ENGN Pre-Workout Review (2021) – Are there Side effects ?

ENGN

$31.99

4.2

Effectiveness

4.0/10

Ingredients

3.5/10

Price

5.0/10

Pros

• Contains a few proven ingredients

Cons

• Contains a proprietary blend that doesn't reveal exact dosages
• Creatine and beta-alanine underdosed
• Expensive considering how small the dosage is
• Missing many key ingredients such as Citrulline and more
• Not a good pre-workout

Want to know what is better than ENGN pre-workout?

Welcome to the most comprehensive ENGN pre-workout review from evl nutrition on the internet.

ENGN is a pre-workout formula from the company Evlution Nutrition. ENGN contains several ingredients and most of them are placed in a proprietary blend so you don’t know the exact dosages of ingredients. The formula reveals its 2-gram creatine dose along with a 1.6-gram beta-alanine which are both under dosed. A serving of ENGN is 8.5-grams and around 6-grams of that comes in the form of active ingredients which is quite low for a pre-workout supplement.

Nothing but scientifically supported information to help you to make the correct decision as to whether this dietary supplement is right for you!

We take an in-depth look at the active ingredients and their dosages to see how they compare to what the latest research tells us about nutritional supplements and their effect on training performance.

No sales pitch or marketing jargon, and no hidden agendas, just the cold hard facts! If you’re fed up of surfing the web for hours at a time looking for reliable information about pre-workout supplements, only to be met with overhyped and baseless product descriptions, then this Evlution Nutrition ENGN pre-workout review is for you!

About Evlution Nutrition

“Our mission is to be your most trusted nutrition partner to achieve your fitness goals. We’re built on a passion for nutrition, health, and sport and committed to constantly evolving our products to ensure they are the most innovative, highest quality, and effective nutritional supplements available…

The goal of our supplements is to support your wide range of performance and health needs, from energy and endurance during training, to recovery, lean body support, and overall health throughout your day. We strive to educate, enable and inspire you to crush your goals and set them even higher.”

As with most, if not all, brand or product descriptions out there, this blurb about Evlution Nutrition doesn’t really tell us anything useful about the manufacturer or products. Instead, it’s vague, generic, and full of superlatives, and in all honesty, that is the name of the game. That’s why, when you’re deciding on which pre-workout supplement is right for you, it’s a good idea to pay zero attention to this section of a manufacturer’s website and read our reviews instead!

Ingredients in ENGN pre-workout

Before we take a detailed looked at the key active ingredients included in ENGN by Evlution Nutrition, we absolutely must answer one question above all others. Does the product include any PROPRIETARY BLENDS?

For those not already aware of what that actually means, here goes… A proprietary blend is a mixture of ingredients where the total weight of the blend is disclosed, but the precise quantities of each component ingredient are not. That means you, as the consumer, have no idea how much of any of the key ingredients you are taking on board per serving. NOT a great place to be when it comes to a nutritional supplement.

If you are in any doubt as to why a manufacturer might make use of a proprietary blend, we can categorically tell you that it’s not because they are trying to prevent competitors from stealing their patented formulas. Instead, there is one reason and one reason only, and that’s to hide underdosed ingredients from YOU, the customer!

Unfortunately, ENGN does include one “Mind-to-Muscle Matrix” proprietary blend which includes as many as 11 ingredients but only offers one total weight! This is not a great start to the ingredients section of our Evlution Nutrition pre-workout review!

Creatine monohydrate (2g)

Without a doubt, the most effective nutritional supplement on the market when it comes to exercise performance is a wealth of scientific research to support the use of creatine monohydrate.

Dosed appropriately, it can help you to boost both strength and lean muscle mass gains in particular.^[1] In order to do so, though, it must be taken at a dose of at least 5g per day over an extended period of time.^[2]

As a result, the 2g included per serving of ENGN by Evlution Nutrition just isn’t going to cut it, I’m afraid. This kind of underdosing is commonplace in pre-workout supplements and creatine, as there isn’t room in a multi-ingredient product for an optimum serving. As a result, when we see creatine included in pre-workout supplements, alarm bells start to sound!

Beta-alanine (1.6g)

A chance for ENGN to get back on track with yet another high-quality ingredient with proven efficacy for exercise performance.

By increasing your muscle stores of something called carnosine, beta alanine supplementation helps you to fight training induced fatigue by buffering lactic acid.^[3] The body of scientific research into this compound suggests that a daily dose of 4-6g for a period of at least 2 weeks should be sufficient to boost your carnosine stores, with saturation levels increasing with further prolonged consumption.^[4]

Again, unfortunately, that means ENGN by Evlution Nutrition comes up well short of an optimum dosage. If you’re starting to think that our ENGN pre-workout review seems to be going from bad to worse here, then wait until you see what comes next!

ENGN Mind-to-Matrix Proprietary Blend (2562 mg)

Yes, that’s right, it’s time for the proprietary blend. Containing 11 ingredients, including betaine, caffeine, choline bitartrate, tyrosine, and agmatine sulfate, it is nigh impossible to determine how much of each of them actually make up the total blend weight.

Consequently, there is little point in our ENGN pre-workout review discussing their presence as we can’t tell you if they appear in scientifically optimum doses anyway. Add to that, the fact that with the exception of caffeine, the ingredients in this blend have very little if any scientific evidence to support their benefits for exercise performance and this proprietary blend just goes from bad to worse.

