Despite the presence of various healthful supplements available on the market, many people are still unaware of the best way to use these supplements to improve their wellbeing and lifestyle.
Included in this long list of misunderstood and misused supplements are pre-workouts.
Although pre-workout supplements can provide many positive benefits – including providing a healthy dose of energy and helping you perform your best in the gym – many people continue to shy away from using them when they’re attempting to bulk up.
Why? It all comes down to a lack of understanding about how pre-workout supplements work, and skepticism about whether or not they really do what manufacturers say they do.
So, what’s the verdict: do pre-workout supplements build muscle? And what is the best pre-workout for muscle building?
What Builds Muscle?
Simply put, building muscle is about providing the right amount of stimulus to your muscles to induce damage, repair, and growth.
When you use your muscles during exercise, they endure damage in the form of microscopic tears to the individual muscle fibers. In response to this stress, your muscle fibers repair themselves by fusing together to form newer, stronger muscle fiber strands. These renewed strands are thicker and hardier, and allow the muscle overall to grow in strength and size.
This growth also helps you to be better prepared for your next workout, allowing you to lift heavier weights and increase your endurance gradually over time.
While all types of exercise can stimulate this process of damage, repair and muscle hypertrophy (growth) to some extent, certain exercises are definitely more effective than others.
Specifically, lifting heavy weights to failure has been found to produce the most significant results. As the phrase “to failure” suggests, this training method is all about forcing your muscles to work until they simply cannot perform another rep.
As you might imagine, this is an intense type of training that requires serious motivation, determination, and willpower. But for anyone looking to spur serious muscle growth, it’s one of the most tried and true options.
The Role of Pre-Workouts
So how do pre-workout supplements contribute toward muscle hypertrophy? As mentioned, building impressive muscle is all about training to failure.
Well, a high quality, reliable pre-workout supplement will help you to do exactly that. By providing you with a healthy boost of energy and increased ability to focus, pre-workouts can allow you to work at higher intensities for longer periods of time.
This also means that you may be able to train and lift at a more intense level before failure occurs. As a result, your muscles will be challenged more than they otherwise might be without the pre-workout supplement.
All in all, this allows your muscles to receive a greater amount of stimulus, spurring more efficient muscle growth.
How to Choose the Best Pre-workout For Muscle Building
When shopping for a pre-workout to help you build muscle mass, there are few things that you'll definitely want to keep an eye out for on the label, to ensure you’re choosing a clean and premium supplement.
First, avoid any supplements that contain unnecessary or potentially harmful artificial ingredients. These types of ingredients might be added for flavor, appearance, coloring, texture or as preservatives.
In many cases, however, these substances are really only used to cover up the inferior quality of the other ingredients used in the blend by making it appear thicker, more flavorful, or smoother.
Similarly, you’ll want to avoid pre-workout supplements that contain “proprietary blends,” which contain multiple ingredients listed under one single label, without specifying the exact amounts of the various ingredients used in that blend.
This labeling tactic is commonly used to cover up unsavory ingredients or disguise the amounts used of each ingredient, to the benefit of the manufacturer. A quality manufacturer should be able and willing to be transparent about what’s in their supplement!
Finally, look for ingredients that will actively contribute toward your goal. So for muscle building, you'll want an effective stimulant like caffeine, which provides a nice natural burst of energy during your workout. Ergogenics – substances that increase your strength and endurance – are also important and should be included in your supplement.
The most commonly used and scientifically backed substances in this class include creatine and beta-alanine.
Naked Nutrition is proud to offer a clean, unflavored pre-workout supplement that has been formulated with only premium, non-GMO ingredients: Naked Energy.
This supplement contains no sweeteners, colors, flavors or other artificial ingredients, and ensures that you receive everything you need to enhance your athletic performance in a single dose.
