Sports Supplements ft. Dean McAloon | Triage Thoughts Ep. 262

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Why sports performance supplements need their own conversation

This article rounds off our recent supplement series. We sat down with Dean, one of the Triage Method nutritionists who has spent the last couple of years doing a postgraduate diploma in performance nutrition and coaching a wide range of athletes, to talk specifically about sports performance supplements. The reason this topic gets its own episode is that “supplements for sport” is too broad a question to be useful. The right stack for a marathoner is not the right stack for a powerlifter, and the right stack for someone trying to be at their best for a one-off match is not the right stack for someone trying to adapt to a long block of training.

Before we go anywhere near a tub of powder, we want to be clear that the cherry has to sit on top of an actual cake. If the diet is poor, the training is unfocused, sleep is short and stress is unmanaged, no supplement is going to rescue the situation. We have other Triage podcasts that go through those fundamentals in depth. Assume you have those reasonably dialled in before any of what follows is worth your money.

Three goals, three different stacks

The single most useful question to ask before buying anything is: what am I actually trying to change? In our experience there are three broad goals an athlete might be supplementing for, and they pull in different directions.

The first is adaptation, the longer-term improvement in your sport that comes from training. The second is acute performance, being at your best for a single session, game or competition. The third is recovery, either reducing soreness between sessions or being able to train more frequently without falling apart.

Those three goals are not always compatible. A gram of caffeine before a session might genuinely lift the acute performance, but it can equally crush your sleep and your recovery, and through that route blunt the adaptation you were training to get. The athlete who walks around permanently wired on coffee and pre-workout is often the one whose progress has quietly stalled. So rather than ask “what should I take for rugby” or “what should I take for running”, ask which of those three buckets you actually need help with first.

The money, the testing and the health trade-off

A few practical points before the list. Supplements cost money, and for most people there is a cleaner win available by spending that money on more fruit, vegetables, carbs and quality protein in the weekly shop than on a basket of pills. We genuinely prefer to see a client’s trolley in Lidl, Aldi or Tesco look the part before they spend a single euro on a tub.

If you compete in a tested sport, the responsibility for what you put in your body is yours. Check the banned list relevant to your federation, whether that is WADA, USADA or another body, and look for the Informed Sport label on anything you buy. Informed Sport is the more rigorous batch-testing programme; the green Informed Choice label exists but is not tested to the same standard. A supplement company that also sells SARMs, prohormones and pre-workouts full of unrecognisable ingredients is a company to walk away from.

There is also a health trade-off to be honest about. Some interventions might help performance in the short term while doing nothing kind for you over decades. That is a choice the athlete has to make with their eyes open: an aspiring Olympian and a club-level lifter are not running the same risk profile.

Baseline health supplements come first

Before any “performance” supplement, we look at whether the basics are covered. Even though athletes tend to have higher calorie intakes than the general population, which usually means more food and more micronutrients, the reality of being a high-output athlete can actually narrow the diet. If you are eating 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day and timing meals around sessions, you may end up leaning on plain rice and other quick-digesting carbs, batch-cooked staples, and meals that work around fibre and digestive comfort rather than around variety. In that context a multivitamin and an omega-3 can earn their place, simply because fatty fish is awkward to eat enough of when you are cooking in bulk. A healthy athlete is one who has the runway in place to actually recover and adapt; the baseline supplements are about protecting that runway.

Creatine: a small but reliable edge

Creatine monohydrate is one of the supplements we are happy to put in the top tier. The analogy we tend to use is a power bank for your phone. It is not going to give you a whole extra day, but it gives you a few extra minutes, an extra rep here and there, a bit more capacity to push when the session is hard. For most people that is what it feels like, a subtle aid rather than a dramatic transformation. Vegans and plant-based eaters often notice a more obvious effect because their dietary creatine intake tends to be lower to start with. Non-responders exist as well, and you can land anywhere on that spectrum. Even if you suspect you are a non-responder, it is still cheap insurance.

Three to five grams a day is fine. We usually just take five grams, which is roughly what a standard scoop is. You do not need to obsess about timing or do a loading phase; consistency is what matters. If you find the powder gritty in cold water, dissolve it in tea, coffee or porridge instead.

The water-retention worry is mostly overblown. Most of the extra water sits inside the muscle, where it is actively useful. There is a subset of people who notice some extra water sitting outside the muscle, and weight-making athletes (powerlifters, MMA, BJJ, weight-class combat sports) may want to come off creatine roughly four weeks out from a weigh-in to clear the muscle water. We are talking about a kilo at the extreme, not ten.

