conduction

A nerve fires and a muscle contracts because sodium, potassium and magnesium move across membranes. You sweat those out. Most pre-workouts carry a token pinch for the label, or nothing, because minerals cost money and add nothing to the front of the tub.

The other half of the problem

Now read the bottom of the panel, where the ingredients nobody markets live.

Sucralose and acesulfame potassium are there because they are cheap and cover a multitude of formulation sins. In 2022 a randomized controlled trial of 120 healthy adults, published in Cell, gave participants saccharin, sucralose, aspartame or stevia for two weeks at doses below the acceptable daily intake. All four altered the gut and oral microbiome. Sucralose and saccharin specifically impaired glycemic responses, and the effect transferred when germ-free mice were colonized with the participants' microbiomes.²

And here I have to be fair to my own side: stevia altered the microbiome in that trial too. It did not impair glucose tolerance, which is the outcome I care about clinically — but anyone telling you natural sweeteners are biologically inert has not read the paper. I chose allulose and Reb-M because the glycemic signal is cleaner, not because they are nothing.

On dyes, the honest version is more interesting than the viral one. In January 2025 the FDA revoked authorization for FD&C Red No. 3 in food, dietary supplements and ingested drugs.³ That sounds like a smoking gun. It is not, quite. The agency acted under the Delaney Clause, a 1960 provision compelling revocation of any color additive shown to cause cancer in animals at any exposure — and in the same order the FDA stated that the mechanism producing thyroid tumors in male rats is not operative in humans at consumed levels.

So no, a red pre-workout is not giving anyone cancer, and I will not tell you it is. My objection is simpler: dyes exist to make the tub look exciting on a shelf and contribute nothing to your training. In something you drink five days a week for years, "contributes nothing" should be disqualifying on its own.

The convenience-store version is a different problem

Energy drinks deserve their own paragraph, because a lot of men over forty use them as a de facto pre-workout without knowing what the cardiology literature says.

In a randomized, double-masked, placebo-controlled crossover trial in the Journal of the American Heart Association, 34 healthy young adults drank 32 ounces of a commercial energy drink or placebo. The drinks significantly prolonged the QTc interval — how long the heart's electrical system takes to reset between beats — and significantly raised both peripheral and central blood pressure.⁴

Now let me correct the number you have probably seen quoted. The headline figure is a 17.9 to 19.6 millisecond QTc prolongation. Almost nobody reports that the placebo arm moved 11.9 milliseconds. The drink-attributable difference is roughly 6 to 8 milliseconds, not 18 — still real, still significant, but not the number in the meme, and I am not going to use the number in the meme.

The genuinely unsettling finding came from a companion trial by the same group. Against a caffeine-matched control containing the identical 320 milligrams of caffeine, the energy drink's QTc change at two hours still differed significantly.⁵ Whatever drives the repolarization effect, caffeine alone does not account for it. And a healthy 22-year-old is not a 54-year-old with hypertension, a family history, or an undiagnosed channelopathy — who is drinking one on the way to the gym and then raising his heart rate for an hour.

Paraxanthine, and where its case is weaker than the marketing

When your liver metabolizes caffeine, roughly 70 to 80% becomes paraxanthine, which accounts for much of the alertness you attribute to the coffee.⁶ Starting there skips the conversion step: faster onset, more predictable clearance, less interference with sleep.

That is the case for it. Now the complication, which runs against my own product.

A randomized crossover trial published in 2026 gave 14 male university rowers 200 mg of paraxanthine, 200 mg of caffeine, both, or placebo before a 2,000-metre time trial. The combination beat placebo. Paraxanthine alone showed no clear standalone performance benefit at that dose. Where it separated cleanly was sleep: caffeine conditions produced worse subjective sleep quality, paraxanthine alone produced better.⁷ Fourteen young rowers is a small sample and subjective sleep is a soft outcome, so do not over-read it either way.

The fair summary is that paraxanthine's best-supported advantages are cognitive performance^8,9 and tolerability — not raw ergogenic power. And a 1995 crossover trial found paraxanthine and caffeine raised diastolic blood pressure, plasma epinephrine and free fatty acids to a similar degree at matched doses.⁶ It is a cleaner stimulant. It is not a free one, and anyone selling it as a stimulant with no cardiovascular signature is overselling it.

What costs nothing, and comes first

A supplement layered onto a broken foundation buys a smaller effect than the same money spent elsewhere. None of this costs a dollar, and all of it outperforms any scoop.

1. Audit the tub you already ownTurn it around and add up the disclosed doses against Figure 1. If half the panel is a proprietary blend, you do not know what you are drinking.
2. Reset your stimulant toleranceTen to fourteen days at a sharply reduced intake. Unpleasant for four days. On the other side, 100 mg does what 300 mg was doing.
3. Fix the sleep before you medicate the fatigueSeven to nine hours, consistent wake time, no stimulant inside eight hours of bed. Training on six hours and covering it with caffeine is borrowing against tomorrow and calling it discipline.
4. Eat something real ninety minutes outProtein and carbohydrate. Most people who call a pre-workout life-changing were training fasted and underfed. What they discovered was food.
5. Salt your water and drink it earlyStart an hour before, not at the door. A quarter teaspoon of sea salt does more for a flat, crampy session than any pump ingredient sold.
6. Shorten your rest periodsIf you want more work in the same hour, the free lever is a stopwatch. Ninety seconds instead of three minutes will do more for training density than any scoop.

