So you drink some pre-workout and suddenly feel the urge to poop. This is not an uncommon thing, especially if you are new to pre-workouts or caffeine in general. You will find many people recommend various ways of minimizing this effect, such as using less powder, making a smaller smoothie with more water, or even just not taking it at all.

Silky Terrier Dog Breed Playing Aro... Silky Terrier Dog Breed Playing Around

I am here to tell you that none of these workarounds are necessary, and that there is no need for alarm or getting rid of the pre-workout altogether.

This article will get into some details on what happens in your body when you ingest caffeine/pre-workout, so if this subject makes you squeamish I suggest you stop reading now.

Also, I am going to assume that everyone knows what pre-workouts generally contain (caffeine, Creatine, beta-alanine, etc). If any of the terms I use below are new to you (eg branched amino acids), look them up on Google – Wikipedia is a good place to start.

So basically there are two ways of ingesting pre-workout: either mixing it in a blender with lots of water, making a smoothie; or putting it into tablets which you swallow (popular brands include cellucor super HD, etc). In both cases there is really nothing special about how they make their product – it is just urea, Creatine and caffeine mixed in some sort of powder form.

Now, caffeine is very well known for its laxative effects, so I won’t bother spending time on that one – you probably know it can give you the shits after consuming too much coffee or tea.

Creatine has also been shown to have a mild laxative effect, however, the dosage required to produce this effect would be 3g+ which no pre-workout contains. To avoid confusion I will ignore creatine as well.