Ep. #725: How to Choose the Best Stim-Free Pre-Workout Supplement

Hey there, I’m Mike Matthews. This is Muscle for Life. Thank you for joining me today to learn about STEM Free pre-workout. You know, I realized that I haven’t done an episode on supplementation in a while or even answered a question related to supplementation or addressed. A says you disagreement. And I guess that’s kind of ironic considering that.

I own a supplement company, but I focus mostly on nutrition and exercise and sleep and other elements of lifestyle because in the grand scheme of things related to getting fitter and healthier, of course, those are the most important factors. Supplements are just supplementary by definition, and that’s really just the best case scenario.

Even the best supplements can only. Supplement a proper diet and proper training routine and good sleep hygiene and so forth. And if you don’t have those things in no amount of pills, powders or potions are going to make much of a difference. But as I often say, if you know what you’re doing in the kitchen, if you know what you’re doing in the gym and you are generally living healthily, you’re getting enough sleep, you’re not drinking too much alcohol, you’re not smoking too many cigarettes, And you have the budget and inclination it’s worth considering adding certain supplements to your regimen.

A protein powder, for example, is very convenient. If you are into fitness, you know that you need to eat a lot of protein every day, and many people prefer to add two to maybe four scoops of protein powder depending on how much they have to eat into their meal plans because it’s just easier. Then eating another chicken breast or another pot of yogurt and so forth.

And another supplement that I think is worth considering is what I’m gonna talk about today, a STEM free pre-workout. Why? Well, a good one can help your workout performance and your results. It can help you gain muscle and strength faster over time, and it can do it without the unwanted side effects that some people experience with.

Pre-workouts that have stimulants and particularly pre-workouts that have stimulants in addition to just caffeine. If a pre-workout is very stem heavy, it can definitely jack you up for your workout. But then there’s the energy crash and the disrupted sleep and jitters, nausea, indigestion, and so forth.

Now, if you are currently using a high quality evidence-based naturally sweetened pre-workout, like, oh, I don’t know, maybe Legion Pulse, that contains caffeine, and if you’ve never considered using the STEM free version of Pulse or a STEM free, Pre-workout in addition to a STEM pre-workout or a caffeinated pre-workout.

Not together, but alternating between them. I’m gonna talk about the benefits of doing that in this podcast as well. That’s what I do personally. So if you want to learn more about STEM free pre-workouts and really just pre-workouts in general, and how to choose the best one for you and how to get the most out of them.

This podcast is for you. Also, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world, bigger, leaner, stronger, and. Thinner, leaner, stronger, as well as the leading flexible dieting cookbook, the Shredded Chef.

Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best body ever, and you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Cobo, and Google Play, as well as. In Select Barnes and Noble stores. And I should also mention that you can get any of the audio books 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account.

And this is a great way to make those pockets of downtime like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning more interesting, entertaining, and productive. And so if you want to take Audible up on this offer, and if you want to get one of my audiobooks for free, just go to www.buy Legion. That’s b u y.

legion.com/audible and sign up for your account. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you wanna see more of it, and if you wanna learn time proven and evidence-based strategies for losing fat, building muscle and getting healthy, and strategies that work for anyone and everyone, regardless of age or circumstances, please do consider picking up one of my best selling books, bigger, leaner, stronger for Men.

Thinner, leaner, stronger for women and the shredded chef for my favorite fitness friendly recipes. All right, so let’s start this discussion with a quick overview of what a pre-workout supplement is and why it’s so popular. So it’s a supplement that is meant to be taken before your workout, hence the term, and usually 30 to 60 minutes or so before.

Training, depending on the ingredients. And if it is formulated well, if it contains ingredients like caffeine, citraline, malate, beta alanine, it can enhance your strength. It can enhance your endurance, your muscle, endurance focus, mood. Uh, it can reduce fatigue. And in the case of beta alanine, it can even.

Increase muscle gain directly similar to how creatine can, not mechanistically similar but similar in terms of enhancing muscle growth by not just improving workout performance. Beta alanine will do that, but it also appears to directly influence your body’s muscle building machinery, so to speak, so you just gain more muscle from your training.