Protein powder: as close to an A-list staple as it gets

You can fairly argue that protein powder is just food, but it sits on the supplement shelf and it is worth the inclusion. Whey is a by-product of cheese making (the watery layer on top of yoghurt is whey), and it is a high-quality, full-spectrum protein. For athletes who are lactose intolerant or vegan, soy or a quality vegan blend does the same job.

The reason it earns its place is convenience and versatility. It hits two of our three buckets, helping recovery between sessions and supporting the adaptations by providing the amino acids your body uses to rebuild after training. Whey is particularly leucine-rich, and leucine acts as a signal to your body that it is time to build muscle, not just as a raw building block. As Dean likes to put it, “protein to grow, carbs to go, fat for mojo”.

If you can comfortably hit your protein target from food, that is great. If you travel, train at awkward hours or simply cannot face another chicken breast, a scoop in your porridge, yoghurt or smoothie is a clean way to top up. The Irish reflex of treating whey protein as some sort of steroid is funny when you consider that protein-and-oats is, in a sense, a traditional Irish breakfast with a slightly different protein source.

Caffeine: the most useful, and the most over-used

Caffeine is genuinely on the A-list for performance, and is arguably more of a drug than a supplement. It is the most widely used drug in the world, and across nearly every sport that has been studied, from ultramarathons to powerlifting, it appears to lift performance. It sharpens focus, increases the feeling of being switched on, and can help with force production and time to fatigue.

The catch is the same thing that makes it useful. The half-life sits somewhere around six to nine hours depending on how quickly your individual system clears it, and that long tail is what wrecks people’s sleep without them realising. If you have 200 mg at 11 am, you still have a coffee’s worth of caffeine in your system at 7 pm. Stack a couple of coffees and an afternoon pre-workout on top of that and you have created a perfectly good reason for the next day to be sluggish, which then becomes the excuse for the next coffee. That is the vicious cycle to avoid.

Practically: the research suggests roughly three to six milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight as a performance dose, but we would lean on the lower end and find the smallest dose that works for you. We tend to cap at around 400 mg for ourselves, and put a cut-off somewhere around midday or shortly after. Cycle in caffeine-free days so that “tolerance” does not creep up; very often what people call tolerance is just the negative effects (poor sleep, jangled nervous system) catching up with the positive ones. Strategic use is the whole game.

Beta-alanine: a buffer for specific sports

Beta-alanine is the ingredient in many pre-workouts that produces the tingling, itchy skin sensation (paraesthesia). Some people enjoy it, some hate it. The actual physiological reason it might help is that it raises the muscle’s stores of carnosine, which helps buffer the build-up of hydrogen ions during efforts beyond about 90 seconds, the burning sensation that limits middle-distance work and very high-rep training.

Unlike caffeine, it is not an acute supplement. You build up the muscle stores over weeks of consistent daily intake, with a loading dose around 80 mg per kilo and a maintenance dose around 40 mg per kilo. Most pre-workouts contain too little to do the job. Where it earns its place is in things like rowing, middle-distance running, or genuinely high-rep strength work; for the average gym-goer doing sets of eight, the bounds where the buffering matters are rarely reached. If the tingling is a problem, a slow-release form called CarnoSyn exists, at a price. And before reaching for it at all, we would want the aerobic and anaerobic conditioning sides of training to be doing their share of the buffering work first.

Sodium bicarbonate: the same idea with caveats

Baking soda is in a similar bucket, working as a buffer outside the muscle cell rather than inside it. Doses that move the needle (around 0.3 g per kg) commonly cause GI upset, deliver a large hit of sodium, and chronic high sodium intake has its own associations with stomach problems. We would put this firmly in “trial in training, never on competition day” territory. The same rule applies to any new pre-competition food, drink or supplement: the day of the race is not the day to find out how your stomach handles something.

Citrulline malate: a nice-to-have

Citrulline malate is the workhorse of pump pre-workouts. It supports vasodilation, which is just a fancy way of saying it widens the blood vessels, opening up more lanes on the motorway delivering oxygen and nutrients to the muscle. It can produce a noticeable pump in the gym and might shave a small amount off the perceived difficulty of a session. Useful doses sit somewhere in the six to ten gram range, and most pre-workouts contain a fraction of that, so if you want to use it properly, buy it on its own. It is genuinely cheap. We would put it on the B-list: a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have, and well below creatine on the hierarchy.

Worth flagging the interaction here: caffeine has a vasoconstricting effect, the opposite of citrulline. Stacking a gram of caffeine inside a “pump” product is a bit like driving with the handbrake on.

