How to pick a pre-workout flavor you’ll actually finish
There’s a cupboard in this house where all the tubs end up, and every time I get into it there’s more in there than I’d have guessed. Some of them are open, and some of those are sitting around half full because I started them, drank them for a while, then quietly stopped.
What stopped me had nothing to do with what was in them. I just didn’t fancy drinking them anymore.
I’ve been buying this stuff a long time and I still do that. lol.
So I want to talk about flavor, which is the bit everyone treats as the last box to tick once they’ve made all the decisions they think are the important ones.
Flavor isn’t the trivial bit
You can read all day about what goes into a pre-workout. There are comparisons and breakdowns and people arguing about it in comment sections at midnight. What you’ll almost never read is anything about which one you’ll still want to drink on a wet Tuesday in February, when you’re tired, you’ve got forty minutes, and turning up at all is the hard part.
That’s the one that decides whether a tub gets finished. And a tub you don’t finish is just a tub in a cupboard.
Four questions worth asking before you pick
1. How sweet do you like things, generally?
Not how sweet is this flavor. I mean you, across the rest of your life. Some people take their coffee black and put nothing on anything. Some people don’t. You already know which camp you fall into, and that tells you more about how this is going to go than any review will, because a review is somebody else’s mouth.
2. Do you drink it fast, or nurse it?
Some people mix it, get it down in about ninety seconds, and start warming up. Other people carry the same shaker around for twenty minutes and are still going at it midway through the second set.
Those are two different jobs. Something you’d happily knock back in one go isn’t necessarily something you’ll still be enjoying on the twentieth small sip. Work out which of those two you tend to be before you pick, not after.
3. The same one every day, or do you get bored?
Some of us are creatures of habit and will have the identical thing every single day for a year without once thinking about it. Other people need to switch or they stop altogether. Neither one is better than the other, but they lead to completely different decisions at checkout.
If you know you get bored, one enormous tub of a single flavor is a trap you’re setting for yourself. Two different flavors you can alternate stand a much better chance of getting used up.
4. Be honest with yourself about "it’s fine"
This is the one that got me, several times over. "It’s fine" isn’t a flavor you finish. If you try something and your honest verdict is that it’s fine, know that’s the tub that quietly migrates to the back of the shelf and stays there.
So how does this apply to El Chapo
El Chapo comes in four flavors: Blue Razz, Fruit Punch, Tiger Blood and Tropical Paradise.
I’m not going to sit here and describe them to you, and I want to explain why, because writing that paragraph would be easy and it would read nicely.
The problem is that I’d be telling you what your own mouth is going to think. I’ve watched two people drink the identical thing, and one says it’s far too sweet while the other one asks if there’s any more. I can’t taste it on your behalf. Nobody can, and anybody who tells you they can is just guessing at you with a lot of confidence.
So what I’d do instead is take those four questions, go and look at the flavor list on the El Chapo page, and pick with the questions in your head rather than the names. The page carries the current list, and that’s the one I’d go by.
The same goes for AMINO AF and Fyre AF, which carry the same four flavors. Same four questions, same approach.
What I got wrong for years
I used to pick on the front of the tub. Best looking label, or whatever the internet had got excited about that month. Then I’d get halfway down it and stop, and I’d tell myself I was rotating.
Now I pick for the version of me that’s tired. Not the one standing in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon feeling organized and optimistic, because that guy will drink anything you put in front of him. I mean the Wednesday one. If Wednesday me is going to want it, it gets finished, and finishing what you bought is the whole return on it.
Anyway. That’s my cupboard wisdom for the week, hard won across a lot of half-empty tubs. Go and have a look at the flavor list with those four questions in your head, and get the one you’ll still want in February.
Stay Swole,
Justin 💪