Now that said, there are many pre-workouts out there that will not do. Those things and not do much of anything. There are pre-workouts that contain ineffective ingredients. There are pre-workouts that contain small, ineffective doses of effective ingredients. There are pre-workouts that contain all kinds of exotic ingredients, different types of neurotropics, plant extracts, you know, like green coffee bean extract.

Ooh, that sounds neat. Is there any reason to have it in there? No, probably not. Branched chain amino acids, BCAAs are very popular. For example, you’ll find those in many pre-workout supplements, and those are very popular under themselves as well. That’s a very popular standalone product. Unfortunately, though there’s no good reason to supplement with BCAAs or essential amino acids, EAs, or any amino acids whatsoever.

The scientific evidence is very clear that if you eat enough protein, you have no reason to take those supplements. They’re not gonna help you gain muscle faster. They’re not gonna help you get stronger faster. They’re not gonna help you recover better from your training or do anything but to make your water tasty and your wallet lighter.

Ironically, BCAs are the number one re. Quested product from Legion customers, like when customers reach out to us and tell us what they want us to make. BCAAs have been number one for years now, but we can’t do it. We can’t make a, B, C, A A product because of what I just explained. So the only reason really, To use BCAs is to make your water tasty.

And unfortunately that’s not a very strong pitch. So anyway, coming back to pre-workouts, there are six ingredients in particular that are green flags that have a good amount of scientific evidence for efficacy and safety, and that you will find. In high quality pre-workouts, both with and without stimulants.

So caffeine is the first one and no subs there. And of course that would be four pre-workouts with stimulants, with at least caffeine. And then we have citraline, that’s another high quality ingredient. Beta alanine, theanine, betine, and alpha G P C. Those six ingredients form. The base of a high quality, well formulated pre-workout.

So if a pre-workout has all six of those, a STEM containing pre-workout would have all six. That is a good sign. It can have other things as well, but if it has those six ingredients in the proper doses, that is a. Pre-workout worth considering because it is going to make a difference in your training, and it’s hard to put more than those things in a pre-workout.

By the way, I know because Legion Pulse contains those ingredients and it is quite expensive to produce. My margins are significantly lower than the industry average than the average. For sports nutrition, for example, my cost of goods hovers around 60%, whereas many supplement companies are. More like 30 to 40%.

And the reason why my cogs are so much higher is I use high quality ingredients, only ingredients that have a good amount of scientific evidence in human research, not just rat research, for example, of effectiveness. And I also use the right. Doses of those ingredients. So generally speaking, good ingredients are just more expensive than bad ingredients.

And proper dosing is always way more expensive than pixie dusting. It may be 10, 15 times more expensive because pixie dusting would be taking a good ingredient like beta Aine, for example, and putting maybe. 300 milligrams, let’s say in a serving of pre-workout. And that’s enough maybe to feel a little bit of tingles, right?

So people will be cogs and they’ll be aware of the beta A in it and they’re gonna think, okay, good. So this actually does have beta A and I feel a little bit of the tingles, but what they may not realize is research shows that you want to be above three grams. You want to be between three and four. Four grams per day, which would mean per serving, right?

Because most people are only taking one serving of pre-workout per day to experience the benefits that have been shown in studies. So anyway, coming back to these six ingredients you want to see in a pre-workout, if it is a stem free pre-workout, obviously the. Caffeine comes out, and then also the theanine comes out because the theanine is paired with the caffeine to enhance mood and to mitigate the energy crash that some people experience after having a relatively large dose of caffeine.

If you take theanine just by itself, research shows that it can have sedative effects, so you wouldn’t want that in your pre-workout. You may want to take. Some theanine later at night if you have a hard time relaxing and falling asleep. But that’s not what we’re going for when we step into the gym. Now, as far as pre-workouts go, in general, of course, products with stimulants are much more popular than ones without stimulants.

