Pre-workouts are a hot topic so in this episode we dig into the ingredients you should avoid and the good ingredients that you should be looking for.
We ask Christine if she actually uses them, or avoids them like the plague.
Muscle Talk - Bodybuilding podcast by International Protein
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If you'd like to learn more about International Protein, visit https://www.international-protein.com/
A Thinkroom production.
https://www.thinkroom.com/
Pre-workouts are a hot topic so in this episode we dig into the ingredients you should avoid and the good ingredients that you should be looking for.
We ask Christine if she actually uses them, or avoids them like the plague.
Muscle Talk - Bodybuilding podcast by International Protein
If you want your own questions answered on our bodybuilding podcast, then join our private Facebook Group and share your ideas, https://www.facebook.com/groups/muscletalk
If you'd like to learn more about International Protein, visit https://www.international-protein.com/
A Thinkroom production.
https://www.thinkroom.com/
Ash Horton:
Our host, the world renowned Christine Envall, an IFBB professional, three times world champion, a mentor, an icon and, of course, a founding co-owner of the best supplements money can buy, International Protein.
Ash Horton:
Pre-workouts are always a hot topic, so in this episode we dig into the ingredients you should be 100% avoiding at all costs, and then we go over the good ingredients that you should be looking for. We also ask Christine if she actually uses pre-workouts or avoids them like the plague.
Ash Horton:
All right, Christine, I want to talk about pre-workouts. There's obviously a bit of controversy around them. Some of them are made illegal, some of them make your veins itch. My question to you is obviously IP stocks and sells pre-workouts, but do you actually use them and believe in them yourself?
Christine Envall:
Cool.
Ash Horton:
And I'm sure there's various different types of pre-workouts as well, so you're going to answer that going, "Yes, but only sometimes." That's my guess.
Christine Envall:
Well, yeah, exactly that, but the pre-workout topic itself I found actually quite controversial. I'm very surprised how some people are really quite adamantly against pre-workouts, and to me, just to say pre-workout, it's very difficult to say because there's so many different categories of pre-workouts. They're something which have really only been around for probably like the last 20 years they've started to really pop out and become a thing, but they're segmented down into so many different categories and to me, a pre-workout is like, what are you trying to get out of it?
Christine Envall:
So, some of them, yes, they are purely full of stims, and I see some that are 100% illegal. I don't know quite how they sell, but I have seen some products where the ingredient names in those read like they're out of a pharmacopeia. They're not food products, they don't have a real space in the food supplement industry, and yet they don't have a listing, and those things are pretty much akin to having some type of amphetamine or some type of, I guess, a narcotic, and that is the bad stuff.
Ash Horton:
Crazy.
Christine Envall:
That is absolutely crazy, and as you said there's some things have been banned, so that's your DMAs and your DMHAs and DBAs and all those things which literally are, I guess, the cousin of speed.
Christine Envall:
I guess that's what made them so popular is because they were like legal speed, and it's one of those things where everyone likes a bit of a rev up and a bit of a stim, so they got really popular because they were popular at the festivals, they were basically an alternative and then [inaudible 00:02:56] walk into a shop and buy something which was really illegal, and I guess that's why they got made illegal.
Christine Envall:
So without going too much into the politics of it, Australia's in a position where we have a very strong food standard which doesn't allow a lot of those ingredients, but the importation side is very weak, so what's permissible in America, and America works under the guise of until it kills somebody, we won't make it illegal, and that's why a lot of things have been taken off the market over the years is because of one by one, something in those products has killed somebody and they become made illegal. But the smart manufacturers over there just kind of tweak the ingredients slightly and make it another ingredient and those ones come into the country and aren't really regulated. They kind of make their way onto the shelves and don't follow any of our regulations.
Christine Envall:
However, enough about that. I want to talk more about, to me, what is a pre-workout? And obviously there's what we just talked about, the stim side of things where there's the high stim ones. So people think of like 500 milligrams of caffeine or 400 milligrams of caffeine, maybe they'll have some synephrine type product, which is your bitter orange, and some of those real hard-hitting ingredients, so everyone is always trying to look for what is the next DMA in the product.
Christine Envall:
And those ones work, I guess, purely by mentally lifting you up, tricking your body into thinking that you're not tired, but they don't necessarily give you any performance advantage. They really are just allowing you to work harder because your body just doesn't know that it's tired.
Christine Envall:
So, I guess that has its place. It's not something that I personally would take because I kind of like to know what's me doing the workout. Am I strong today, am I weak today, how am I feeling? I don't necessarily want something fooling me into thinking that I'm better or worse than I am, because I think that can lead to a point of over-training, it can lead to a point of injury. I also find that as I get older, I tolerate those kind of things a lot less.
