Pre-workout supplements aren’t just for guys.
For women who are serious about hitting peak performance, improving their fitness, or cutting fat while maintaining lean body mass, a pre-workout supplement is almost a necessity.
However, you can’t always settle for the same pre-workout supplement as men, since women have a different hormonal profile than men, and thus need a pre-workout supplement that’s tuned to their biochemistry.
We’ve reviewed the best pre-workout supplements for women and ranked the top ten. If you want to tune up your workout, check our our rankings.
Research
Rankings
Last updated: August 8, 2022
Pre-workout supplements considered: 22
Hours of research: 51
Experts reviewed: 5
Scientific papers referenced: 9
1. Ladder Pre Workout
Ladder’s Pre-workout is perfect for women looking for a clean and pure option. It’s deliciously sweetened and contains very little sugar, making it ideal for dieters.
The inclusion of beta-alanine and creatine help ensure your muscles have the energy they need to push longer and harder – giving you the best workout possible. With just the right amount of caffeine included, this is one of the best options for women who train hard.
2. Naked Energy Pure Pre-Workout Formula
Its plain packaging and simple design formula make it clear: this is the go-to pre-workout supplement for women who want to keep things simple.
It has a few key vitamins and minerals: folate, vitamin C, and calcium, plus beta-alanine, creatine, and L-arginine, which work to improve your explosive power, muscular strength, and anaerobic energy.
Well-suited for high-intensity workouts, long cardio, and weight lifting sessions, this supplement is an all-around great pick.
3. Hilo Energize Pre-Workout Gummies
Hilo focuses on energy and endurance, with beetroot, maca root, vitamin B12, and rhodiola plus lion’s mane mushrooms. It’s a simple, caffeine-free formulation that’s great for HIIT or endurance training, though it lacks a bit when it comes to benefits for strength athletes.
If you want a clean, simple, stimulant-free pre-workout and don’t want to bother with mixing up a powder, Hilo is a great option.
4. RedLeaf Pre-Workout Energizer
RedLeaf is a strong candidate for the best pre-workout supplement that focuses on burning fat.
With a combination of green tea extract (one of the most proven fat burners out there), raspberry ketone, a small dose of caffeine (40 mg to be exact), it’s highly effective at turning up your body’s ability to burn fat.
Add to that the amino acids included and you’ve got a winning formula for fitness and weight loss.
5. Alani Nu Pre-Workout
Alani Nu is a potent and ultra-simple pre-workout supplement that focuses on delivering just the most powerful performance enhancers: citrulline, beta-alanine, tyrosine, caffeine, and theanine.
It’s great for intense training sessions though the 200 mg of caffeine might be too much for people who are caffeine-sensitive.
6. Cellucor Super HD
Cellucor Super HD is a high-powered pre-workout formula whose focus is clearly burning off fat by up-regulating your body’s metabolism and its ability to oxidize fat during exercise.
It may not perform as well if your goal is high intensity interval training, since it lacks some of the anaerobic boosters of other supplements, but the strong kick of caffeine will work well for burning fat.
7. Organic Muscle Organic Pre-Workout
Despite the name, Organic Muscle Organic Pre-Workout isn’t so focused on people looking to pack on muscle. Its formula is instead centered around antioxidants and natural metabolism boosters.
The lack of amino acids and performance boosters makes this supplement less suited for high intensity workouts, but great for long sessions of cardio.
8. Garden of Life Sport Energy + Focus
Can you make an all-natural plant-based pre-workout? That’s what Garden of Life has set out to do with this product. You get a powerful dose of nitric oxide boosters, caffeine, and vitamin B12.
Unfortunately the pre-workout falls flat for many users because of its fairly high sugar content (11 grams per serving). It’s a great idea but doesn’t quite live up to its promise.
9. Raw Synergies ThermoPre
ThermoPre is designed for a strong fat burning and energy boosting effect, but with 250 mg of caffeine per serving, plus other energizers like yerba mate and theacrine, it might be too much for many women to handle without getting jitters or irritability.
10. RSP Amino Lean
Amino Lean from RSP has a wide range of ingredients, but the presence of artificial flavors and coloring agents will be a big turn-off for many users. Moreover, it’s got a lot of ingredients thrown together in a the proprietary blends is not an attractive feature either.
Category winners
Best overall pre-workout for women: Ladder Pre-Workout
Ladder Pre-Workout features a super clean formulation that boosts athletic performance across the board: creatine for strength, a moderate dose of caffeine for more energy and higher workout intensity, and betaine and beta-alanine for anaerobic power.
Best pre-workout for women over 40: Hilo Energize Gummies
Hilo Energize Gummies are stimulant-free, making them great for women over 40 who want more energy for their workouts but don’t want to deal with the sleeplessness and jitters that caffeine-heavy pre-workouts can cause.
