Pre-Workout That's Good for You: What to Look For (and What to Avoid)
Jarman Gosai, Data Scientist and founder of Gym Concoction
Walking into a supplement shop and trying to pick a pre-workout that won't wreck your sleep, your stomach, or your weekly grocery budget is harder than it should be. Most of what's on the shelf is built around one ingredient (caffeine, lots of it), padded out with artificial sweeteners and undisclosed "proprietary blends," and priced like the people who buy it have never read a label.
This article is what I wish I'd had when I started building Gym Concoction. It walks through what actually makes a pre-workout good for you, what to look for on the ingredient panel, and what to walk away from. I'll talk about our Energy Formula at the end because we built it specifically to solve the problems below. But the framework holds whether you buy from us or somewhere else.
What makes a pre-workout actually good for you?
A pre-workout is good for you when it contains research-backed performance ingredients at honest doses, uses natural flavouring and sweeteners, and skips artificial additives, undisclosed blends, and stimulant overload. The strongest options support energy, endurance, and focus through ingredients like citrulline malate, creatine, beta-alanine, and free-form amino acids. Not just by hammering you with caffeine.
A lot of mainstream pre-workouts get you to the gym faster, sure. The trade-off is anxious jitters, an afternoon crash, disrupted sleep that night, and a stomach that feels off for the next hour. None of those are signs the product is working. They're signs it's overshooting.
The ingredients worth looking for
These are the ones with the strongest research support for actual performance, not just buzz. Every one of them is in our Energy Formula sachet, and I'll explain why each made the cut.
Citrulline Malate
Citrulline raises arginine levels in your blood more efficiently than taking arginine directly does, which boosts nitric oxide production and improves blood flow to working muscle. The practical outcome is better pumps, less perceived effort during sets, and faster recovery between them. There's also good evidence it reduces muscle soreness in the day or two after training.
Citrulline pairs especially well with high-rep work and anything involving short rest periods. If you're doing supersets, drop sets, or endurance work, this is the ingredient that most directly affects how your last set feels compared to your first.
Creatine
If you only take one supplement in your life, take creatine. It's the most thoroughly studied performance ingredient ever produced, with hundreds of trials covering strength, power output, lean mass, recovery, and (more recently) cognitive performance. A widely-cited 2003 study showed roughly a 24% increase in bench press strength and 32% in squat strength after eight weeks of supplementation. Those numbers are not normal for a single ingredient.
Creatine works by topping up the phosphocreatine in your muscles, which is what your body uses for short-burst, high-intensity effort. It also pulls water into the muscle, which is part of why people gain a couple of kilos in the first few weeks. That's not fat. That's hydrated muscle, and it's a good thing.
Beta-Alanine
Beta-alanine is the ingredient responsible for the tingling sensation you sometimes feel after a strong pre-workout. That tingle (called paraesthesia) is harmless and fades within about an hour. What beta-alanine actually does is raise carnosine levels in your muscles, and carnosine buffers the acid build-up that causes the burn you feel late in a set.
Translation: you get a few more reps before you have to stop. This is the ingredient that matters most for anything in the 8 to 25 rep range, where local muscular endurance is the limit, not absolute strength.
Acetyl L-Carnitine (ALCAR)
ALCAR is one of the more expensive ingredients to source and one of the most useful when you're training tired, training fasted, or trying to focus through a long session. It helps shuttle fatty acids into your mitochondria (the energy factories of your cells), which means your body can burn fat for fuel more efficiently. It also crosses the blood-brain barrier, which is why people use it for mental clarity, not just physical energy.
Most pre-workouts skip ALCAR because it costs around ten times what caffeine does per serving. We kept it in because the difference in how a session feels (especially a morning or post-work session) is genuinely noticeable.
L-Tyrosine
L-Tyrosine is a precursor to dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline. These are the neurotransmitters that govern motivation, drive, and focus. The clearest research on tyrosine comes from stress-tolerance studies: people supplementing with it maintain cognitive performance better under conditions that would normally degrade it (cold exposure, sleep deprivation, mental fatigue).
If you've ever had a workout where you physically could lift the weight, but mentally couldn't be bothered, tyrosine targets that gap.
L-Theanine
L-Theanine is unusual. It's found mainly in tea leaves, and roughly 86% of mainstream pre-workouts skip it entirely. It promotes a state of calm alertness by increasing alpha-wave activity in the brain. That sounds like marketing language, but it's actually measurable on an EEG.
The reason it matters in a pre-workout: most stimulant-based formulas leave you wired in a way that's hard to channel. Theanine smooths the edges. You stay focused without feeling jumpy. Because our formula is stimulant-free, theanine plays a slightly different role for us. It helps you switch from a stressed mental state (work, traffic, life) into a focused training state.
Inositol
Inositol is the most overlooked ingredient on this list. It plays a role in cellular signalling, particularly in how cells respond to nutrients and how neurotransmitters fire. You'll find it in almost no pre-workouts at any meaningful dose.
We include it because the same signalling pathways are involved in nutrient partitioning during and after training, which is what determines whether the food you eat goes toward muscle repair or gets stored. It's a quiet ingredient. You probably won't feel it directly in a session. But it's one of the things working underneath that makes the formula complete.
The ingredients worth avoiding
These are the additives that show up in cheap pre-workouts and quietly do nothing good for you. Sometimes they're outright cost-cutters. Sometimes they're masking lower ingredient quality. Either way, you don't want them in something you take three to five times a week.