Christine Envall:
So, I see that definitely for the younger crowd, not to say that there won't be older people using it, but I definitely see those really high stim products. They're usually the ones which have got the really fancy packaging, look bright and crazy, have some really crazy names, and they're the ones which people get very used to very quickly because of the way that caffeine down-regulates in your body and you need to take more and more of it to get the same effect.
Christine Envall:
So, with a lot of those products are the ones where people, it's like their flavor of the month for six months and then people are looking like, "What's the next thing, what's the next thing?" And that's where manufacturers are trying to find something stronger and stronger.
Christine Envall:
So those kind of products unfortunately do make up a large part of the market, because, again, I'm kind of an old-timer and when I started going to the gym, the people that went to the gym were there because they loved it. It was a passion and it was a lifestyle, and now I kind of feel like with the amount of people that go to the gym, there's probably a good proportion of those people that it's almost like peer pressure: you need to be in the gym because it's where you go. You have to have your Instagram page, you've got to put up your photos, you've got to be talking about your lifts.
Christine Envall:
But your actual passion may not actually be for working out and that's where I see that those people are looking for something that gets them to the gym and motivates them to be in the gym, and they're not necessarily looking at what are they doing to improve their body, how's their performance? It is more just about being there. And again, it's like a party experience a little bit.
Christine Envall:
So, our highest stim product is the War Hammer, and it has 350 milligrams of caffeine. So on that basis of high caffeine, it's on the high side, but it's definitely not on the crazy high side. There have been some changes in the regulations in Australia in December, and it's become official in July, where you can't have more than 5% by weight of caffeine in your product. So that's where that's fine, but that you can have 500 milligrams still if you're serving size is 10 grams, because it's a percentage.
Christine Envall:
But then the flip side of that is you're supposed to then dilute it with a certain amount of water, because you can't sell a product in Australia with more than, I think it's like 320 milligrams or 325 milligrams of caffeine per liter, as made up.
Christine Envall:
So a lot of the pre-workouts that you see is supposed to be made up with a liter or 1.2 liters of water, and then obviously the problem comes that people are making it up in 400 million-
Ash Horton:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:07:20]-
Christine Envall:
... so they're drinking it a lot quicker.
Ash Horton:
... throw it in a cup.
Christine Envall:
Yeah, throw it in a cup. I know there are those big, massive gallon jugs and stuff that people can take to the gym, but I think the problem then comes that it's like how quickly you consume that 350 and 500 milligrams. But then there are people who they do it and they can fall asleep an hour later.
Christine Envall:
So I'm not going to knock it, I'm just going to say me personally, I find it very hard to train on those type of products because I'm used to being able to like, I call it, I guess, internally focus and get mind-muscle connection, and I think if you're buzzing far too much, you can't get that connection, so therefore you're not really getting the most out of your workout. You might be training and you might feel like you're working really, really hard, but is your muscle actually doing the work hard? That remains to be seen.
Christine Envall:
So then on the top of that, you're going to have the dehydration that comes from having too much caffeine, and then as soon as you dehydrate your muscle, your performance goes down.
Christine Envall:
So to me it's like yeah, it's great to give you that lift, and that's where something with a much lower content of caffeine... Like, 200 milligrams, 250 milligrams is probably a way better place to be for a majority of people.
Ash Horton:
How many milligrams in a cup of coffee?
Christine Envall:
It's about 125 in a normal, I guess, what you would buy from... Not a double shot or anything like that. So a double shot, I guess, is kind of pushing it up to that 250 type of marker. A lot of flavoured milk talks about, you know, iced coffee flavoured milk and stuff like that has around about that 125 to 150.
Christine Envall:
So, that kind of a dosage doesn't have too much trouble, it doesn't give too much trouble for most people, but does give that mental lift. And you can't argue with that. Coffee has been studied so much. It also obviously helps with liberating fat from your fat cells, and I think we also talked about how it can decrease muscle soreness after training. So caffeine, I'm not saying-
Ash Horton:
So better to take coffee after training than before.
Christine Envall:
No, no.
Ash Horton:
No?
Christine Envall:
I think it's the in your system, and then the impact is that afterwards, you don't get the soreness afterwards because it was in your system whilst you were training.
Christine Envall:
But like a lot of things, caffeine could be one of those things which is probably best dosed in smaller amounts throughout the day because of how quickly it does actually drop. And I guess just talking a little bit about caffeine as well, when I'm talking about it, I'm talking about either your roasted black coffee, or I'm talking about your caffeine anhydrous, which is the synthetic form of coffee.
