The Best Pre-Workout Supplements

Spoiler alert: The best pre-workout supplement isn’t a supplement at all. There’s no powder or tablet that beats a sustained commitment to living right and not indulging in too much junk food, says Lindsay Langford, sports dietitian for SVSP. Langford and the other sports nutritionists we talked to promoted a “food-first approach” with a focus on fruits, vegetables, and pre-workout meals rich in carbohydrates.

Still, she claims that supplements can make a difference when combined with good eating habits. “I do feel that when you’re working with athletes especially, a lot of time there’s room for that extra 1 or 2 percent that we can get from a supplement,” she says.

And it’s not just the pros who benefit. Rudy Mawer, an elite sports nutritionist and researcher who has worked with everyone from NBA players to Olympic gold medalists, often recommends supplements to recreational athletes. “There’s still a lot of areas they could get bigger improvements on, such as being on a better training plan or a better diet or sleeping more,” he admits. “But while I’m working on those aspects with a client, I’ll still put them on a pre-workout supplement because it’s a very easy habit — you just put a scoop in water and drink it before you train.”

To find the best pre-workout supplements, we started with more than 300 products including powders, tablets, and drinks targeting everyone from professional bodybuilders to endurance marathoners. Certain supplements focus on supercharging anaerobic strength with proven ingredients such as creatine and beta-alanine, while others boost endurance with caffeine and citrulline. We wanted our top picks to do just enough of both.

Thanks to the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), pre-workout supplements don’t have to be approved by the FDA prior to marketing. Many companies in the supplement industry use this controversial piece of legislation to their advantage, selling products that may contain harmful, untested, or just plain ineffective ingredients. “Don’t believe all the claims that are made from supplements,” confirmed Simin Levinson, a clinical assistant professor in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. “Oftentimes they make up a lot of false promises that are not backed by legitimate science.”

This doesn’t mean that all pre-workout supplements are inherently unhealthy; it just means that we have to pay special attention to the ingredients and dosages of each product. A supplement you buy down at the local GNC won’t contain banned or regulated substances such as HGH or synthetic testosterone, but its formula may contain other unregulated ingredients that set off alarms among nutrition experts. Levinson warns that consumers with no prior knowledge of what to look out for are most at risk: “The tricky part is that when you’re reading supplement labels, it’s so hard to decipher what the chemical names of some of these substances actually are.”

None of the formulas we considered contain any form of steroids or banned substances. But we also flagged other ingredients that may cause negative side effects or simply haven’t been tested thoroughly enough. One such ingredient is bitter orange, an herb made from the bitter orange tree and found in many supplements. It contains synephrine and octopamine — two chemicals linked to high blood pressure, strokes, and heart attacks — and so we cut it along with any formulas containing synephrine or octopamine on their own.

We also cut ingredients that may counteract a supplement’s other effective ingredients. Agmatine sulfate, for example, may interfere with the nitric oxide boosters citrulline and arginine, so it had to go. Other ingredients that were a no-go: yohimbe (a powerful stimulant linked to panic attacks) and acacia rigidula (an untested stimulant that nonetheless still crops up in some dietary supplements).

“A lot of supplement companies will try to hide under proprietary blends because they don’t have to list the dose,” explains Mawer. “It’s very funny, because people think that a proprietary blend means there’s some magic formula the company has made. But there are no magic blends or formulas. People like me are the ones researching this stuff, and we publish our studies online for everyone to access.”

The right ingredients in the right dose is what works, and no special combination is going to make it work any better.

When a company chooses not to list its product’s ingredients properly, consumers have no way of knowing the exact doses they’re taking. It’s a surprisingly common practice, but that doesn’t stop it from being as shady as a bodybuilder’s shadow. “In my eyes, if a supplement company is doing everything right and using the right dose, why would they not promote that?” asks Mawer. Marie Spano, a sports nutritionist for the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, agrees: “Proprietary blends aren’t necessarily bad, but it’s hard to tell if they have efficacious amounts of certain ingredients since they’re all grouped together. Why would they not list every ingredient to show people that they’re using all the right dosages?”

Of course, the companies that do list their doses properly run into a different problem: Sometimes, those doses are just too high. This can be an issue when it comes to caffeine, a naturally occurring and extremely well-researched stimulant that 85 percent of the U.S. population consumes on a daily basis.

Caffeine gets a bad rap because it can be mildly addictive and even lethal in the kind of pure, massive quantities that almost never appear in pre-workout supplements, but Mawer swears by it. “I’m a big advocate of caffeine,” he says. “For an endurance athlete it’s probably the number one supplement based on the research.”

“Caffeine is perhaps the most studied ergogenic aid,” agrees Spano, and it can be a powerful pre-workout stimulant when consumed in safe doses. Levinson notes that caffeine’s benefits even extend beyond the pre-workout period. “It can help provide additional mental focus and clarity, which is also one of the reasons why business executives rely on it before meetings,” she explains.

