Guides
Pre-workout: reading the label properly
Most pre-workouts contain the right ingredients at the wrong doses. Learn to read the panel and you will stop paying for a fifteen-ingredient blend that is functionally caffeine and food colouring.
Rule one: if it says “proprietary blend”, be suspicious
A proprietary blend lists ingredients but gives you one combined total: “Rage Matrix — 6 000 mg” followed by twelve names. The order tells you which is largest by weight, and that is all you get.
The maths is unforgiving. A working dose of citrulline malate alone is 6–8 g. If the entire blend is 6 g and citrulline is one of twelve ingredients, you are not getting a working dose of anything except possibly the first item. Blends exist to hide that.
A brand confident in its formula prints every dose. Increasingly they do — which makes the ones that still hide it easier to spot.
The doses that actually do something
| Ingredient | Effective dose | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Caffeine | 3–6 mg/kg bodyweight (200–400 mg typical) | Reduces perceived effort, improves output. The one ingredient that unambiguously works. |
| Citrulline malate | 6 000–8 000 mg | Nitric oxide, pump, modest endurance benefit |
| L-citrulline (plain) | 4 000–6 000 mg | Same, more concentrated |
| Beta-alanine | 3 200–6 400 mg daily | Buffers acidity in 60–240 s efforts. Needs weeks of consistency. |
| Creatine monohydrate | 3 000–5 000 mg daily | Strength and repeated efforts. Daily, not pre-workout. |
| Betaine anhydrous | 2 500 mg | Modest strength/power evidence |
| L-tyrosine | 1 000–2 000 mg | Focus under stress |
| L-theanine | 100–200 mg per 100 mg caffeine | Takes the edge off caffeine jitter |
| Taurine | 1 000–2 000 mg | Modest endurance and cramp support |
| Alpha-GPC | 300–600 mg | Focus, mind-muscle connection |
Add those up. An honestly dosed pre-workout is a genuinely large scoop — 15 to 25 g. A 6 g scoop cannot physically contain working doses of five of these things. Scoop size is the fastest tell on the shelf.
Rule two: watch for pixie-dusting
Pixie-dusting is including a trendy ingredient at a token dose so it can appear on the front of the tub. Common examples:
- Citrulline at 1 000 mg (needs 6 000).
- Beta-alanine at 800 mg (needs 3 200).
- Creatine at 1 000 mg (needs 5 000 daily anyway).
- A “nootropic complex” of 250 mg total across four ingredients.
- BCAAs at 1 g, which does nothing at all if you eat protein.
The tub is not lying. It contains what it says. It just does not contain enough of it to matter.
Rule three: count your total caffeine
This is the one that actually hurts people. A strong pre-workout can carry 350–400 mg per scoop. Add two cups of coffee earlier in the day at roughly 95 mg each and you are near 600 mg.
- Roughly 400 mg a day is the commonly cited ceiling for healthy adults.
- Caffeine’s half-life is about 5 hours. A 350 mg dose at 17:00 still has ~175 mg in you at 22:00.
- Sleep is where training adaptation happens. A pre-workout that costs you an hour of sleep has taken more than it gave.
If you train after 17:00, use a stim-free pre-workout. Citrulline, beta-alanine, betaine and taurine all work perfectly well without caffeine, and you keep your sleep.
Rule four: start on half a scoop
Every time, with a new product, regardless of how experienced you are. Formulas vary enormously — especially the high-stimulant American brands, where a full scoop can be an unpleasant introduction. You can always take more next session. You cannot take less once it is in you.
Rule five: do the per-serving maths
A R450 tub with 30 servings is R15 a session. A R650 tub with 60 servings is R10.83. The expensive tub is cheaper. Every pre-workout on this site shows its cost per serving under the price — but check the scoop size, because some brands quote servings on a half scoop nobody actually uses.
A reasonable checklist
- Fully disclosed doses, no proprietary blend.
- Caffeine you have deliberately chosen, counted against your day.
- Citrulline at 6 g+ if you care about the pump.
- Beta-alanine at 3.2 g+ if you want the buffering, and patience for a few weeks.
- A scoop big enough to plausibly hold all of it.
- A stim-free option in the cupboard for evening sessions.
- A cost per serving you are comfortable paying several times a week.
And a genuine caveat: if you are on any medication, have a heart condition, high blood pressure, an anxiety disorder, or you are pregnant or breastfeeding, talk to a doctor or pharmacist before touching a stimulant pre-workout. Our advisor will not answer that question and neither will the person behind the counter — that is deliberate, and it is the right call.