Christine Envall:
There's also the coffee that comes in the green coffee bean, which is the bean before it gets roasted and turned into coffee, and that is in its natural form. It's still bound up with chlorogenic acid from the coffee beans, so it is released into the body more slowly. So it's actually a better form, and I'm seeing that come out. I mean, we use it in our Brutal Energy too, and it's sort of a more natural form of coffee in the fact that it's high in release. It's slow release so you're not getting pounded with that huge amount of caffeine all at once.
Ash Horton:
You don't get the jitters.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. Again, it's one of those things where the jitters, to me, is also a little bit personal, because I might go to get a coffee from Zarraffa's, for example, and five times have no trouble, and then one time I'll feel like I get the palpitations and stuff and I'm like, "I didn't order anything different." So whether the barista's made it differently, so there may actually be a different amount, or it just could be that other things are maybe more dehydrated.
Christine Envall:
So I think it's that thing where there's a lot of different factors that go into how it's going to impact somebody, but definitely if you can get a slower release of that caffeine, one, it's not going to crash as quickly, but number two, you're not going to potentially get that feeling of the jitters.
Christine Envall:
Again, one of the things what caffeine does is it does raise your heart rate, it does raise your breathing rate and has an impact on your cardiovascular system, whereas some of the other stims that are around now don't do that. So things like your TeaCrine and your Dynamine are very, very similar to caffeine in the way that they, I guess, block you from feeling tired, but they're a more, either, slower to release. They don't have that sensitivity buildup so you can kind of keep on taking it and you don't need to take more. You're still getting that same reaction out of the same amount even a month or six weeks' later. Longer term, I don't know beyond that. They don't have the impact on the cardiovascular system, so they have the impact on not making you feel tired, but they're not going to give you that stressed feeling of your heart racing, which is one of the negative sides of caffeine.
Christine Envall:
So those are, I guess, some of the more popular ingredients for the stim side of products. Obviously we talked about the synephrine, which I find very interesting with that because it was a cousin, obviously, of ephedrine and that's why it's used. And ephedrine obviously got banned because people died from using it. It's actually still legal in Canada, believe it or not.
Ash Horton:
Oh, wow.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. Ephedrine's sold through the health food stores over there. But with the synephrine in Australia, you're allowed to take, I believe it's 30 milligrams per day, and it used to be that people would take that in three 10-milligram dosages, but now I'm seeing it pretty much in people's products at a 30-milligram one-hit dose, you have your whole lot all in one. And some people get nausea from that and other people don't. But then I was reading a study for people who wanted to sleep and for anxiety, and the bitter orange actually was very good at calming people and helping them sleep
.
Christine Envall:
So, I think it potentially-
Ash Horton:
That's where the report's coming from.
Christine Envall:
I think it also can be, like, we look at bitter orange and we have it because of the synephrine, but there are actually other components in the bitter orange, so I guess it's, again, are you taking more the herbal form, or you're taking something which has been more purified for the active chemical, the active ingredient that's inside of it.
Christine Envall:
That's, I think, the big thing in pre-workouts where there's so much variety and there's so much variation in what you can actually use, and again, the green coffee as an example, you can get ones which are only 40% caffeine, 60% caffeine, 80% caffeine, 98% caffeine. So, the pure and the more caffeine, I guess, then it's kind of less of the other components in there. And there's obviously with a lot of plants, it's not just one component that's got the benefit, there's a whole bunch of different actives in there which are doing things, but one particular one will be more dominant at doing a particular thing. So that's the stim side of it.
Christine Envall:
Now, the stims generally are backed up with a bunch of other ingredients, so some of the more common ingredients which are in pre-workouts are things like your beta-alanine and your citrulline. And I'm going to call those two out because they are probably, behind creatine, are fairly well researched and they are fairly well proven, I guess, to do some things.
Christine Envall:
So, if I'm looking for a pre-workout and I want something which actually helps me work out harder, or actually helps me to do better in my workout, then I would be looking for those kind of ingredients. Because taking the stim side out of it, which, like I say, I can get a lot of motivation just from myself, or if I'm a little bit tired, a small amount of caffeine's not a problem, but if you actually want something which is going to help you get a pump or work out longer, take longer till you fatigue, and this is both weight training or endurance training, and then those are the kind of ingredients which do actually work.
Christine Envall:
The problem, I guess, with something like citrulline is you do have to take a big amount of it. You've got to take around about your six grams of your citrulline malate, or around 4.5 grams of your pure citrulline. So, just the difference there is that obviously one has a malic acid molecule bound with it, which was meant to make it more soluble and better uptaken, but I think they've realized that the citrulline still does get absorbed quite well.
Christine Envall:
Just interestingly, most of the studies for weight training were done on malate and most of the studies for endurance were done on citrulline. But I'm seeing in the supplement world a crossover of who's using what, and at the end of the day, I think your body still treats it pretty much the same way, and if you're trying to get more bang for your buck, obviously you use the citrulline so you don't have to put as much in there. But essentially, that's trying to just basically…
Christine Envall:
I've gone blank here because I've been talking about it all the time.