Of course, how much caffeine you should take — or even if you should take it at all — varies greatly among individuals. “Everyone reacts to caffeine differently,” explains Levinson, who notes that some people get jittery or anxious while others really benefit from the stimulant.

So how much caffeine is too much? One review carried out by the government regulatory agency Health Canada considered more than 200 studies and concluded that a daily dose of 400 mg is perfectly safe for most adults. (According to the FDA, the average American consumes approximately 300 mg a day). Other experts seem to agree that 400–450 mg a day won’t result in any adverse side effects.

Via Mayo Clinic. Adapted from Journal of Food Science, 2010; Pediatrics, 2011; USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 26; Journal of Analytical Toxicology, 2006; Starbucks, 2014; Food and Chemical Toxicology, 2014; Keurig, 2014

If a daily cup of coffee or tea is already part of your routine, taking a pre-workout supplement like Legion Pulse (350 mg of anhydrous caffeine) or iSatori ISYMFS Pre-Workout Amplifier (a whopping 425 mg of caffeine in various forms) already puts you over that threshold. Add the occasional chocolate bar or energy drink, and we start to get into dangerous territory. (Too much caffeine may result in trouble breathing, hallucinations, an irregular heartbeat, and even convulsions — all of which might make it just a little hard to focus on working out.) That’s why we cut any supplements with more than 200 mg of caffeine, an amount that our experts all agreed is safe and moderate.

Those with a higher tolerance might want to consider a higher dosage, but they might also be able to get that extra kick from the beverages they’re already drinking on a regular basis. The important thing is to plan your diet and try not to go over that daily 400 mg mark — especially if you aren’t already habituated to caffeine. If you suspect that your body might be able to tolerate a higher dosage, consult with your doctor first.

Back when we reviewed protein powders, we asked over 4,000 registered dieticians for their opinions and their response was unanimous: Avoid artificial sweeteners and colorings whenever possible. The same holds true for pre-workout supplements, many of which come loaded with artificial sweeteners your body can’t digest or convert into useful energy.

Though most of the studies available on artificial sweeteners and colors don’t provide conclusive results, there’s enough of a controversy surrounding them that we think they’re best to avoid. Here’s a brief list of the concerning ingredients (and their side effects) we found in the pre-workout supplements we researched:

Color

Red 40 — has been proven to promote hyperactivity in children, immune system tumors in mice, and the US Department of Health and Human Services says it’s “reasonably anticipated” to be a human carcinogen.

Blue 1 & 2 — have been linked to hyperactivity and cancer in a wide variety of artificial food coloring tests.

Artificial Sweetener

Acesulfame Potassium (Sunett) — Methylene chloride (a known carcinogen) is a by-product of the acesulfame potassium (ACK) creation process. However, the FDA states it does not expect methylene chloride to remain in the finished product due to: “(1) The multi-step purification process used in the manufacture of ACK and (2) the volatility of methylene chloride.”

Splenda (Sucralose) — Splenda is the trade name for sucralose. Research notes that sucralose is made by adding more chlorine atoms to a sugar molecule. Notable side effects include bloating, gas, and diarrhea

Sugar Alcohol

Erythritol — If consumed in high amounts, erythritol can cause cramps, nausea, flatulence and diarrhea. While it is considered to be one of the safer sugar substitutes, people who overindulge on protein powder will exceed safe limits.

Glycerin (Glycerol) — side effects include: diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and headache.

Inositol — possible side effects include diarrhea, dizziness, flushing, itching, loss of appetite, nausea, upset stomach, and vomiting could occur if it is ingested in high quantities.

Polydextrose — has the capacity to cause abdominal cramping, bloating, and excessive gas.

Xylitol — gas, bloating, and diarrhea can occur with high dosages.

It’s important to note that these ingredients don’t just show up in supplements — they also appear in many of the snacks and candies nutritionists say to avoid. So if you’re going to make a point of staying away from artificial colors and sweeteners in your supplements, make sure you’re doing the same with everything you put in your body. “If you’re eating pizza and ice cream and candy every day, that’s going to be 20 million times worse for you than the artificial sweetener in a pre-workout supplement,” says Mawer. We’re not sure if 20 million is the exact figure, but you get the point.

After cutting out all the junk and getting rid of products that might make users a little too jittery, we were finally able to arrive at our top picks. Of the remaining contenders, we favored those with the highest quantity of effective ingredients and the lowest quantity of superfluous nonsense. If there’s one word to describe our top picks, it’s “well-rounded.” These supplements don’t just rely on one ingredient to get the job done; they pull in everything from creatine to citrulline and round out the package with a nice kick of caffeine (or a milder stimulant like yerba mate).