The only saving grace is that there is probably a solid enough dose of caffeine as there is plenty of space in the 2.5g blend for at least 250 mg of the only proven ingredient on the list! But even this we can’t be exactly sure of!

What is ENGN Shred?

ENGN Shred is an Evlution Nutrition alternative pre-workout supplement with a greater emphasis on fat burning and shredding! As a result, the product has a different formula with this goal in mind.

Recommended using 15-30 minutes before workout.

It still includes a Mind-to-Body Matrix proprietary blend with many of the same ingredients as the original ENGN formula. Beta alanine remains at the same mediocre dosing of 1.6g and creatine monohydrate is scrapped altogether, presumably because of its tendency to lead to weight gain as opposed to loss.

The key differences between the products, however, come with the ENGN Shred Matrix. A blend of ingredients designed to help you to burn more fat during your workouts. Now, you will be glad to know that despite using the term ‘matrix,’ this combination of ingredients is NOT a proprietary blend with the weight of each component ingredient fully disclosed!

This matrix includes doses of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), carnitine, coleus extract, red pepper fruit extract, and Yohimbe extract, all of which are believed to help boost your metabolism and increase fat-burning potential.

Are there any side effects? (Original ENGN formula)

As with any pre-workout formula, there are a few potential side effects to consider.

Creatine monohydrate can be associated with bloating and general gastrointestinal discomfort. This is normally the case with large doses consumed in one serving; however, given that there is only 2g included per scoop of ENGN by Evlution Nutrition, it’s doubtful that this will cause you too many problems.

Beta alanine tends to cause a tingling sensation on the surface of the skin, which normally subsides after about 20 minutes. This side effect is completely harmless and should be taken as evidence that you are consuming a meaningful dose of beta alanine and not something entirely useless. In all honesty however, the 1.6g serving in this pre-workout is unlikely to even produce these tingles!

Caffeine, particularly at high doses, can lead to symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, anxiety, and jitters. Most scientific research suggests it can be safely consumed at dosages of up to 400 mg per day.^[5] Because caffeine makes up part of the ENGN proprietary blend, we can’t say whether its dose of caffeine will result in the aforementioned side effects.

If you have a particularly low tolerance to caffeine, it may be worth starting with a half dose of this product just to test the water.

Pros and cons of ENGN by Evlution Nutrition

Pricing

At $29.99 for 30 servings on the official Evlution Nutrition website, ENGN comes in at a buck per serving. This puts it pretty much in the middle of the road as far as cost goes, with plenty of pre-workout manufacturers offering cheaper and more expensive options.

Flavor options

There are 9 flavors of ENGN pre-workout available for purchase, which means even the fussiest of customers should be able to find a taste to their liking. These include typically whacky pre-workout options such as furious grape, watermelon, and fruit punch.

Where to buy ENGN pre-workout

You can obviously purchase ENGN from the official Evlution Nutrition website, which is perhaps the most reliable option. Having said that, it is also available on trusted third-party supplement websites such as bodybuilding.com and iherb.com, as well as online retail giant Amazon, so it is well worth shopping around for the best price!

Summary

All in all, our ENGN pre-workout review has to conclude that this Evlution Nutrition manufactured supplement disappoints at almost every juncture. Not only does it contain a proprietary blend, which makes it impossible to determine how much of everything you are actually taking, but this blend is also largely made up of ingredients with limited if any, research to support their efficacy in exercise performance.

Add to that, the gross underdosing of both creatine monohydrate and beta alanine, about which there is a wealth of evidence to support their use, and things go from bad to worse for ENGN by Evlution Nutrition.

Whilst the fact that ENGN most likely contains a solid enough dose of caffeine, and is available in 9 flavor options are both certainly positives, it simply isn’t enough to paper over the giant cracks which appear elsewhere in this ENGN pre-workout review.

Whilst the price is very much middle of the road at $1 per serving, the product doesn’t even reach mediocre heights! Sorry, Evlution Nutrition, but you really must do better next time. Our advice to you? If you’re really serious about boosting your training performance with a pre-workout supplement, you can find much better than ENGN and probably at a lower price!

Resources

^[1] Grindstaff PD, et al. Effects of creatine supplementation on repetitive sprint performance and body composition in competitive swimmers. Int J Sport Nutr. 1997;7(4):330–46.
^[2] Creatine supplementation with specific view to exercise/sports performance: an update- journal of international sports science and nutrition.
^[3] beta-Alanine supplementation augments muscle carnosine content and attenuates fatigue during repeated isokinetic contraction bouts in trained sprinters- J Appl Physiol (1985). 2007 Nov;103(5
^[4] Stellingwerff T, Anwander H, Egger A, Buehler T, Kreis R, Decombaz J, et al. Effect of two beta-alanine dosing protocols on muscle carnosine synthesis and washout. Amino Acids. 2012;42(6):2461–72. doi: 10.1007/s00726-011-1054-4 and Harris RC, Jones GA, Kim HJ, Kim CK, Price KA, Wise JA. Changes in muscle carnosine of subjects with 4 weeks of supplementation with a controlled relase formulation of beta-alanine (CarnoSyn), and for 6 weeks post (Abstract) FASEB J. 2009;23:599.4.
^[5] Fat burners: nutrition supplements that increase fat metabolism- Obesity Reviews 2011