Ash Horton:
A lot of this has just gone straight over my head, but that's okay.
Christine Envall:
Oh, is that why you're looking at me blank, Ash? But, yeah, it really just allows you to work longer, I guess. You don't get that fatigue factor. It's basically, in your body, it turns into arginine, so just taking a history lesson here. The first pre-workout…
Ash Horton:
Dumb it down for simple people.
Christine Envall:
Simple people. When pre-workouts first came out, they all were loaded up with arginine, and the reason we put arginine in there was because that created nitric oxide in the body and that increased blood flow, which when you're trying to work out, you want to have more blood flow, get some more nutrients to the muscle. The more that you can get that around your body, the harder that you can work, the longer that you can work. It also helps with recovery obviously, because if you're still got the blood flushing around your body afterwards, you can take the toxins out and all that.
Christine Envall:
So, the thing with arginine, it's very rate limiting, so just putting more arginine in didn't allow that reaction in your body to continue. It basically limits out at a certain point. So something like citrulline is a better way of delivering the arginine to the body, so you're getting your pumps and things that you used to get from the arginine, but the citrulline has a different mechanism, and that's where that comes in.
Christine Envall:
Then something like your beta-alanine basically is stopping your body getting too acidic, and often it's the acidity which stops you from being able to work because of the burn in the muscle kind of shuts it down, so the beta-alanine essentially is stopping that from happening.
Christine Envall:
Now, that's the one that gives you the tingles, but the tingles aren't related to the effectiveness of the product. So it's like the tingling thing is like a side effect, it's not a…
Ash Horton:
The itchy veins?
Christine Envall:
Yeah. Unfortunately that's just part and parcel of it, but the interesting thing with citrulline and with beta-alanine is we do load them up in our pre-workouts, but they're a buildup thing. They're not something where if you've never taken it before, you take it, you're not going to get really any noticeable difference out of that first time that you take it. You do need to take them for something like seven to 14 days-
Ash Horton:
Okay.
Christine Envall:
... a buildup effect, and a lot of the studies on beta-alanine in particular, they're dosed in... Like, people'll be taking those around four times a day, splitting that dosage up into four times a day. And they talk about the total dosage over the period of the study, they don't talk about, oh, 3.2 grams in one serving. But obviously, nobody wants to sit there taking a drink four times a day to benefit their workout, so we bung it all into that one pre-workout.
Christine Envall:
But technically, you could take your beta-alanine throughout the day at smaller dosages and over a period of time you're still going to get the benefit out of that particular product, and citrulline's pretty much the same. It's the buildup kind of effect. So, that's those kind of ingredients.
Christine Envall:
What I'm going to talk about, the Brutal Pump that International Protein does, because it is essentially a non-stim product, so we've left all of the caffeine, all of those stim type of products out of there. And it doesn't have citrulline in it, but it's called Pump, and obviously citrulline's associated with being a pump ingredient.
Christine Envall:
But it has a very cool ingredient, and I'm going to pronounce this wrong, is nitrosigine, or nitrosigine, if you're in a America, which is a trademarked ingredient by a company called Nutrition21, which does some incredibly cool sports supplements. They put a lot of research in and they have some really interesting ingredients, and obviously their focus is purely improving sports performance.
Christine Envall:
What this ingredient is, again, it's arginine bound with a silicate, and what they've found is it's actually four times more effective than just arginine on its own. So essentially, how we talked about arginine being rate limiting, so in the studies that they've done, it's essentially as good as citrulline in terms of improving performance, increasing the blood flow and also helps with the elasticity of your vessels, and veins, which is coming from the silicate.
Christine Envall:
So, that to us is a kind of more futuristic ingredient, or it's a more phase two type of ingredient, because you're doing the same kind of thing with a product that you only need to take, like, 750 milligrams to 1.5 grams, not that 4.5 to 6 grams. So, the less that you need to put into your body like that, the less chance you have of stomach upsets, of having to take a whole bunch of stuff that you don't necessarily want to have in your system.
Christine Envall:
So that's, I guess, the key ingredient that we put into our Brutal Pump to help with that vasodilation and the improving recovery post-workout as the blood continues to flow. But it also has an ingredient called Actinox, which was made famous, I think, in a product years ago called Black Powder, and again, it's helping to convert that arginine into the nitric oxide and give you that pump and give you that greater blood flow. I guess that's obviously not a new ingredient. It's a very much been around forever and a day kind of ingredient, but that was one that we've added in.