Best pre-workout for women with B-vitamins: Naked Energy Pure Pre-Workout
Naked Energy leverages the energy and mood-elevating properties of B vitamins, as well as arginine and caffeine, to improve workout performance. If you want to combat fatigue and sluggishness at early-morning gym sessions, Naked Energy is the way to go.
Best pre-workout for female endurance athletes: Ladder Pre-Workout
Ladder Pre-Workout has a great combination of supplements for endurance performance: beta-alanine improves high-intensity interval performance, the modest amount of caffeine is a great all-around performance booster, and citicoline sodium salt boosts the electrolyte content.
Best pre-workout for women without caffeine: Hilo Energize Gummies
Hilo manages to boost workout performance without caffeine by focusing instead on ingredients like beetroot, maca root, rhodiola root, and lion’s mane for workout performance, and vitamin B12 for energy. If traditional pre-workouts keep you up at night, give Hilo a shot instead.
Best pre-workout for women’s weight loss: Ladder Pre-Workout
Boosting weight loss with a pre-workout supplement calls for proven fat burners like caffeine and green tea extract. Ladder Pre-Workout delivers on this front, making it our pick for a weight-loss oriented pre-workout supplement for women.
Who should buy a pre-workout supplement for women?
If you’re a woman who is serious about getting in a quality workout, you’re a prime candidate for a pre-workout supplement for women.
Taking a generic pre-workout might land you with too much caffeine, tingling and red skin from too much niacin and beta-alanine, but not enough in the way of other sources of energy. There are far better ways to get prepared for your workout than that.
Not every woman needs to take a pre-workout before going to the gym. If all you do is exercise to stay healthy or keep generally fit, you probably don’t need a pre-workout.
However, if you take your fitness seriously and want to perform your best at strength, power, or endurance-based sports, pre-workout supplements can help you achieve peak performance. Athletes training to compete and lifters looking to set personal records can both benefit from a pre-workout supplement.
How we ranked
When formulating our rankings of the top pre-workout supplements for women, we had several strict criteria for inclusion.
Formulated for women’s hormonal profile: We excluded products that were too heavy on caffeine and too light on any other beneficial ingredients straight away—we dumped Legion Pulse, NO-Xplode, and other popular general-purpose pre-workouts for this reason.
Focused on workout performance and recovery: Next up, we looked for key ingredients that would boost workout performance and decrease post-workout soreness. These included antioxidants like vitamin C, as well as amino acids (particularly branched-chain amino acids or BCAAs for short).
Since amino acids are the building blocks for muscle fibers, they’re critical for workout recovery.
Ingredients for anaerobic power: Peak workout performance in sports like Olympic lifting and CrossFit depends to a great extent on your body’s anaerobic energy systems, so we put a strong emphasis on pre-workout supplements that contained ergogenic aids for anaerobic power, like beta-alanine, arginine, and creatine.
Oxygen delivery boosters for endurance: For endurance events, delivering oxygen to your muscles is more important. We rewarded products with nitric oxide sources, like beetroot extract, since they’re proven to boost endurance performance.
Clean supplement design: Finally, we looked at the overall composition and quality of the supplement. Did it use minimalist design, with little or nothing in the way of artificial flavors, colors, and additives? Or was it sugary, full of artificial sweeteners, or colored with potentially undesirable synthetic coloring agents?
Products that scored well in terms of overall supplement design ended up at the top of the rankings, while those that scored poorly ended at the bottom, or got dropped completely.
The remaining products, in order of quality, represent the best pre-workout supplement choices for women that are on the market right now.
Benefits
Achieving your workout goals gets a lot easier when you choose the right pre-workout supplement. For women who want to accomplish more at the gym, a pre-workout supplement can keep you hydrated, increase the amount of fat you burn, improve your anaerobic power, or help you recover faster from heavy lifting sessions.
It’s all a matter of choosing the right supplement for your workout needs.
Broadly speaking, a pre-workout supplement for women is going to be targeted at (at least) one of a few primary benefits: improving hydration, boosting fat oxidation, increasing performance during high-intensity exercise, and improving recovery after resistance training sessions (i.e. weight lifting).
Pre-workout supplements provide quality hydration. Hydration is a critical need if you’ll be doing long cardio sessions, taking a sauna, doing hot yoga, or anything else that will produce a lot of sweating.
Research indicates that even mild dehydration–a loss of a few percentage points of your body weight in water–can result in a substantial decrement in performance, as well as an impairment in your ability to tolerate heat (1).
This could cause problems if you are out for a long run in the summer or in the middle of a 90-minute hot yoga class. A pre-workout supplement can use one of several tricks to help increase your hydration levels and improve your performance in situations where you’ll be sweating a lot.