In fact, many people equate pre-workouts with just massive doses of stimulants, a bunch of caffeine and a bunch of other dubious chemicals with. Some sweeteners maybe and some flavoring, and then some other random ingredients thrown in there that may or may not do anything but enough of a stimulant kick to turn you into the Tasmanian Devil for an hour or so.

And of course, it’s no surprise that pre-workouts that contain stimulants are a lot more popular than ones that don’t. If you redline your nervous system, you’re gonna notice an immediate difference in the gym. There is instant gratification there, whereas with a stem free, Pre-workout, you are likely not going to notice an immediate difference.

You’re not gonna take it 30 or 45 minutes before your training session and then immediately be able to lift more weight or do more sets or reps. But if it is a high quality stem free pre-workout, if it is formulated well, as I mentioned a little bit earlier in this podcast, it can make a difference in your training over time.

As I mentioned earlier, although a STEM free pre-workout can’t deliver an adrenaline rush, it can boost your performance and your results in several ways. It can improve your muscle endurance, which can allow you to do more sets or more reps in your workouts. It can give you bigger. Pumps and research shows that that can directly impact muscle Building a good stem free pre-workout can reduce fatigue and that can help you recover faster in between your sets and lift more weight with better form.

It can boost your power output, which is useful for. Just about any sport, any type of athletic activity, it can decrease muscle soreness, which then of course helps you have more productive workouts. Also may help you train certain muscle groups a little bit more frequently so you can bump up your volume if you need to do that.

And of course, it can help you avoid the post-workout crash that many people experience with stimulant containing pre-workouts and particularly pre-workouts that contain other stimulants in addition to caffeine, because some of those stimulants are quite powerful and in some cases can be. Dangerous and two additional benefits of STEM free pre-workouts that I really appreciate are one, it allows you to get most or all of your caffeine from other sources like espresso, for example.

And it also allows you to cycle on and off caffeine, which is smart if you want to get the maximum benefit from it in your training. For example, if you want to experience this acutely, have no caffeine for the next seven to 10 days. None at all. And then before your next, let’s say, heavy squat session or heavy deadlift session, have something between 0.5 to maybe 0.8 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, about 30 to 45 minutes before that workout.

And if you’ve been having caffeine regularly for a long time, which means that your body’s thoroughly desensitized to the stimulant aspects of it, in particular, you are going to be desensitized to it by coming off for seven to 10 days, and then by having a relatively large dose. You are probably going to have a squat or deadlift workout like no other like you haven’t experienced in a long time.

And if you like that experience enough to be willing to give up caffeine several days per week to have just a few. Maybe two or three large doses of caffeine per week, and then no caffeine on the other days. You can experience those workouts every week a couple of times per week. You have to maintain sensitivity to caffeine’s stimulant effects though, and that means that you can’t have it every day, even in small amounts, because research shows that even relatively small amounts taken every day.

One 200 milligrams is enough to desensitize you to caffeine’s stimulant effects. Now what you never lose and what you are used to experiencing if you have been having caffeine regularly for a long time, is its ability to reduce feelings of tiredness that you can never become fully desensitized to. But the stimulant.

Effects you can now, one downside to having caffeine before workout in any amount is the post-workout crash that most of us experience to some degree. And the reason why it happens is caffeine primarily boosts performance by preventing a neurotransmitter called adenosine from working as it should. And adenosine is an inhibitory.

Neurotransmitter, and that means it reduces central nervous system activity and it promotes sleep and restfulness. So when adenosine levels are high, c n s activity drops. And when adenosine levels are low, c n s activity increases. So basically, high adenosine equals sleepy, sluggish. Low energy. Jeb Bush, you know, low adenosine, on the other hand is alert, focused, high energy.

I won’t say Trump, I won’t trigger anybody. And so caffeine blocks adenosine. So adenosine can’t do its job. And that then boosts alertness. It boosts focus. It boosts strength, endurance. That’s the good news. Of course. The bad news though is that although caffeine, Does stop the drowsiness and the other unwanted effects of adenosine, at least in terms of working out.

It doesn’t stop adenosine production, so your body is still pumping this stuff out, even though it has been temporarily deactivated by caffeine. And so what happens then as your body clears caffeine out of its system and the adenosine becomes reactivated? Well, of course we have now a flood. Of this chemical.