Christine Envall:
So essentially what that product is trying to do is trying to improve performance via actual performance, not just tricking yourself into thinking that you're performing better, but we have put in some cool things to stop you from feeling tired. And we have another ingredient, which is called Fatigue Fighter, but it's coming from a peptide, so it's coming from a protein, not from a stimulant type source.
Christine Envall:
Essentially what that's doing is kind of telling your brain that it's blocking the dopamine which makes you tired, and apparently when you work out, your body produces more of that. So it's kind of like you're working out and your body's fighting against you telling you you're tired, even if you're not. Isn't that cruel?
Ash Horton:
It is.
Christine Envall:
The body actually does that. But what this ingredient does is it, as I said, it's basically a dairy peptide, but it's being utilised in a way that it helps to block that from happening. It stops your brain from thinking that it's tired. So we're giving you that mental lift without giving you the stim effect, because it's working in a totally different way to what caffeine does.
Ash Horton:
[inaudible 00:21:24] I want some.
Christine Envall:
Good. Because it also has the [inaudible 00:21:28] in it, so it has the creatine-
Ash Horton:
[crosstalk 00:21:28].
Christine Envall:
I love this supplement because it doesn't make you feel worn down, and I think that's the problem with a lot of the stim products. And again, we could go on forever talking about this because we're going to do a podcast on sleep one time, Ash, because of how important sleep is. But essentially if you're taking too many stims late at night, then you're struggling to sleep and then you're into a cycle where you need those stims to then get going again.
Ash Horton:
It's not a good routine.
Christine Envall:
Not a good routine, because then you can be tricking your body into thinking you're okay, but you're actually over-training, so therefore all your gains and everything are lacking.
Christine Envall:
So, just coming back on track, that's why I say, a pre-workout, it really depends what you're taking it for, what you're trying to get out of it. If you are actually trying to get some extra strength, you're actually trying to get some extra endurance and better performance, then you want to look for something which has more of those ingredients which do actually improve performance, rather than just kind of trick you into not feeling tired.
Christine Envall:
Those ones will come in handy, obviously, if you're prepping for a show and you're really at that point where your calorie deficit, you've been dieting for eight weeks and you're really starting to feel tired, then there's probably a time and a place for those kind of products. But in your off-season, you really need to get off of those and let your body, I guess, come to its natural state, clean out and not be a crutch.
Christine Envall:
Because I think one thing that I always thought when I was competing and training is I didn't want to make anything a crutch. There's assistance that you need when you're at a particular point in your prep, and then it's the same thing whether it be fat burners, whether it be anything, you want to make sure there's a point where you know what is you and what has enhanced you and what has assisted you. Because as you go in and as you get older, you need more assistance, so you don't want to have used up all your assistance cards.
Christine Envall:
It's like that phone a friend and all those lifelines in those TV shows, you don't want to use them all up when you're in a very able state. It's like wait till you get over 40, wait till you get over 50, which is a point, as I've kind of delved into a lot of these pre-workout stuff, things like your beta-alanines and your citrullines are more beneficial to older people, because we have that decline in our natural function, and younger people will get a benefit, but older people get more of a benefit.
Christine Envall:
It's something where I hadn't really thought about that as I got older, because as I said, there's kind of a controversy around supplements. Do you need them? Can you try to get everything naturally out of food? And the simple answer is that they're an anti-aging tool as well, in terms of physical anti-aging.
Christine Envall:
So, yeah, your creatine, your citrulline, your beta-alanine, to me they're your top three for actual ingredients which will actually help your performance, and particularly as you get older, will have a big benefit to what you're doing.
Christine Envall:
But, as I said, I'm jumping all around about the place here, but the Brutal Pump to me is a very cool ingredient because it's really good for endurance sports, because we also have the hydration ingredients in there. So we have the electrolytes and we have another ingredient which is basically a glycerol based ingredient which attracts the water into the body, so if you're doing long distance work and you are losing a lot of fluid, then it's obviously allowing you to go longer in that way. And then also in weight training we talked about how if your muscle water level goes down too much, you'll actually lose strength, you lose performance.
Christine Envall:
So we want to keep those things going and it all works in... As your blood flow increases, your blood volume increases, you need more water, so it has to all come in. And that's, again, where that high caffeine is fighting against that, because you're essentially dehydrating yourself and you can knock out any performance benefit that you get by being dehydrated, but you don't realize it because your body thinks it's great.
Christine Envall:
So, yeah, it's a complex area. As I said, I've done, I guess, some talks on my Facebook page and we've talked for about two hours and we still haven't covered... Because I didn't even really get into the cognitive ingredients, which I'm told are the next wave of pre-workouts, and I will quickly talk about that because the next wave of pre-workouts is actually for gamers and e-sport people.