The first among these is the inclusion of a wide range of electrolytes. Most people know that sweat is salty, but that salt isn’t just comprised of sodium–there are several other electrolytes, including calcium, potassium, and magnesium, that are contained in sweat, at varying levels (2). While sodium is indeed the most common electrolyte in sweat, it’s necessary to replace the others, too.
A good pre-workout supplement for women will include not just sodium, but magnesium, calcium and potassium as well.
Another tool in the arsenal of a pre-workout is the use of glycerol powder to boost water retention. This is a biochemical trick that’s been known to elite exercise physiologists since at least the 1990s, but has only recently become popular among pre-workout supplements for women.
One study demonstrated that a glycerol supplement improved cycling performance in a simulated time trial (3).
In the experiment described in that paper, cyclists were able to ride faster with a “hyper-hydration” protocol that involved glycerol, compared to drinking just water alone.
Pre-workouts for women can burn fat. When it comes to fat oxidation, the key ingredients are herbal extracts like green coffee bean and green tea extract, which are both potent fat oxidizers.
Each of these seems to combine well with caffeine in moderate amounts, as they seem to interact synergistically. This was the conclusion of a scientific article published in the International Journal of Obesity: the active compounds in green tea combine with the effects of caffeine to produce better increases in fat metabolism compared to either compound alone (4).
Beta-alanine and L-carnitine can boost anaerobic performance. Anaerobic power output depends on your body’s ability to buffer lactate, and this ability can be augmented by beta alanine and carnitine.
Supplementing with these compounds improves performance in high-intensity sprints and repeated-sprint tests, so they’re great ingredients for events like CrossFit and HIIT training (5).
Beetroot juice is well-suited for continuous high-intensity training, since it boosts your ability to utilize oxygen in your muscles, according to a 2012 scientific article (6).
Amino acids (including BCAAs) are crucial for strength gains. For strength gains, you’ll want to seek out a pre-workout supplement that includes amino acids (particularly branched-chain amino acids) and creatine, especially if you are looking for absolute gains in strength.
Amino acids, and BCAAs in particular, help athletes who are pushing themselves right to the limits of recovery, preventing overtraining and improving recovery during training (7).
Creatine is one of the most-proven supplements for increasing muscular strength. For women looking to boost their muscular strength, creatine is one of the safest and most effective supplements you can take.
While creatine is most commonly associated with male athletes, there’s a substantial body of evidence suggesting it can increase muscular strength and even decrease body fat in women specifically. For example, one study on female lacrosse players showed that creatine increased upper body strength and decreased body fat content (8).
Other research shows that just five days of creatine supplementation is enough for healthy women to increase their leg strength (9). Short-term results like these justify the inclusion of creatine in a pre-workout supplement, as they suggest that creatine has an immediate and fast-acting effect.
Side Effects
Almost all quality pre-workout supplements for women will be well-tolerated. The only category of ingredients that can cause side effects are those designed to increase fat metabolism, and the biggest culprit among these is also one of the most ubiquitous in everyday life–caffeine.
Caffeine jitters and sleeplessness can affect women particularly strongly. Women seem to be especially susceptible to the negative effects of caffeine, partially because they just tend to be smaller and thus affected more by a given dose of caffeine, but also because of hormonal influences.
Estrogen affects how long caffeine lasts in your body. Caffeine lasts a lot longer in the bloodstream of women who take contraceptives, which means that taking a pre-workout supplement with caffeine in it in the afternoon could keep you up late into the night (9).
If you get jittery, irritable, or restless later in the day, check the caffeine content of your pre-workout supplement.
Vitamin B3 (niacin) and beta-alanine can cause tingling and pins and needles. B-complex vitamins and beta-alanine are both common pre-workout ingredients, but can cause a tingling sensation when taken in high doses. Though it can be irritating, it’s not indicative of any more serious problems. You can avoid this tingling by spreading out your dosage or choosing a pre-workout that’s free from these compounds.
Recommended dosage
Most high-quality pre-workout supplements for women have had their serving size calibrated to correspond to the ideal dosage of all of the active ingredients, but you can’t always count on a product’s serving size to get it right.
Caffeine: 2-3 mg per kilo of body weight. If your pre-workout supplement contains caffeine, you should know that most research suggests you can garner all of the benefits with a dose as low as about 2-3 mg of caffeine per kilogram of body weight. That’s about 100-150 mg of caffeine for a 120-pound woman.
Creatine: at least 3 grams. Traditional creatine supplementation routines often call for doses of 15 grams per day or more, but new research shows that as little as three grams per day total can achieve the same effects (9).
Beta-alanine: 1-2 grams (ideally in separate doses). For beta-alanine, optimal effects occur with one to two grams per day, but if you take too much all at once, you can get a tingling sensation in your skin. It might be better to allocate some of your total beta-alanine to a post-workout or intra-workout supplement.
