Do pre-workout supplements do more than the caffeine in them?
Mostly no. The caffeine is doing most of the work. A few other ingredients add a small, real bump, but only at research doses that many products never actually hit.
A pre-workout is usually a scoop of ten to twenty ingredients, and the marketing implies the payoff is in the stack. Take the label apart, though, and most of the effect you actually feel traces back to one thing: caffeine. At the standard 3 to 6 mg per kilogram of body weight it reliably improves muscular endurance, strength, power, and how hard a session feels, and the average scoop carries a genuine dose, around 250 mg. That is the part you notice.
The other headline ingredients aren’t fake, just smaller and fussier. Citrulline malate buys you roughly three extra reps before failure, about a 6% bump, but the meta-analysis got that from 8 grams. Beta-alanine works too, except only after two to four weeks of daily loading; the single scoop before today’s session does nothing for it except maybe leave your skin tingling.
So the honest build is caffeine, plus a small real assist from citrulline if it’s dosed high enough, plus a beta-alanine effect that shows up only if you take the stuff every day for weeks.
The dosing catch
This is where most products quietly fall short. A survey of 100 top-selling pre-workouts found the average scoop held about 4 grams of citrulline, half the studied dose, and 2 grams of beta-alanine, under the daily target. Caffeine was the one ingredient consistently dosed where the research says it works. For a lot of formulas, the “more than caffeine” is mostly on the marketing.
The proprietary-blend problem
The bigger tell is the proprietary blend: one combined weight covering several ingredients, so you can’t see how much of each you’re getting. Reviewers point out this makes it essentially impossible to judge whether a formula does anything beyond its caffeine.
If a pre-workout works for you, it’s most likely the caffeine, and you can reproduce that with cheap caffeine, then add 8 g of citrulline and a daily 4 to 6 g of beta-alanine if you want the extras at doses that actually earn their place.