Pre-Workout, Blue Raspberry

Description

A pre-workout in blue raspberry with citrulline, beta-alanine and caffeine listed individually in milligrams, and no proprietary blend anywhere on the panel. That last point is the product. Most of this category sells a combined blend weight, and a pre-workout quoting 6 grams of a matrix could be 5.9 grams of the cheapest ingredient with a dusting of everything else on top. Each amount here is printed on its own.

The numbers on the tub

The doses the research actually used

Citrulline malate was studied at 6 to 8 grams, taken about an hour before exercise, with endpoints including repetitions to failure and subjective soreness ratings. Beta-alanine was studied at 3.2 grams a day over four to ten weeks, with muscle carnosine measured by magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Caffeine was studied between 3 and 6 mg per kilogram of body weight, which lands most adults between 200 and 400 mg.

Those are the amounts administered and the measurements taken in the published work, not claims about this tub. They are printed because they are the yardstick: a pre-workout holding 1 gram of citrulline is one sixth of the studied amount, and no amount of flavouring changes that arithmetic. Our note on what a blend is allowed to leave out explains why so many labels avoid the comparison.

Why a full dose pre-workout has to be a big scoop

Add 6 grams of citrulline to 3.2 grams of beta-alanine and you are already past 9 grams before flavouring, acid, sweetener and anything else. That is why honest products in this category have large scoops and why a 7 gram scoop promising clinical doses of several actives cannot be doing what it says. Physics gets a vote.

Counting the caffeine properly

Caffeine content is in bold on every pre-workout here, with the serving count, so a whole tub’s load is obvious before you buy it. Stack a pre-workout on top of two coffees and the daily total moves well past where most people think they are. Half life in most adults is around five hours, which is the number that matters if you train in the evening.

About the tingling

Any pre-workout containing beta-alanine causes paraesthesia, a pins and needles feeling across the face and hands, and it is dose related and recorded in the literature as transient and harmless. It arrives about twenty minutes in. Nobody warns first time buyers clearly enough, so it is on this page rather than in a review.

What is not in it

No undisclosed stimulant blend and no ingredient present at a token amount to decorate the label. If something is in the tub it has a number beside it. The performance page applies that rule across creatine, electrolytes and the rest of the shelf.

Mixing and timing

It dissolves in 300 to 400 ml of cold water and it is sour, since citrulline and beta-alanine both are. The trial protocols dosed between 30 and 60 minutes before exercise. That is a description of how studies were run rather than an instruction from us.

Testing

Every active in this pre-workout is listed at its own weight, so the citrulline can be checked against the 6 to 8 grams the trials used instead of being taken on trust inside a blend total.

Every lot of this pre-workout is identity tested and assayed by a laboratory with no ownership link to this business, each active measured separately, with heavy metals and microbials included. A caffeine figure that is only roughly right is not acceptable, so an out of specification lot is withdrawn and its certificate stays public. For the dose ranges studied, the NIH fact sheet on supplements for exercise and athletic performance is free and detailed, and your lot report is linked above.