And that then leads to the low energy lethargy that many people experience after having a relatively large amount of caffeine, which often is had before a workout. And so then people think of it as the post-workout crash. And the more caffeine you take, the harsher the crash tends to be for obvious reasons.

And I’m not aware of any scientific evidence to. Prove this, but many people find that caffeine in the form of pills or powder tends to produce a more intense crash than caffeine from coffee. Now, not everybody experiences the post caffeine crash in the same way. Some people experience it heavily, some people moderately, and some people not at all.

But most people are somewhere in the middle. Most people notice that sometime after having caffeine, they have a bit less energy in, they’re a bit less alert than before they had the caffeine. So if you are one of those people, or maybe you experience the post caffeine crash more intensely, Than the average person.

A STEM free pre-workout, of course, is a great way to not experience it at all. Another benefit of using a STEM free pre-workout is something I mentioned earlier, but I wanna talk a little bit more about it. And that is switching between one that has caffeine and one that does not, which allows you to reset your body’s sensitivity to caffeine, which then allows you to get the maximal benefit from it in the gym.

And there are a couple of ways of doing this. I mentioned one way, which would be to have. Relatively large doses of caffeine just a couple of days per week, and then no caffeine on the other days. Another way is to use a caffeine containing pre-workout for two or maybe three weeks, at which point your body will be thoroughly desensitized, and then using a stem free pre-workout for a week, maybe two weeks, to desensitize your body and then go back to the caffeine containing pre-workout.

And rinse and repeat. And what’s great about that strategy is if the STEM free pre-workout is well formulated, you get to continue benefiting from all the ingredients that are not caffeine. And then when you are using the caffeinated pre-workout, you are gonna get more of a workout boost, more of a performance boost, at least during the time that you’re using the caffeine containing pre-workout than you would if you were always using the caffeine containing.

Pre-workout,

if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world. Bigger, leaner, stronger, and thinner. Leaner, stronger, as well as the leading flexible dieting cookbook, the Shredded Chef.

Another major benefit of a STEM free pre-workout is it’s not gonna mess with your sleep. And getting enough sleep and enough high quality sleep is one of the most effective things you can do to not only do better in the gym, but just do better in pretty much every way and every activity. Getting enough sleep and enough good sleep.

Good sleep hygiene is the ultimate quote unquote biohack. It is the one weird trick for boosting IQ and boosting muscle growth and boosting fat loss and boosting happiness, and on and on and on. And so if having caffeine is inter. Fearing with your sleep, if it’s making it harder to fall asleep or stay asleep or wake up feeling rested because your body has to move naturally through different sleep cycles and do different things, and caffeine can disrupt that but not wake you up.

So you may sleep through the night, or maybe you wake up once to go to the bathroom. But you just don’t feel that rested caffeine can do that. Then changing that by either having less caffeine or no caffeine, or by having caffeine earlier in the day rather than later in the day is going to make a huge difference in your quality of life, not just your quality of workouts or body composition and timing as I just mentioned.

Is usually the key for most people, A moderate dose of caffeine, not even a large dose, just a few hundred milligrams early in the morning doesn’t disturb the sleep. No problem. But if they have that same amount later in the day, even if it’s 4:00 PM 5:00 PM, it can, and in many people it does. And that of course, is very common with people who train later in the afternoon or the early evening and who feel like they need.

That extra oomph after a long day of work and taking care of the family and so forth. And so I understand that a good dose of caffeine helps them get through their workouts, but unfortunately it also often makes it hard for them to sleep well. And a few simple tips that I’ve shared with those people are, one, seeing if they can work out earlier in the day, at least a few days per week, when they may want to have the caffeine in particular, like a heavy squat or a heavy deadlift session.

Is there any way they can do those workouts? Maybe first thing in the morning or sometime in the morning. And if that’s not possible, if they have to work out later in the afternoon or in the early evening, then we will switch to a stem free pre-workout for those workouts, which may be all workouts and put a nap.

