I don’t take a pre-workout before every session
I get asked this enough that I’d rather write it down once and point people at it. No, I don’t take a pre-workout before every session. Some weeks I take El Chapo before most of them. Some weeks I take it twice and that’s it. That isn’t me being cagey about my own product and it isn’t me hedging. I treat it as a decision I make about the session in front of me, and some sessions get one and some don’t.
So this is how I pick. Not what you should do. Just what I do, and why.
The sessions that get one
It comes down to whether I’ve decided in advance that the session matters. There’s usually one or two in a week that I’ve been building toward, where I’ve got a number in my head and I’d be annoyed with myself for turning up half interested. Those get one. The long ones get one too, where I know I’m going to be in there a while and I want to walk in treating it as a proper piece of work rather than something I’m squeezing in between two other things.
Training with someone else counts as well. If I’ve told a buddy I’m meeting him, the session is already on the calendar and it’s already a bit more serious than a solo hour, and I’ll treat it that way from the kitchen onward.
Then there’s the other half of it, which I don’t think people are honest about. The ritual. Making it takes two minutes. Two minutes of standing at the counter doing nothing else, not looking at my phone, not answering anybody. By the time I’ve finished, my head is in the session instead of in my inbox. That has nothing to do with what’s in the tub and everything to do with the two minutes, and I’d be lying if I said it mattered to me less than the rest of it. The session has started before I’ve left the house.
The sessions that don’t
Short days. If I’m in for forty minutes of accessory work I’m not making anything, I’m just going. Same with the days where I’m tired and I’ve already accepted the session is maintenance. I’ve got no interest in dressing up a going-through-the-motions day as something bigger. It still counts. It’s still worth turning up for. It’s just not a day I need to make a decision about.
Time of day does a lot of the work here too. If I’m training late I skip it. That’s a preference about how I like my evenings to run and I’m going to leave it at that.
And then there’s a rule I keep for myself, which is that I don’t want it going automatic on me. If I catch myself having stopped deciding, reaching for it because that’s the thing I do at that hour, I leave it alone for a few sessions. No reason more complicated than wanting it to stay a choice. That’s sort of the whole point of this post.
Four flavors makes it a different question
El Chapo comes in four flavors, Blue Razz, Fruit Punch, Tiger Blood and Tropical Paradise, and I didn’t expect this bit to matter, but having more than one open at a time changes the decision completely.
With one tub open it’s yes or no. With two or three open it stops being yes or no and turns into which one, and that’s a better question to be standing there asking yourself, because it makes you check in with what you’re in the mood for instead of running on autopilot. Some days one of them sounds right and the others don’t. Fine, that’s the one. And some days I look at all of them and none of them appeal, and that’s information as well. More often than not that was a session that was never going to need one.
The other thing rotating does is stop it getting boring, and boring is how a habit dies. I’ve gone off things I liked purely because I had the same one forty times in a row. Lana will tell you I do this with food as well, so it’s not a gym thing, it’s a me thing.
What I’ve got on the other days
Skipping a pre-workout doesn’t mean skipping everything. On the days El Chapo stays in the cupboard I’m still having CREATINE MONO and AMINO AF BCAA + EAA, and I’d be having those anyway, because those two aren’t part of this decision at all. They’re just in the day. Training day, rest day, traveling, doesn’t matter, they don’t get a vote.
That’s the distinction I’d draw if I had to draw one. El Chapo is a variable and I decide about it every time. Those two are constants and I think about them roughly as much as I think about brushing my teeth, which is to say not at all until I’ve forgotten.
Which is also, I figure, why the constants are the ones people quit. There’s nothing to notice about them. Nothing about a wet Tuesday makes you feel clever for having had one. A thing you decide about stays interesting, and a thing you never decide about quietly falls off the list during a busy week and doesn’t come back, and you don’t even notice that it’s gone. If you’ve done that with either of those two, you know exactly what I mean, and there’s no lecture coming from me because I’ve done it as well.
The short version
No, not every session needs one. Mine don’t. The ones that get it are the ones I’d already decided mattered that week, and the ones that don’t are still sessions and they still count.
My son is getting into training now and I’m not going to pretend that watching him start hasn’t had me looking at my own routine a bit harder. When somebody begins from nothing, every single thing they do is a choice, because they haven’t got any habits yet to hide behind. Twenty-some years in, most of what I do I stopped choosing a long time ago. Getting older has a way of pointing that out to you as well. This is one I still choose, every time, and I’d like to keep it that way.
That’s the honest answer. If you take one before every session and you’ve thought about it and it’s what you want, good, that’s a decision too. I’d just rather you made it on purpose than looked up one day and found you’d been doing it. Go and have a look at mine if you want to see what I’m deciding between, El Chapo is the variable and CREATINE MONO and AMINO AF BCAA + EAA are the two that just live in the day.
Stay Swole,
Justin 💪