Beetroot and nitrates

Beetroot juice and similar nitrate-containing vegetables (rocket, dill, certain cruciferous vegetables) feed into another vasodilation pathway. Bacteria in your mouth convert dietary nitrates into nitrites, which downstream contribute to nitric oxide. Beyond the blood-flow effect, there is some interesting work suggesting an improvement in mitochondrial efficiency, lowering the oxygen and ATP cost of a given effort.

For endurance and middle-distance athletes this might be worth a try. The typical protocol is around 500 ml of beetroot juice or a 70 ml concentrated shot two to three hours before competition, and there appears to be a small additional benefit to loading daily for about a week beforehand. We would not call it a world-breaker, but it is reasonable to test.

Betaine (trimethylglycine)

Betaine, also called trimethylglycine, works as an osmolyte that influences cell volume, in a loose family resemblance to creatine. The performance data is mixed and some of the research raises concerns about cholesterol. We would call it a C-list supplement at most for sports performance and rarely recommend it for that purpose.

Tart cherry juice: a tool for the dense competition week

Tart cherry juice is rich in anthocyanins and quercetin, plant compounds with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. The use case we can actually defend is the multi-day competition: think CrossFit Games, a Strongman weekend, or a tournament where you have to back up performances on consecutive days. In that window, dampening soreness and inflammation so that you can go again the next day is genuinely useful.

What we would not do is take it day-in, day-out alongside normal training. The inflammatory response after training is part of how you adapt to that training. Blunting it chronically with tart cherry, vitamin C or other heavy-handed antioxidants is a good way to feel less sore and progress less. Cherry Active is a common brand; 30 ml of the concentrate or around 250 ml of standard juice is the usual serving.

Carbohydrate supplements: potentially a game-changer, in the right sport

Like protein powder, carbohydrate supplements are essentially food in a convenient form: energy gels, energy chews, Lucozade Sport, maltodextrin powder. For most gym-goers doing 60 minute sessions, the answer is to eat more carbs and have a sensible pre-workout meal, not to spend money on gels.

For endurance athletes the picture changes completely. Once you are training or competing beyond roughly 90 minutes to two hours, blood glucose becomes a genuine limiter, and intra-workout carbohydrate can move from “nice idea” to “essential”. The research suggests the gut can be trained to handle up to about 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour, ideally split roughly two parts glucose to one part fructose, because the two sugars use different transporters in the gut. Reputable sports nutrition brands already build that ratio into their gels.

Two important caveats. First, gut tolerance has to be trained. Do not suddenly slam 90 grams of carbs an hour for the first time on race day. Build up gradually in training. Second, this is also a tool for athletes with extreme caloric requirements, including some bodybuilders in a gaining phase, where digesting another bowl of rice is the real bottleneck and a drink with carbohydrate powder is simply easier to stomach.

What we would actively avoid

A short list to keep your money in your pocket.

Dubious brands. If a company sells protein powder alongside SARMs and prohormones and ships from a warehouse in a country you cannot place on a map, walk away. For tested athletes, only buy from brands carrying Informed Sport batch-testing.

BCAAs. If you are hitting your protein target from food or a decent protein powder, you are already getting the branched-chain amino acids you need. As a flavoured drink they are fine; as a “performance” supplement they are usually a tax on people who already eat enough protein.

Exogenous ketones. The performance data is unimpressive, and the price relative to what carbohydrate already does is hard to justify.

Fancy creatine forms. Creatine HCl, ethyl ester and the rest are more expensive versions of monohydrate with no convincing case to choose them.

Testosterone boosters. Either they do nothing, or the ones that “work” are working because they have been spiked with something that could get you banned and is unsafe besides. We have a previous Triage episode dedicated to this.

Premium “greens” and multivitamin-plus blends. Athletic Greens and Revive Active are the obvious examples. They are essentially expensive multivitamins with extras. For the price, eat more fruit and vegetables, and use a simple multivitamin if you need one.

A useful habit is to read the back of the label, look up each ingredient on examine.com, and ask whether the dose actually matches what the research suggests. A pre-workout with a 35 euro price tag and two grams of citrulline in it is not a serious product.

Where this leaves you

Get the foundations in: diet, training, sleep, stress, and a sensible baseline of micronutrients. Pick supplements that match your actual goal, whether that is adaptation, acute performance or recovery, rather than buying whatever a podcast host is being paid to mention. For most athletes the short, defensible list looks like creatine, protein powder, intelligent use of caffeine and, sport depending, some combination of carbohydrate supplements, beetroot, beta-alanine or tart cherry juice. Everything else is either situational or noise.