Somewhere in their day. It can just be 30 minutes. A 30 minute nap. Take in an hour, maybe two hours before a late afternoon or early evening training session can make a huge difference in boosting energy and boosting performance without interfering with sleep, because it’s not long enough to cause problems for most people.

If somebody were to take a two hour nap in the afternoon, yeah, that may make it hard to fall asleep at night, but if it’s a power nap, you know, 20 or 30 minutes, it’s very unlikely to make it hard. Porter to fall asleep and it can make a pretty big difference in mood and energy and workout performance and just enjoyment of training.

And you know, it can also enhance recovery because of course, a lot of the things that our body needs to do to fix muscle damage and create new tissues and so forth are done when we sleep. Now, one final benefit of a stem free pre-workout that I want to mention again and just talk a little bit more specifically about.

Is that you can get most or all of your caffeine from other sources, which for most of us is some form of coffee, right? But I guess these days, energy drinks should be mentioned as well because they are very popular and getting more popular. And when you look at the average caffeine intake of somebody who uses a caffeine containing pre-workout, And drinks coffee and or energy drinks, the number is usually quite high.

For example, I regularly hear from people who average eh 600 milligrams to over a gram of caffeine per day, at least five days per week. Many of them settle down a little bit on the weekends, and studies show that some people can get away with that. Some people can have that much caffeine and not experience any long-term effects, any negative side effects, health effects, particularly cardiovascular effects.

But most people can’t do that. Most people are gonna have to pay that piper one day. Again, the current weight of the evidence is that most people. Should keep their average daily caffeine intake at or below 400 milligrams per day. And when you consider that a cup of coffee is gonna have anywhere from one to 200 milligrams of caffeine, depending on how big your cup is, not necessarily an eight ounce cup.

Right? And depending what kind of coffee it is, and a shot of espresso is. Usually around 80 milligrams of caffeine, and your average energy drink is probably around 200 milligrams of caffeine. It is basically impossible to keep your daily intake at or below 400 milligrams if you’re gonna have a caffeine containing pre-workout, which is going to have at least three to 400 milligrams per serving.

Plus the coffee and or energy drinks. With a stem free pre-workout though, you can. So for example, I really like espresso and I have four shots of espresso in the morning. So that’s about three to 400 milligrams of caffeine. And that’s it for the day for me. I use. Stem free pulse instead of the caffeinated pulse.

So I can still benefit from the ingredients I was talking about earlier without having to put my caffeine intake at an inappropriately high level. And for me, it’s specifically related to sleep. I got D n a testing done some time ago, and according to the results, my body’s pretty good at clearing caffeine and other toxins, and I probably do have a relatively high tolerance of caffeine, uh, better than average.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a lighter sleeper. I no longer sleep through the night. I always wake up at least once to go to the bathroom, maybe twice. Whereas when I was younger, that was the exception. Most nights I would sleep all the way through. That’s just not the case now. Now I’m 36 and I have kids, and I don’t know if that’ll ever be the case again.

Maybe, maybe one day. I’ve noticed though, as I’ve gotten older, caffeine will have a bigger impact on my sleep. 10 years ago, I would be able to have caffeine. I would have. A half a serving of pulse at like 7:00 PM and I would have Yohimbe and I would do fasted cardio when I was cutting, and I would sleep just fine.

Now, that would mess me up. I may be able to fall asleep, but my wakings are going to be drastically. Increased. I’ll wake up 3, 4, 5 times in the middle of the night if I were to do that now. And I’ve also noticed that my total daily caffeine intake is correlated more now with sleep quality than it was when I was younger.

For example, if I have my espresso in the morning plus just a half a serving of pulse sometime in the early afternoon before I go work out, so that’s an extra 175 milligrams to put me up to about 600 milligrams for the day. I can do that for two or three days in a row before my sleep starts to become worse again.

It’s wakings in particular for me. I rarely have trouble falling asleep, and I rarely have trouble falling asleep when I wake up in the middle of the night. But if my sleep is going to be disrupted by really anything. It’s going to be more wakings, which of course just makes you feel less rested even though you’ve spent enough time in bed and maybe your sleep tracker even says that you got enough sleep.

