Picture a trainee who has spent forty-five pounds a month for five years on pre-workout supplements. Eleven brands, rotated. Twenty-five pounds a month on intra-workout aminos. Cumulative spend: roughly two and a half thousand pounds. The trainee skips breakfast most days. The "actual meal" before training lands four hours before the session. Performance has not measurably changed in five years.
Now picture the trainee in the next rack over. A banana, sixty minutes before. Coffee. Train. Total cost: about three pounds a week. Trains consistently. Outperforms the supplement stack on every honest metric.
Inside this one
- Three-question decision tree: time-to-train, training type, individual response
- Templates for the 60-120 min meal, the 30-60 min snack, and the <30 min micro-snack
- Worked examples for early morning, evening, and multi-session days
- Caffeine receipt: the one pre-workout ingredient with substantial evidence
- Why fat and fibre are the saboteurs and total daily intake beats precise timing
- Full Technical Addendum with peer-reviewed citations — audit me
The standard it is held to
Every factual claim in this volume names its source, and every claim carries a confidence grade — settled, strong, emerging or contested. Where the evidence is thin, the text says so. How it’s made, in full → · What we’ve got wrong →