Walk down any supplement aisle and you'll see the same trick played over and over: a bold front label promising "explosive energy" and "insane pumps," and on the back, a list of ingredients followed by one vague line — "Proprietary Energy Blend: 8,400mg."
That number looks impressive. It also tells you almost nothing.
The proprietary blend problem
When a supplement company lists a "blend" instead of individual ingredient amounts, they're not required to tell you how much of anything is actually in it. That 8,400mg could be 7,900mg of cheap filler and 500mg of the ingredients that actually do something — or it could be a genuinely well-dosed formula. As the customer, you have no way to know. You're trusting the brand's marketing copy instead of the actual facts.
This matters more than it sounds like it should, because the ingredients that make a pre-workout effective only work at specific doses. Underdose them, and you're paying for flavor and hope.
What to actually look for on a label
Here's what research-backed dosing generally looks like for the ingredients that matter most in a pre-workout — use this as your baseline when comparing labels:
- Caffeine — 150–300mg per serving. This is the ingredient doing most of the work for energy and focus. Below 150mg, most people won't feel much. Above 300mg, you're firmly in "read your own tolerance carefully" territory.
- L-Citrulline (or Citrulline Malate) — 6–8g per serving. This is the ingredient behind "the pump" — it supports blood flow during training. A lot of labels list citrulline in the 1–2g range, which is well below where most research shows a noticeable effect.
- Beta-Alanine — 2–5g per serving. Supports muscular endurance on higher-rep sets. This is also the ingredient responsible for that harmless-but-startling tingling sensation (paresthesia) — if you've felt that from a pre-workout before, this is why.
- Creatine Monohydrate — 3–5g per serving, if included. Note: creatine works through consistent daily use, not as an acute pre-workout "kick," so its presence in a pre-workout is more about convenience than immediate performance.
If a label doesn't give you individual numbers for these, you're being asked to trust a blend you can't actually evaluate.
What full disclosure actually looks like
We built our own pre-workout line — Velocity Fuel and Volt-Shock — around this exact problem. No proprietary blends, anywhere. Every ingredient, every milligram, listed plainly on the label, because we think you're capable of reading a nutrition panel and deciding for yourself whether a formula is worth your money.
That's also why we run two separate lines instead of one:
- Velocity Fuel is a lighter energy and focus formula — a good fit for any time of day, whether that's a morning boost or a lighter afternoon session where you don't need a full pre-workout stim load.
- Volt-Shock is a full pre-workout — built for training sessions where you want energy, pump, and endurance support together, dosed at the levels above, not token amounts hiding behind a blend name.
Neither one asks you to guess. That's the whole point.
The takeaway
Next time you're comparing pre-workouts — ours or anyone else's — flip to the back of the label first. If you see individual ingredient amounts, you can actually evaluate whether it's a serious formula. If you see a "proprietary blend" and one combined number, you're being asked to trust marketing instead of facts.
We'd rather earn that trust by showing you the numbers.