How to Create a Pre-workout?

Chad Waterbury recommended many moons ago when Tnation was in its infancy:

Protein Powder, BCAAs, and a Banana.
Replace the banana with cyclic dextrin

Alan Aragon if I recall recommends 50/50 mix Protein/Carbs about .25 per LB
so 220 LB man gets 55g of each

Lyle McDonald recommends just a little less. something like .13-23 per LB

Now if you want:
Add Creatine
Mix with Coffee or Green Tea
Mix a small packet of electrolytes
Basics Bought in bulk making each drink under $1.00 US
You can control all the ingredients and amount

These are all roughly 30 minutes prior to workout.

The rest of the ingredients you mentioned can be researched at Examine and you will see they are not the best bang for your buck.

Stick with the basics. Thats what all the aforementioned professionals have done.

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I’ll quote myself,
Adding a carb to this mixture is a great idea as well as a fast acting protein.

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I personally like Poliquin’s advice which, in summary, is large amounts of BCAAs pre and intra (circa 40g). Adding beta alanine and citrulline malate is also a no brainer. This is a typical Poliquin prescription for fat folk (i.e. those above 10% BF) which, sadly, includes me. I find I can pick up quality flavoured powdered BCAA in 4/1/1 ratio cheaply these days, so it is an inexpensive stack.

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It’s not the amount of sugar calories n Gatorade. It’s the type of sugar.

what part of that do you not understand? electrolytes are one of the most important components in a workout drink, because they become depleted pretty much instantly in an intense workout. I mentioned sodium specifically, because I think that’s the MOST important electrolyte, probably followed by potassium.

As to the carbs
 Highly branched cyclic dextrin is a good place to start. That is the preferred carb source. Are you not understanding that carb sources vary tremendously in effectiveness, or are you asking why you would have a carb source in the first place?

You really don’t seem to have a strong grasp of the basic concepts of quality preworkout nutrition, based on your original suggestions, or your follow up questions. I don’t understand why you would want ‘more control’, when you’re not particularly educated on the subject. You really shouldn’t have had to ask me why electrolytes or carbs are important. That’s about as basic as it gets.

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I never feigned any type of knowledge in regard to pre workout even starting I had never tried one. I was just trying to learn the basics of what one would be and how to make one.

I do want control over what goes in hence why I even asked how to make one. The help is much appreciated and I wasn’t trying to be a dick or anything towards anyone that provided help.

Like Flip and some other have said, I’ve never seen a homemade concoction that ends up with comparable ingredients and dosages and is less expensive.

$300 would get you 6 bags of SWF, which will last 132 workouts and ends up at about $1.90 per workout. Add on a few cents if you get creatine too. So, there’s that.

I still don’t really get what “I want control over what goes in” means, especially when you’re saying you don’t know anything about the ingredients to begin with. It would seem to make a lot more sense to use something that was specifically designed for what you’re trying to do.

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Exactly. The key is comparable ingredients.

I’ve priced out essentially every single ingredient, in raw form, that goes into SWF, Mag 10, and Plazma. I’ve also tried to ‘recreate’ these formulas with some slight alterations, leaving out certain ingredients that, in my opinion, are less important than others. The problem I ran into was that the ingredients that I found to be truly essential, which were the HBCD’s and the hyrdolyzed casein, are the bulk of the cost. If you leave one or the other of these out, or replace them with a lower quality source, then yes, you can save money. But even replacing the HBCD’s with something like waxy maize didn’t save me enough money to justify it. And recreating the ENTIRE formula of any of these products ended up being more expensive than the biotest products, unless I was buying in HUGE bulk (talking thousands of dollars at this point). I would be willing to be my ‘raw’ source is the same as yours, solemn. I won’t mention it here because it’s a competitor, but there is one major US source that does this.

Keep in mind that biotest already IS buying in bulk, which is why they can save you money in the first place.

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So basically SWF will ultimately be the best bang for my buck? I’ll try it out.

They both trouble me.

What’s the company?