Roll your own Pre-workout mix

Since 2016, I’ve been mixing my own pre-workout. There are numerous reasons why and it wasn’t to save money either. I had two fundamental reasons why I started mixing my own concoctions.

It’s common knowledge that you need to maintain about 5g of creatine daily for peak effectiveness (if you’re using it). In addition, most pre-works have a standard dosage of caffeine – I think around 200mg (I don’t have solid empirical evidence to support that – just from my observations). Depending on the day, my scoop of C4 would sometimes make me tingle sometimes not. Sometimes make me get up and go and other times not.

Then it hit me.

You grab your scoop of C4 – how much caffeine is actually in that scoop? How much creatine is in it? I mean they just put all the shit in the same can and shook it up. Which meant, depending on the day – you might over load on one thing and under dose on the other.

This is unacceptable to me. While I’m not obsessive or compulsive about anything – I am a stickler for following a strict regimen when working out which includes pre and post work out mixes.  This was reason number one.

The second reason was an easy one, continual learning, and education when it came to my workouts. I did research on what chemicals actually were proven to work and which ones weren’t. No reason to buy a container of pre-workout that had a lot of crap I really didn’t need.

Here is my routine.

1. I purchased seven small screw lid plastic containers from the Container Store. Each of those holds about 20 grams of powder – not that you will fill it up but that’s what I currently have. This allows me to make a weeks’ worth of butter badass motivational powder.
2. Creatine – 5 grams – Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate
3. Caffeine – 1 capsule 200 mg (opened) –  Nutircost Caffeine Capsules
4. Beta-Alanine – 3.5 grams – Nutricost Beta-Alanine –
5. L-Citrulline Malate – 5 grams – Nutricost L-Citrulline Malate

*All above are Amazon links – I don’t not get anything from advertising.

Now, if you do your research you will see online other measurements for some of these items. I’ve reduced some of the sizes for me. A prime example is for me, taking 5 grams of beta-alanine will make my face tingle to the point of itching. However, 3.5 grams is tolerable. I’ve also tweaked with caffeine size – I’ve bounded down to 100mg and back up to 200mg. It’s your body, figure out what works.

The bad thing about mixing your own is the flavor. The above mixture tastes like shit. Many onsite forums suggest mixing in Gatorade (which I started using at first). It took about 10grams of Gatorade to make the mixture remotely tolerable. The issue now was that I had to mix up almost 25 grams of powder with water to drink.

That’s a lot! Because you’re typical scoop of C4 is around 4-6 grams. I traded out the Gatorade for Crystal Light and then removed the flavor powder all together. Now, I just mix 8oz of water, a squirt of MIO (which is fantastic), and my powder.

At times, I’ve added in other things like L-Carnitine but usually just go back to the original chemicals that actually have been proven to do something. As for BCAAs that is part of my post-drink routine – which I can share in another post.