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What Does Pre Workout Feel Like?
What Does Pre Workout Feel Like?
If you’re looking to boost your overall fitness and strength, you may feel like you have maxed out what you’re able to do in the gym on your own. Sometimes, you need a little something extra to power through a fitness plateau and take your workout to the next level. Pre-workout supplements, or “pre-workouts,” can help you do just that.
What Is Pre Workout?
Pre-workout is a type of supplement that is specially designed to help your body perform during its peak during a workout. These supplements typically come in a powdered form and may contain ingredients like protein, nitric oxide, vitamins, minerals, and caffeine.
In addition to providing a boost of fuel for your workout, pre-workout supplements often also contain ingredients that help your muscles rebuild and recover more quickly.
Why Do People Use Pre Workout?
Many people are familiar with drinking a protein shake after a tough workout to rebuild and refuel your muscles, but the concept of pre-workout supplements is less well-known.
People use pre-workout supplements, also referred to as “pre-workouts,” to provide a boost of energy, focus, and power before a tough workout. These supplements often pack ingredients like Caffeine, Beta-Alanine, L-Citrulline, L-Theanine, Creatine, and other amino acids that are designed to help you work out harder for longer.
Here at Gainful, we offer a Personalized Pre-Workout blend that is tailored to your specific fitness and wellness needs. Your blend can include BCAAs for muscle growth and recovery, Beta-Alanine for performance, L-Theanine for focus, and Natural Caffeine to reduce fatigue perception and allow you to excel.
We recommend taking your pre-workout in the window immediately before your workout. When taken within this window, the supplement has time to take effect and start delivering its intended effects, such as:
- Increasing focus
- Increasing circulation
- Reducing fatigue perception
- Increasing muscle strength and endurance
- Increasing training intensity
Most people take pre-workout supplements in order to attain these effects and power their workouts.
What Does Pre Workout Feel Like?
When you’re working out, you want to feel like you can take on the world. Pre-workout is designed to help you feel more energetic, more focused, and more alert in order to help power your workout. The exact feelings a pre-workout is likely to cause will vary depending on the ingredients contained in the product.
Our Personalized Pre-Workout blends can include a few different ingredients that contribute to enhanced feelings of energy, power, focus, and endurance:
- Caffeine
- Beta-Alanine
- L-Citrulline
- L-Theanine
- Creatine
Let’s take a closer look at each one to understand the benefits.
Caffeine
Caffeine is among the most important ingredients in a pre-workout supplement. Just as the caffeine in your coffee wakes you up and puts an extra spring in your step in the morning, caffeine in a pre-workout supplement helps to make you feel more alert and energetic while reducing the perception of fatigue. That means you’ll be able to work out harder for a longer time without feeling exhaustion, leading to more gains.
Beta-Alanine
If training hard is your goal, beta-alanine can help. This amino acid is naturally produced by the body, which uses it to produce a compound called carnosine. Carnosine is critical for muscle endurance during high-intensity workouts because it helps to control the build-up of lactic acid, which causes you to feel fatigued, in the muscles. Taking in extra beta-alanine allows your body to produce extra carnosine and keep the levels of the compound higher in your muscles, helping you to work out harder for longer.
L-Citrulline
L-citrulline is an amino acid naturally produced by the body. The kidneys convert L-citrulline into nitric oxide and L-arginine, which the body uses to improve circulation. Taking in extra L-citrulline in a pre-workout supplement can support healthy production of nitric oxide in the body.
When you have extra nitric oxide in your blood, the arteries start to relax, allowing more blood to flow throughout the body. Improved circulation helps your muscles to function at their best during a workout. However, this compound can also sometimes cause feelings of tingling or itching along the skin due to the increased blood flow. These feelings are normal and will disappear as the compound is processed in the body.
L-theanine
Having too much caffeine can make you jittery and cause you to lose focus, which is part of what makes L-theanine such an important part of any pre-workout supplement. L-theanine is an amino acid that helps you focus and stay alert during your workout when paired with caffeine, allowing you to concentrate on the task at hand.
When combined with caffeine, L-theanine also helps to improve other aspects of cognitive performance, such as speeding up your reaction time and allowing for faster visual processing.
Creatine
Creatine is one of the most well-known workout supplements on the market, thanks to its benefits for muscle strength and endurance. Creatine is an amino acid produced by the liver and kidneys and stored in the muscles and brain. It’s used to create adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which acts as fuel for your muscles during the day.
As you run out of ATP, you’ll start to feel more fatigued and weaker, so keeping your stores of this essential fuel high is key to getting in a great workout. Supplementing with creatine helps to increase muscle strength and endurance, allowing for the powerful, explosive movements that workouts like weightlifting require.
How Is Pre-Workout Used?
Pre-workout supplements deliver extra energy in the form of caffeine and amino acids, so it’s important to ensure that your body has enough time to process these ingredients before you start your workout. It’s recommended that you take your pre-workout supplement in the window immediately before your workout to optimize results.
While you’ll feel the benefits of a pre-workout supplement the first time you use it, using the supplement only occasionally is not recommended. Pre-workout supplements should be used consistently for the best results, as studies show that taking the supplements before each of your workouts over an extended period of time allows the levels of the ingredients in your body to build up over time.
This means you’ll have more power and endurance over the long run due to increased training capacity.
When it comes to pre-workout supplements, it’s possible to do too much of a good thing. When consumed in excess, pre-workout supplements containing caffeine may cause side effects like digestive symptoms, an increase in blood pressure, irregular or rapid heartbeat, or changes in blood sugar if you are sensitive to this ingredient.
Our Pre-Workout is personalized based on your preferences, training intensity, and goals so that your blend matches your priorities — and if you don’t enjoy feeling the effects of caffeine, your blend can be made comfortably caffeine-free.
The Bottom Line
When taking a pre-workout supplement, you’ll likely feel an increase in energy levels, improved focus, increased alertness, improved circulation, and perhaps some tingling or itching along the surface of the skin. Pre-workout supplements are taken to help power a workout and allow your muscles to exercise at higher intensities for longer.
Sources:
Does Taking a Pre-workout Actually Work? | Cleveland Clinic
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