Ash Horton:
Interesting.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. Which it's not like for us people who get in the-
Ash Horton:
So they can move their thumbs faster?
Christine Envall:
Concentrate, react quicker, not get tired, because think about the length-
Ash Horton:
It's a massive industry, isn't it?
Christine Envall:
Massive-
Ash Horton:
It's huge.
Christine Envall:
... big dollars, but it's endurance. So apparently they like medium caffeine because they can't be going to the toilet all the time. They can't break off-
Ash Horton:
[crosstalk 00:25:54].
Christine Envall:
... from the game. And they need something also that suppresses their appetite because they don't get a chance to break off and eat, but they have to have that lightening reaction. They need to be able to switch tasks, switch from one task to another, and that's where a lot of the ingredients that I'm seeing in pre-workouts are also focused around that, where you have the ability to go from one task to another.
Christine Envall:
Now, again, in a traditional weight training session, it's not a super fast activity. So I don't know if that counts as going from spotting your friend to doing the actual exercise, like if that takes a big mental stress, but it could. If you're calorie deficient, going under a lot of heavy weight, then you can get that little bit of... You kind of zone out.
Christine Envall:
So a lot of the ingredients, too, around the... I call them the mood and mindset ingredients, like your cholines and your Alpha-GPCs and your choline bitartrates, your theanine, your juglans, which is your walnut extract, all of those ones are all in there really to help with cognitive performance.
Christine Envall:
So, as I said, for weight training, how useful that is, maybe not, maybe is, depending on how hard you train, but definitely people who do sport where you are having to think of a lot of different things and think of players and remember players and react, because unpredictable, or a lot of those outdoor events where people are having to do a lot of combat style things, and again, they come up against different conditions, then those kind of ingredients are probably going to be very beneficial for those kind of people.
Christine Envall:
And again, in a race, a tactical race, a long endurance bike race, for example, where you got fatigue, your mentally fatigued, physically fatigued, but you still have to be making decisions about where you're going to sit in the pack or when you're going to brake, or a lot of different things like that where those type of ingredients can be useful, but they're really in their infancy in terms of research.
Christine Envall:
There's definitely research there around them, but whether they're beneficial if you're, for example, not tired, are they going to help? Are they going to boost you up if you're not tired? Maybe not. But if you're tired and under stress, and that can be under physical stress condition-wise like cold, hot, extreme heat, extreme cold, those kind of conditions, whether they actually work until you're in that state, I think that's where the research is kind of... You know, the jury's still out so to speak.
Christine Envall:
But I guess the point of it is that there's so much focus in this area with the companies that make a lot of the speciality ingredients, the trademarked ingredients, that it's an area which is just going to continue to grow and develop a lot, and the thing with all of these products is you really need to try it yourself to know, because, as I said, what one person loves, another person hates.
Christine Envall:
I remember trying a product called [Mister Hyde 00:28:38], or something, and I remember the fan was going around in the gym and it was creating a strobe light with the light.
Ash Horton:
Tripping you out.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. It's very hard to train on that, and again, that's not what training's about. You want to be able to-
Ash Horton:
[crosstalk 00:28:52]-
Christine Envall:
... go in the gym-
Ash Horton:
... pretty close to LSD.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. And I'm like, "Never again." That was like on half a third. That was in America too, that wasn't in Australia by the way. But yeah, and to me that just killed the workout. You want to be able to focus.
Christine Envall:
For me, like I say, I need to be able to focus internally, get that really good mind-muscle connection, and I find that's better from things more like your acetyl-L-carnitines and your tyrosines and those type of ingredients, rather than the high stim ones.
Christine Envall:
The TeaCrine, I basically talked about that at the start. That's a really great focus ingredient, but to me it goes way beyond your sports performance because it lasts so long, so if you take it in the morning, you're good all day. You'll be at work just firing, Ash. You'll just be like-
Ash Horton:
[inaudible 00:29:38].
Christine Envall:
Yeah, dealing with this problem. This problem comes at you, you've got no problem.
Christine Envall:
So, I think there's also another area of executive performance and stuff like that where those type of ingredients will come into it, and then there's all the memory ones and that. So, it's a ever-growing area.
Ash Horton:
You need to create that drug. What is it? Did you see the movie where they took the-
Christine Envall:
Limitless?
Ash Horton:
Limitless. Yes.
Christine Envall:
Yes.
Ash Horton:
You need one of them.
Christine Envall:
But as you see on that, I think you get very rundown. Was that the one where if they didn't get it, they got super-
Ash Horton:
[crosstalk 00:30:08] for a while, though.
Christine Envall:
Well-
Ash Horton:
You could run for a while.