Artificial sweeteners (sucralose, aspartame, acesulfame potassium)
These aren't dangerous in small amounts, but they have two real downsides. First, regular exposure shifts gut microbiome composition in ways researchers are still figuring out. Second, they're often a sign that the rest of the formula is built down to a price point. If a manufacturer is saving money on the sweetener, they're probably saving money everywhere else as well.
Monk fruit and stevia are the cleaner options. We use monk fruit exclusively in our Energy Formula.
Maltodextrin
Maltodextrin is a cheap, flavourless carbohydrate that bulks up the powder so it looks like you're getting more for your money. It spikes blood sugar harder than table sugar does, which is the opposite of what you want before training. If you see it in the top three ingredients of a pre-workout, the rest of the formula is probably mostly filler.
"Proprietary blends"
A proprietary blend is when the label tells you the total weight of a mix of ingredients but not the individual amounts. So you might see "Performance Matrix: 5,000mg" without knowing whether that's 4,800mg of one cheap ingredient and 200mg of seven others, or an even split. It's a labelling trick to hide under-dosing. If a brand won't tell you the doses on the label, assume the doses are bad.
Excessive caffeine and stimulant stacks
There's nothing wrong with caffeine. There's a lot wrong with 400mg of caffeine plus DMHA plus theacrine plus yohimbine in one scoop. Stimulant stacks are how brands chase the "wow that hit hard" review, but they're also how people end up with crashes, anxiety, blood pressure spikes, and ruined sleep.
If you do want caffeine, the cleanest approach is to have it separately (a coffee, a single-ingredient capsule) at a dose you can control, and use a stimulant-free pre-workout for everything else.
Stimulants: do you actually need them?
This is the question most pre-workout marketing wants you not to ask. The honest answer is no, you don't need stimulants to train hard. You need to be properly fed, properly hydrated, properly slept, and you need the performance ingredients above to do their work.
Stimulants can make a session feel more intense, but feeling more intense and performing better are not the same thing. There's good research showing that very high caffeine doses can actually hurt fine motor control and reduce time-to-exhaustion at certain intensities. And the cost of stimulant reliance compounds over time. Tolerance creeps up, sleep degrades, and you end up needing more to get the same effect.
Our Energy Formula is fully stimulant-free, which means you can use it at 9pm without ruining your night. It also means you can stack it with your own caffeine if you want to, at a dose you control.
How we built the Energy Formula
The seven ingredients above are all in one sachet of Energy Formula. We picked the combination because each one supports a different part of what training actually demands: blood flow, force production, muscular endurance, fuel utilisation, mental drive, focus, and cellular signalling.
No other pre-workout sold in Australia contains all seven of those ingredients together. We checked. The inositol inclusion in particular is rare across the entire category, not just locally.
A few things we said no to along the way:
We said no to caffeine because it's the cheapest, easiest performance ingredient on the planet, and the market is saturated with it. If you want caffeine, you can buy it for two dollars at any supermarket.
We said no to artificial sweeteners because they're a quiet signal of cost-cutting, and because we want a product you can take every training day for years without it slowly compounding in your system.
We said no to maltodextrin because there's no good reason for it to be in a pre-workout.
We said no to proprietary blends because if we're going to charge for a product, you should be able to see exactly what you're paying for.
We also said yes to a few things most brands skip. We sweeten with monk fruit only. We flavour with Australian-grown fruit (Yarra Valley cherry, Huon Valley apple, Queensland orange) sourced from Australian suppliers, not artificial flavour concentrates. We pack each serving as a single-serve sachet, which means you get exactly the dose every time. No scooping, no spilling, no big tub sitting in your gym bag.
It costs us more to make. We think that's the right trade-off.
A few common questions
Is pre-workout safe to take every day?
A clean, stimulant-free pre-workout is generally safe to take daily for most healthy adults. Stimulant-based pre-workouts are a different conversation, and most sports nutrition guidelines suggest keeping total caffeine intake below 400mg per day from all sources combined.
Can I take pre-workout if I'm sensitive to caffeine?
Yes, if you choose a stimulant-free option. Most of the performance benefit in a well-built pre-workout doesn't come from caffeine anyway. Our Energy Formula contains no caffeine, no guarana, no green tea extract, and no other stimulants.
Does pre-workout work without caffeine?
Yes. The ingredients that drive most of the measurable performance change (citrulline, creatine, beta-alanine) do not contain caffeine and don't need caffeine to work. Caffeine adds a perceived energy boost, not the underlying physical effect.
What's the difference between citrulline and citrulline malate?
Citrulline malate is L-citrulline bound to malic acid. Malic acid is involved in your body's energy production cycle, which is why the combined form is generally preferred in pre-workout formulas. Both forms work; malate has slightly more research support for training applications.
How long before training should I take it?
Twenty to thirty minutes is the sweet spot for most people. Mix the sachet into 300 to 500ml of water and drink it on the way to the gym or during your warm-up.
Where to go from here
If you've made it this far, you're already doing what most people don't. You're reading labels and asking whether what you're putting in your body actually deserves to be there.
If you'd rather not have to formulate this stack yourself (weighing out seven powders to the milligram every morning), our Energy Formula sachet is built to exactly the specification I've described above. Single serve, naturally flavoured with Australian fruit, monk fruit sweetened, stimulant-free, no artificial anything.
Have a look at the Energy Formula product page for the full ingredient panel and the three flavours we make.