BCAAs: 5-10 grams. Most research on BCAAs for women suggests that five to ten grams is the optimal dose, though this is total across the day. If other supplements, like a protein shake, contain BCAAs as well, these also count towards this total.
Exact dosage is less critical for electrolytes and antioxidants like vitamin C, so you can be flexible with the amounts of these ingredients.
You’ll notice that most high-quality pre-workout supplements already have these dosages dialed in, so you often don’t have to worry too much if you’re using a top-notch product.
FAQ
Q: What should be in a pre-workout drink for women?
A: To be prepared for optimal workout performance, you want to look for ingredients that will support three broad categories of athletic tasks: muscular strength, anaerobic power, and aerobic endurance.
On the muscular strength front, a pre-workout drink with BCAAs are a real winner for boosting recovery.
Creatine is another critical ingredient for building muscular strength, and its advantages bleed over into anaerobic power as well.
For better anaerobic power, you want beta-alanine and L-carnitine, as they increase your body’s maximum power output.
When it comes to aerobic endurance, electrolytes and beetroot are the way to go.
Caffeine boosts athletic performance across the board, though understandably not everyone wants a lot of caffeine right before every workout they do.
Q: What can you take instead of pre-workout?
A: One of the simplest and most old-school “pre-workout” alternatives is a cup of coffee. A little hydration and a healthy serving of caffeine is more than enough to boost your performance and motivation at the gym.
If you want to go more high-tech, try adding MCT oil to your coffee for a boost of energy from medium-chain triglycerides.
You can also cobble together your own supplementation routine that provides, separately, key pre-workout ingredients like creatine, beta-alanine, and branched chain amino acids, but at that point, why not just take a pre-mixed pre-workout?
Q: Is pre-workout bad for you?
A: Some people have negative reactions to pre-workout products that are too heavy on caffeine, or load up on too much beta-alanine. Too much caffeine can result in anxiety, nausea, jitters, and irritability—not exactly what you want for peak athletic performance.
Too much beta alanine can cause tingling in your skin, as can pre-workouts with huge amounts of niacin, though both of these are harmless side effects.
Q: Do you need to use pre-workout?
A: If all you do is go to the gym to stay healthy or say generally fit, pre-workout probably isn’t necessary. Pre-workout supplements are good if you are a serious athlete who wants to achieve your personal best, or take your training to the next level.
Pre-workout supplements are great for athletic tasks governed by muscular strength, anaerobic power, and aerobic endurance, so they’re not likely to help with something like yoga, no matter how serious you are about it.
The benefits of pre-workout tend to scale with the intensity of the activity, and the level of seriousness of the athlete. That’s why they are so popular among high-level athletes and competitors.
Q: What does a pre-workout supplement do?
A: Pre-workout supplements prime your body for top performance by increasing nervous system output, buffering lactate during intense exercise, and supplying amino acids to the muscles to accelerate recovery and prevent muscle damage.
While these effects stimulate different physiological systems, the ultimate goal is the same: better workout performance.
Q: How long does a pre-workout supplement last?
A: The elimination time for different pre-workout ingredients varies, but it’s reasonable to expect a pre-workout to last for at least two to three hours. That’s based on the expected absorption time and elimination half-lives of the most common key ingredients in pre-workout supplements: caffeine, beta-alanine, BCAAs, creatine, and B vitamins.
If you’re doing a very long workout, or splitting your time between two different workouts, you might opt for an intra-workout supplement to keep your energy levels up, but in most cases, this won’t be necessary.
Q: Why does pre-workout make you tingle?
A: Tingling from a pre-workout supplement comes from two sources. Either the product contains a lot of beta-alanine, or it contains a lot of niacin (vitamin B3).
The flushing and tingling from these ingredients is harmless, but it can be pretty annoying and even distracting when you are trying to get a good workout in. However, it isn’t harmful.
You can eliminate this tingling by spreading your dosage out over 30-60 minutes, or taking a pre-workout with less or no beta-alanine and niacin.
Related articles
- Pre-workout supplement
- Intra-workout supplement
- Post-workout supplement
- Fat burners for women
- BCAA for women
- Protein powder for women
Recap
A pre-workout supplement that’s specifically formulated for women can help you perform at a higher level in the gym, whether your training is focused on endurance, strength, or power.
Pre-workouts can amp up your energy levels for early-morning workouts with caffeine and B vitamins, and thanks to ergogenic aids like creatine, beta-alanine, and carnitine, you can hit peak performance more reliably in your workouts.
A good pre-workout for women can help you avoid the jitters and sleeplessness that can come from relying on stimulant-packed pre-workout blends that are formulated for male athletes with a very different hormonal makeup.
Looking to push your performances at the gym to the next level? Try one of our top-ranked pre-workouts for women.
For BodyNutrition’s #1 recommended pre-workout supplement for women, click here.