Maybe you got seven and a half hours of sleep, but if you woke up five or six times, you’re not gonna feel nearly as rested as if you had only woken up one or two times. And so that’s why I’m a big fan of STEM free. Pulse, I want to have the citraline and beta alanine and BT and the Alpha gpc without the caffeine and theanine.

And so like with many of Legion’s products, when we were looking into creating a STEM free pre-workout, I was hoping that there was enough of a market for it. I was hoping the economics would work because I really wanted to scratch my own itch as well as everybody else’s, as well as sharing it with all of you.

And so that covers everything on my list as to why you should consider trying a stimulant free pre-workout. Even if you plan on continuing to use stimulated pre-workouts with a stem free in the mix, you can avoid the. Post-workout or post stimulant crash, you can still get the benefits from non stimulatory ingredients that will make a difference in your performance and in your results.

Over time, you can avoid unwanted side effects of certain stimulants, not caffeine so much unless intake gets too high, which can cause nausea and jitters and anxiety and. So on. But those side effects are more common with pre-workouts that contain caffeine and other stimulants that can be more powerful and more dangerous than caffeine, like D M AA, for example, which is still in pre-workouts, often not disclosed because it’s not supposed to be in there.

And there are other experimental molecules, stimulants that you’ll find in different pre-workouts that should not be there. That are very under-researched or just not researched at all. If you include a stem free pre-workout in your supplement regimen, you may find that you also get better sleep. And that is gonna make a huge difference in not just your training and your physique, but your general quality of life.

You’re gonna do better in your work. You’re gonna do better in your relationships, you’re gonna. Feel better, you’re gonna look better. There’s research that shows that getting enough sleep can markedly enhance your physical attractiveness, and a ST free pre-workout also allows you to get most or all of your caffeine from other sources that you may like more than.

Pre-workout. And as for specific products, specific STEM free pre-workouts, to try, of course I have to plug my own, I have to plug legion’s pulse, which you can find [email protected]. B U Y L E G I L n.com/pulse. And it contains a clinically effective dose of citruline malate. So that’s eight grams of sit malate and research shows that.

That can improve muscle endurance, reduce muscle soreness, and improve aerobic performance. Uh, pulse also contains 3.6 grams of beta alanine per serving, which reduces feelings of fatigue during your workouts and can improve your work capacity in your workouts. And particularly with anaerobic exercise, which is gonna be great for people who do high intensity weightlifting, for example.

Pulse contains two and a half grams of BT E per serving as well, and studies show that that boosts muscle endurance and increases strength. And finally, it contains 150 milligrams of Alpha gc, which increases power output. And we have a few different flavors to choose from in the STIM free. We have more in the caffeine containing version because that is way more popular, but we do have a few flavors to choose from for STEM free, my favorite.

Is sour apple for what it’s worth. And lastly, if you haven’t tried pulse before, you can rest easy knowing that if you don’t like it for whatever reason, just let us know and we will give you your money back or give you a credit or send you a new flavor. Whatever you’d prefer. With no hoops to jump through, you don’t have to fill out forms, you don’t even have to send anything back to us.

Just let us know, Hey, this didn’t work for me. And we’ll take care of you. So again, if you wanna check it out, buy legion.com/pulse. Well, my lovely listener, that be it for today’s episode of Muscle for Life. Thanks again for joining me and make sure to tune in on Wednesday to hear an interview I did with Ashley Stahl on finding fulfilling work for a better and happier life.

And then on Thursday, there’s another installment of Best of Muscle for Life Coming where you’re going to hear hand. Picked snippets from three of the most popular episodes I have released over the years. And then Friday there’s gonna be another q and a where I’m gonna be talking about the lying versus the seated hamstring curl exercise, which is better weight loss medications and isometric training.

How does it compare to traditional resistance training, and is it worth including in your regimen? All right. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from?

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To listen and you will not miss out on any of the new stuff that I have coming. And last, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike muscle for life.com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback.

All right, thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.