Christine Envall:
Well that's a pre-workout, so that's what I'm saying. If you're competitive bodybuilder on-season, off-season, then I would try to get off the stim pre-workouts off-season, because you don't really need to have them. You want to give your body somewhere to go, you want to make sure that all of your receptors are fresh, and you want to look at potentially the ones which are actually doing something for your body and for your performance and your growth and that, your creatines and citrullines and beta-alanineas, which is, to me, they're like the meat and potatoes of the supplements for performance.
Christine Envall:
But then, as I said, there's whole other area which is emerging around the mindset and the mood and feeling good and wanting to be in the gym and thinking that you feel great, which comes in handy when you are close to a show and prepping, but as far as do you need it when you're just going for your general workout Monday to Friday when you're not actually competing, then I would say try to stay off of that kind of stuff.
Christine Envall:
But sales tell me otherwise that people just love stims, but all the people that I know and talk to don't. But, yeah, that's just a brief summary on pre-workouts.
Ash Horton:
Fascinating. So, what are the ingredients you should look out for to stay the hell away from?
Christine Envall:
Well, I think most of those have been taken out of the pre-workout products as far as I can see at the moment.
Ash Horton:
It's within Australia, right?
Christine Envall:
Within Australia.
Ash Horton:
Because it's well regulated. But let's talk about internationally. There's a lot of international products on the market.
Christine Envall:
It's a difficult one to say because there's names that I can't even pronounce, so if you can't pronounce the name and it sounds like a chemical... If it sounds like a herb, then you're probably going to be relatively safe, but if like, as I said, I come across a formulation recently and I took one look at it and I'm like, "Oh, God. What is this?" Because the methyl, ethyl, something which sounds very chemical-y is generally something to stay away from.
Christine Envall:
But if it's looking like it just has caffeine, as I said, bitter orange is limited in how much you can have, so make sure it's not got more than that 30 milligrams per serving, those kind of things you won't have too much trouble with. It's the amount of caffeine that you may have trouble with.
Christine Envall:
But that's what I'm saying, you really need to kind of, I guess, test things for yourself, because, for example, as you know, we make a lot of products and with a lot of the herbal type ingredients there's some really weird flavours, and we were looking at some different flavours to try to mask those notes, and the team had me try 13 different levels of this masker on a fat burning product. It shouldn't really seem to have too much in it that was very dangerous or anything like that, but it definitely gave me a buzz. They did it to me at four o'clock in the afternoon, which was probably a little late for me.
Ash Horton:
You didn't sleep that night at all, did you?
Christine Envall:
No, it wasn't good, it wasn't good. And I was talking so fast.
Ash Horton:
So you used the word dangerous before. Obviously there is a danger in using too much pre-workout. What are the real dangers that you see? Is it just quantity?
Christine Envall:
It's quantity and time, because as I said, you kind of get into that state where you're forcing your brain to release different chemicals, which there isn't an endless supply, and it's much like with the rundown of narcotics and the cycle that goes with that, you're going to get that same kind of thing where you're basically pumping these chemicals out of your brain and they run out and that's what leaves you flat.
Christine Envall:
So that's kind of like the mental side of it, so you're basically mentally tired and then, I guess, people look at taking other things to try to counteract that and build that back up, but it's not really how you want to do it. You just want to let your brain naturally have those ingredients.
Christine Envall:
But again, this is why, I guess, people put in the mind-soothing ingredients like your theanine and your cholines and those kind of things, because I guess they're trying to counteract that effect. But to me, from a physical point of view, it's that not realising that you're rundown, and again, appetite suppression, not eating properly so you're not recovering properly, maybe training harder, training longer than what... There's that point between what you need to stimulate your body, and then there's that point where you've gone too far and you run it down.
Christine Envall:
And for me, particularly if you're getting ready for a show, you are on a knife's edge because you're calorie deficient and you're wanting to suppress your appetite, and you're wanting to train harder, and you're wanting to do more cardio and all that kind of stuff, but you need to be still aware of listening to your body and knowing when it's just you being lazy and when it's physically you've just run yourself down.
Christine Envall:
And I do see a lot of people who, I guess, they turn into string beans on stage because they've really gone at it a little bit too hard, and then of course with those type of products there is an addictive cycle of needing to feel good and needing it to pick you back up again.
Christine Envall:
I liken it to, I don't know if other people relate to this, but when you kind of just feel real scratchy, not scratchy, itchy, but you just feel like you want to rip someone's head off and everything's too hard and you just feel like just tired and irritable, and that's that kind of crash and that's what comes from using too much. Obviously you take another serve and it takes all that away, but that to me is an addictive cycle.
Ash Horton:
At that stage, though, should people just chill out and just take a week, just let the body [crosstalk 00:35:21]? Depends where... I mean, if you're preparing for a show it's a different story, but they should definitely relax in some form or fashion, yeah?
