Today we’re going to take a dive into a stimulating new research on the matter of
preworkout supplements.
That thing that gives you that extra jolt and jitter right before you finish your 18th
set of calf raises.
Let’s be honest though, those calves still ain’t growin.
In this video, we’re going to dive into a new study that looked into the most stimulating
preworkout ingredient of all, and whether if it actually makes a difference in your
heavy lifting.
With the goal of performing at your best, a preworkout provides an assorted concoction
of supposed helpful ingredients that can turn that 1-rep squat max you hit two days ago
into a 5-rep max… using only one leg.
Or, at least somewhere in between.
But as many unpronounceable ingredients a preworkout might have, it is commonly believed
that the ergogenic, performance enhancing effects of a preworkout is largely, but not
entirely, attributed to one very common ingredient.
Quite a play by the preworkout industry considering the industry raked in a measly fifteen billion
dollars last year.
That common performance-enhancing ingredient is… caffeine, the most widely used stimulant
in the world.
As we know, caffeine has quite stimulating properties, promoting wakefulness, increased
energy, and reducing fatigue.
Prior research also showed that this energetic entity could indeed affect our physical performance.
However, in this new study, the findings might just challenge how meaningful caffeine truly
is when it comes to heavy lifting.
Is it possible that caffeine doesn’t play much of a role at all, or maybe zero-caffeine
preworkouts can be just as effective?
In this new study, 24 college-aged, resistance trained participants with an even split of
men and women, completed three different training sessions.
For those sessions, using a randomized crossover design, each participant either consumed a
multi-ingredient preworkout beverage containing 350 milligrams of caffeine, an identical multi-ingredient
preworkout beverage that contained no caffeine, and a placebo punch-flavored beverage.
The beverages were all placed into opaque containers that are double-blinded to the
researchers and the subjects.
In other words, neither subjects nor researchers knew which beverages the subjects were consuming
for any given day.
Multiple exercise tests were performed, aiming for outcomes in upper and lower body strength
and endurance.
Additionally, they tested isometric strength and rate of force development in the squat.
Good measurements overall to see exactly if and where caffeine might make a difference.
Let’s now move to the results.
In both upper body strength and endurance tests via the bench press, the caffeinated
preworkout not only did not fare better than the non-caffeine preworkout, it also had no
significant benefit over the placebo beverage.
The same goes for lower body strength and endurance via the leg press, where again no
improvements were observed with taking either caffeinated or non-caffeinated preworkouts.
Surprisingly, for the leg press 1 rep max, the non-caffeine preworkout beverage actually
fared worse than the placebo.
For the squat measures, both preworkouts do seem to increase performance in the isometric
strength test and initial rate of force development.
However, in the case of initial rate of force development, the non-caffeinated preworkout
in this case did better than the caffeinated beverage.
To summarize it all, for the most part, caffeine or not, preworkouts did not have much of any
effect when it comes to lifting.
Especially for the common lifts like the bench and leg presses, improvements simply were
not there.
That’s kinda surprising.
Previous recent research and analyses have consistently found at least some performance
benefits with caffeine, especially for lower body performance.
That might explain the improvements for isometric squat strength we saw in this study, but then,
the non-caffeinated preworkout improved that as well.
So, it’s definitely interesting.
There might be an off chance that caffeine’s effects might be overstated.
Or… maybe not when you consider some caveats to this study.
The first caveat is caffeine tolerance.
In my opinion, the researchers did the right thing by choosing participants that are habitual
caffeine users, as that’s probably the most representative population for those that are
interested in taking preworkouts in the first place.
Young, frequently exercises, and jacked up on Starbucks.
However, tolerance is still a big question mark.
Although we do not have sufficient evidence on caffeine tolerance and its effect on physical
performance, it’s not uncommon to hear people say that it’s harder to feel the effects
of caffeine after taking a lot of it for a long time.
Also, the researchers measured subjective feelings.
And from that, they found that subjects did feel more energetic, less fatigued, and more
focused when consuming the caffeinated preworkout.
Although it did not influence performance, we have to consider these subjective changes.
Keep in mind that these tests were done in a lab setting with controlled times, prep,
and warmups.
In a normal setting, people will be in a more comfortable, familiar environment, working
out at a time they feel best, and have their own personal warmup routines.
Pair these with those feelings of more energy, more focus, and less fatigue, it can very
well make a difference to your training.
And finally, don’t ever forget that this is only one study.
As good as the info might be, our decisions should never be made based on single findings,
but rather through personal experience and findings with abundant evidence.
Altogether, I think the findings here do make sense based on the environment the researchers
created, but accounting for real-world differences and also existing conflicting research, I
wouldn’t recommend throwing out your expired preworkouts just yet.
In the end, the choice is yours and how you feel about it, just remember that if you really
wanna grow your calves, eat enough protein and… look for another goal cause it’s
still ain’t happenin.
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As always, thank you for watching and don’t forget to get your protein!
Does caffeinated protein exist?