You should be able to act on all six and buy nothing. Do them and still want a pre-workout, and the supplement is then doing what a supplement is for — multiplying something you have already built, rather than substituting for something you have not.

Where a formula earns its place

I looked for a long time for one I would hand a patient without a caveat. The effective ones were stimulant bombs. The clean ones were underdosed. Nearly all were sweetened with something I spend clinic hours telling people to avoid. Eventually it became less work to build one than to keep apologizing for the alternatives.

Peak Performance Pre-Workout is what came out of that. Every active is printed on the panel with its milligram amount. At the full two-scoop dose: 6,000 mg citrulline malate, 3,200 mg beta-alanine, 5,000 mg of a taurine–malic acid complex, 200 mg paraxanthine, and a real electrolyte base — 200 mg sodium, 250 mg chloride, 100 mg magnesium, 130 mg potassium. Sweetened with allulose and Reb-M stevia. No sucralose, no acesulfame potassium, no dyes, no artificial flavor package, no maltodextrin or dextrose padding the scoop.

I take it. I am fifty-six, I have trained since I was sixteen, and I am still doing Ironman distance, still competing in Master's Men's Physique, still racing stand-up jet skis and still riding a Ducati on track. Those last two matter here: on a race ski or a track bike, a stimulant that gives you jitter and a racing pulse is not an inconvenience, it is a hazard. What I need now is clean attention and a fatigue point that arrives later — not a chemical adrenaline surge. That is a different product than the one I would have bought at thirty.

What I did not expect is how consistently the feedback lands on the same thing. It is not the initial hit. It is the back half of the session — the last two sets people would normally have talked themselves out of, and the fact that the day does not fall apart at three in the afternoon. That is exactly what the buffering literature predicts, and exactly the benefit nobody puts on the front of a tub, because you cannot feel it on day one.

What people are actually reporting

Read those and you will notice what is missing as much as what is there. Nobody is describing a rush. They are describing the absence of the things a stimulant load normally costs you — the jitter, the crash, the argument with your sleep that night — alongside a fatigue point that arrived later than usual. That is the profile I was formulating toward, and it is the reason I will keep telling you to start at one scoop.

What it will not do, stated plainly

Every product page in this industry tells you what a formula does. Almost none tell you where it stops.

The effect sizes are modest, and I will not inflate them. The most-cited citrulline trial reported 52.9% more repetitions — but that describes the eighth and final set of a deliberately exhausting bench press protocol in 41 men, not a whole session.¹⁰ Pool eight trials across 137 participants and the honest answer is about three extra reps to failure, a 6.4% improvement.¹¹ Beta-alanine's pooled effect size across 40 studies and 1,461 participants was 0.18 — small — landing almost entirely on exercise capacity rather than time-trial performance, with no benefit under 60 seconds.^12,13 Three extra reps is worth having. It is not a transformation.

The beet root in our formula is not a nitrate dose. Three hundred milligrams of beet root powder contributes trivial dietary nitrate next to the juice concentrates used in that literature. The citrulline is doing the nitric oxide work here. If anyone — including us — implies otherwise, that is marketing, not pharmacology.

There is silica on our ingredient line. A trace anticaking agent that keeps the powder from turning into a brick in a humid garage. I have seen "no flow agents" claimed by brands whose own labels say otherwise, and I am not joining them. No fillers, no binders, no bulking agents, no artificial sweeteners, colors or preservatives — all true. "No flow agents" would not be.

It contains no creatine, on purpose. The industry average of 2.1 grams is roughly half a maintenance dose and functionally a label decoration. Rather than dust it in, we left it out and sell Pure Creatine separately at a real dose. Different mechanism, not timing-dependent, no overlap. Two products, two jobs.

It is not a full electrolyte replacement for long sessions. The minerals are dosed to do something rather than to appear on a label, but 200 mg of sodium is a training-window dose, not a two-hour-brick-in-August dose. For endurance work or heavy sweat losses, Catalyst Electrolyte is the right tool, and the two stack cleanly.

It is still a stimulant. Start at one scoop and stay there for several sessions. Assess how you feel during training and how you sleep that night before going near two. If you take cardiovascular medication, talk to your prescribing physician first — not to a product page, and not to me on the internet.

Back to the patient

We did not put him on a supplement. We took the energy drink out, reset his stimulant tolerance over two weeks, moved his last caffeine to before noon, and had him eat before training instead of arriving fasted and wired. His resting heart rate came down seven beats in six weeks. His blood pressure followed. He was mildly annoyed that the answer was that boring.

Two months later he asked what I take before I train. I told him, and he started taking it — with the tolerance reset already done and the sleep already fixed. That is the right order. A formula multiplies a foundation. It does not build one, and any company telling you otherwise is selling you the thing instead of the outcome.

You are fifty-two, or fifty-six, or sixty-one. The first half is scored. What is left is how much quality work you can put in during the second — and whether you can still do it in your seventies. The buffering, the blood flow, the clean attention: none of it is about how you feel in the next twenty minutes. It is about the last two sets you stop skipping, multiplied by every week between now and then.

The second half is where this game is decided. Show up for it with something in the shaker that has a job.