Topic
Supplements
Evidence-backed supplements, dosing, timing, and what to skip.
Casey MillsDoes the Collagen in Your Coffee Count Toward Your Daily Protein?
A 2024 trial gave older men 50 grams a day of whey, pea, or collagen; whey and pea raised muscle protein synthesis, collagen did not, and the leucine on the label explains why.
Max KlineHow Many Hours Before Bed Should You Stop Drinking Coffee?
The widely quoted 8.8-hour coffee cutoff comes from a 2023 meta-analysis, but a 2025 polysomnography crossover trial found 100 mg of caffeine four hours before bed did nothing measurable to sleep.
Atlas MercerDoes Urolithin A Actually Make You Stronger, or Just Better at Recovering?
In trained runners and lifters, urolithin A failed to move race times or one-rep maxes, so if you are already fit and buying it to add raw performance, the trials do not back that purchase.
Jamie ReyesDoes Caffeine Before Lifting Actually Make You Stronger, or Is It Mostly Placebo?
A 2026 balanced-placebo trial split caffeine the drug from caffeine the belief and found a 5 mg/kg dose produced a real 4% strength bump, while merely expecting caffeine produced none.
Elias KiptooDoes Swishing a Sports Drink and Spitting It Out Actually Make You Run Faster?
The coaching rule said swishing a sports drink only helps runners on an empty stomach, but the carbohydrate signal reaches the brain's effort circuits whether or not you have eaten.
Max KlineDoes Taking Ashwagandha Actually Lower Your Cortisol, or Is That a Myth?
Ashwagandha is the supplement everyone's stressed friend recommends, and the pitch is always the same: it drops your cortisol. That's a specific, testable claim, so let's treat it like one. The most-cited human trial…
Atlas MercerDoes Taking Citrulline Malate Actually Add Reps to Your Last Set?
The claim on the tub is clean: pre-workout citrulline raises nitric oxide, opens the vasculature, clears ammonia faster, and buys you extra reps under fatigue. The dose that keeps showing up in trials is 8 grams of ci…
Elias KiptooDoes Taking Sodium Bicarbonate Before a Hard Session Actually Buffer the Burn?
Most runners hear "baking soda" and think of a chemistry-class volcano, not a performance aid. But sodium bicarbonate is one of the few ergogenic aids with a mechanism that actually makes sense for the kind of running…
Max KlineDoes Taking Your Omega-3 Fish Oil Actually Slow Down How Fast Your Cells Age?
Telomere length is the closest thing we have to a cellular odometer, and most interventions that claim to move it are noise dressed up as signal. So when a randomized controlled trial actually shows a shift, I pay att…
Atlas MercerDoes Drinking Coffee After a Bad Night of Sleep Restore Your Performance?
The intuition is that caffeine plugs the hole sleep loss creates. The data says it patches one system and leaves another exposed. A 2021 study from Michigan State University's Sleep and Learning Lab (Stepan, Altmann,…
Max KlineDoes Taking Creatine Before Bed Mess With Your Sleep?
Creatine is the most studied supplement in sports nutrition, but the timing question I keep getting is oddly specific: does the dose matter at night? The fear is that creatine is somehow stimulating and will wreck you…
Max KlineDoes Eating Kiwifruit Before Bed Actually Help You Sleep?
I love a sleep intervention that costs almost nothing and has a plausible mechanism, so when the "two kiwis before bed" thing kept resurfacing, I went looking for the actual data instead of the wellness telephone-game…
Elias KiptooDoes Drinking Beetroot Juice Before a Race Actually Make You Faster?
Beetroot juice keeps showing up in race-day chatter, and for once the hype has decent science under it. The mechanism is dietary nitrate, which your body converts to nitrite and then to nitric oxide, improving blood f…
Max KlineDoes Taking Your Magnesium at Night Actually Improve Your Sleep?
Magnesium is the supplement everyone tells you to take for sleep, and the marketing has gotten ahead of the data in the usual way. So let's isolate the variable. The strongest recent test we have is a 2021 systematic…