Christine Envall:
Yeah, and that's the thing, it really depends on your circumstances. If you're getting ready for a show, then it's like you know that it's going to be tough a certain way, but you need to look and say, "Am I losing a lot of muscle with my body fat here? Does my body look right?" Because there's a kind of an over-trained look where people start to look very flat and very shrunken, as well as they are getting lean, but they're losing a lot of that muscle fullness.
Christine Envall:
So this is where you really need to have someone that you trust to look at you and be able to tell that difference, because to try to do it yourself is very difficult because your mind…
Christine Envall:
Take all of these pre-workouts and everything out of it, just your mind coming up to a show and the tricks that it plays on you in terms of how you're looking, different lighting, different time of day, different mirror, you look different in every one, so you've got to have that person who's more objective, less subjective, to kind of say, "Look, hey, you look like you're dropping out way too much size because you're running yourself down.”
Christine Envall:
Because it is a situation where yeah, if it was comfortable and easy, it wouldn't be what it is. Unfortunately that is part of bodybuilding, but in terms of the ingredients to stay away from is like it is such a personal thing, because some people don't like the beta-alanine, they don't like it at that dosage, and yet it's such a great ingredient. Other products I find I get a headache. No matter how much water I drink, I find that the wear-off effect is a definite headache and other people don't notice that at all.
Christine Envall:
So that's what I'm saying, any product, if you know you don't like stims, don't go for a product that has high stims in it. And again, everyone's different. Some people can tolerate zero caffeine and other people can tolerate 100 milligrams, other people 200, other people 500.
Christine Envall:
So, as I said, it's kind of like one of the ingredients that got a bit of a bad name, I think, was juglans, the English walnut, because overseas they were putting some form of DMA or something in it, like an actual chemical but putting the herbal on the label just for the sake of trying to get it through, so some reason people associated those two ingredients.
Christine Envall:
Now, it's something that we do use in the factory. We've had it tested, it doesn't contain that illegal compound, and that particular ingredient has good studies behind it around cognitive function. So that's a great thing for older people, and it's a really good thing for mental function, but it's got a bit of a bad reputation because of that.
Christine Envall:
But as I said, we have one product where the customer has asked us to reduce the amount of the bitter orange because their customers feel nauseous, and then we have four other companies that we make for through the Prestige side of the business who have no issue with it.
Christine Envall:
So, it is a very personal thing, depending on who the market is. But if something doesn't feel good, you get a headache from it, then probably stay away from it. Stay off it, try to look for something else. And that's why-
Ash Horton:
So that sort of leads into my next question. Who shouldn't be using pre-workouts?
Christine Envall:
Oh. Beginners. I'm going to say straight-up, if you're joining up at the gym and you're trying to get into weight training or you're trying to get into any kind of physical fitness, you've got that initial period of your body getting used to training. You need your protein, you need to get your nutrition sorted out, but stay away from the pre-workouts, even if it's what I call the good stuff, the good ingredients. Let your body find that fitness level because you get so many gains and so much benefit out of that, then start to look at things like your pre-workout.
Christine Envall:
So people who are…
Ash Horton:
You need to cycle it, so don't be on it all the time.
Christine Envall:
Yeah, and cycling, it doesn't mean going from one stim product to the next stim product and changing brand. And again-
Ash Horton:
You stay with International Protein.
Christine Envall:
Of course you stay... Switch between your Brutal Pump and your War Hammer, or your Brutal Energy and your War Hammer, but time and a place for everything, and that's what I say, we try to put a option forward which doesn't have the ingredients which really run your body down. I try to create products which build your body up, which help your body recover and help you work harder, rather than ones which trick you into thinking that you're doing great.
Christine Envall:
So, again, that's where the Brutal Pump comes in, but it's not the sexy product and it definitely doesn't sell how the War Hammer does, because a lot of people just want that heavy stim. But as I said, if you're looking for something which is effective and you can use it long-term, then that's more of the product that you would go for.
Ash Horton:
All right, well this is fascinating stuff. Christine, thank you very much. Always a pleasure.
Christine Envall:
And hopefully we get some questions out of this one, because, as I said, there's so much more you can talk about with pre-workouts and go deep on each ingredient, so if people have questions then they can pop them up on the Aussie Muscle Guru Facebook page.
Ash Horton:
Words of wisdom. If you like what you've heard, recognize that these tips are free. So show your support by becoming a loyal International Protein customer by jumping online, hunt our product down and hit that Buy Now button
Ash Horton:
So once again, like, share and subscribe to our podcast so we can continue to bring you these episodes from our one and only Aussie Muscle Guru, three times world champion, Christine Envall.