Flow Pre is a premium pre-workout formula that aims to provide general support, whatever your fitness goals are.
This is in line with the market for pre-workouts and we’re pretty impressed with the approach that Flow is taking. It’s not setting the world on fire with novelty and innovation, but it has some interesting little twists you might not see in your average pre-workout.
Table of Contents
About Flow Pre
Flow is designed as a generalist pre-workout supplement. It’s not clear that it’s aimed at any specific niche – even the marketing material says it’s for ‘any type of physically demanding work’. This doesn’t speak to a clear goal or specific use.
The ingredients are an interesting mixture and they provide a significant range of benefits. We’re going to break them down individually – and see what they can do for you – so let’s look at the label…
Flow Pre Supplement Facts
Directions for Use
The intended use of the product is a simple scoop, but it doesn’t direct you on timings and similar. We recommend taking this product in the 30-60 minutes prior to a workout, in order to get the best results from the caffeine and citrulline.
These are the most time-limited compounds for performance, so they’re well placed in this product. This also ensures the proper absorption and uptake of sodium into the muscles. We recommend 1-2 scoops, based on tolerance.
Consume with a middle-high GI carbohydrate source before training for the best results.
Flow Pre Ingredients
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Citrulline (5g)
Citrulline is great; it’s one of the emerging heroes of the pre-workout market. It’s always been a popular nitric oxide booster, meaning that it can improve delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the muscles during exercise. This was always valued for the role in building a better muscle pump.
However, it’s recently gained appeal for its role in endurance performance and muscular recovery. The same mechanisms that make citrulline great for pumps make it a quality performance boosting compound. They improve muscular endurance and recovery between bouts.
After exercise, citrulline’s effects on nutrient delivery and oxygen circulation may result in improvements to muscle damage recovery. This means better performance in the long-run, as well as just in the session you’re taking the pre-workout for.
There’s a ton of citrulline in this product and the results are going to be significant, which we really like. It’s a great compound and this product hits it hard with clinically-relevant doses.
Beta-Alanine (3.2g)
Beta-Alanine is cool because it increases muscle carnosine, a huge deal for the turnover of energy in the muscles. This is important because it makes Beta-Alanine a fantastic endurance compound.
Not only will it improve your overall time to exhaustion, which is great, but it also supports the 60-240 second performance window. This is ideal because it’s in the middle of power/strength and classical endurance.
This overlooked mid-ground is a great place to make additional gains and provide yourself with nutritional support. Beta-Alanine does both, through anti-fatigue benefits and boosting carnosine levels.
The dose is big here, too, so you’re going to be getting tons of value from your Beta-Alanine.
Taurine (1g)
This is an interesting compound: it’s become very popular in the energy drink and supplement market but isn’t decidedly great for a pre-workout.
Taurine does have some benefits, however. In fact, it has a wide range of very modest benefits – the most important of which seems to be a mild synergy with caffeine. This makes for better overall results and keeps your caffeine intake more effective – producing better results.
Equally, we like Taurine for improving and regulating hydration of muscle cells. It’s directly used for combatting certain forms of cramps but seems to just be generally useful in providing a better muscular environment.
It’s also significantly beneficial for blood flow which, obviously, makes it a great partner to citrulline.
The results are all quite useful, primarily as synergists, but they don’t make it a clear-cut choice for one of the main ingredients in this product. We like it, it just seems like an odd choice when there are some clear missing opportunities like creatine, which would synergize perfectly with almost everything in this product!
We like Taurine a lot, we’re just not sure it deserves the primacy it is given here.
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Glycerol (750mg)
A key osmolyte for improving muscular hydration, this is a great compound for combining with the more modest hydration benefits of taurine. It’s a great way of improving muscular water storage and uptake.
This makes for better performance at pretty much every distance or duration. This would also have been a perfect synergist with creatine since all the science tells us that this combination produces some of the most important workout-boosting hyperhydration.
On its own, however, it’s primarily just going to be useful for increasing the uptake of fats (both the dietary and bodyfat kind) for utilization. This doesn’t make it a fat burner: it just changes substrate use slightly.
Green Tea (300mg)
Green tea extract is pretty useful in some circumstances. It offers two key compounds that are valuable: GABA and EGCG.
GABA is a mood regulator and can improve your hormonal response to exercise. On top of this, GABA intake is beneficial for improving overall sleep quality, as well as the effect it has on training recovery/growth.
EGCG is a fat-oxidation compound that is going to work well in combination with Glycerol. It promotes the metabolism of a small amount of bodyfat which can contribute to better performance – especially in endurance exercise.
Caffeine (200mg)
The lynchpin of most pre-workout supplements on the market, caffeine is a compound that has been tested and proven by time itself, with countless studies and a century of popularity.
The benefits of caffeine are both mental and physical. As you might expect, both kinds contribute to better performance in your workouts, so they deserve talking about.
Caffeine’s main psychological benefit is combatting fatigue and improving wakefulness. It directly replaces the signal for tiredness in your brain, helping you to feel better when you’re tired or stressed.
The result of the psychological benefits adds up: improved mood, focus, cognitive performance, and ultimately a better perception of your workouts. This adds up to better mental performance and commitment in the gym.
Equally, the physical benefits of caffeine are the result of reduced fatigue. The neuromuscular force you can generate is higher when caffeinated than normal, which means stronger, more powerful sessions with a slower performance drop-off.
Long story short, caffeine is great. Dosage here is relatively low but you can find other ways of caffeinating or just double the scoops. Still within effective and healthy dose guidelines.
Norvaline (200mg)
This is basically an analogue of isoleucine, making it a branched-chain amino acid for most intents and purposes.
Isoleucine and Norvaline contribute to reducing the breakdown of muscle proteins, especially when dieting. This is a useful benefit for most people, since it’s also a good way of supporting muscular health during/following exercise.
However, this isn’t a huge deal and we’re not entirely convinced on the importance of Norvaline in the context of this product. It might synergize well with Citrulline and Beta-Alanine, but it provides very little distinct value as a pre-workout supplement, especially considering what could be used instead of Norvaline.
Overall, not a huge addition.
Methyl Liberine (100mg)
This is also known as Dynamine, and is a novel stimulant that naturally occurs in standard stimulant sources like coffee or the coca plant. This is primarily going to be useful here in combination with the caffeine in order to provide a more natural matrix of caffeine compounds.
The benefits aren’t clear right now, because Dynamine isn’t well-researched for ergogenic (performance-boosting) properties. We’re not sure what exactly this is going to do for you, but it’s not clear that it’s that much use yet.
Piperine (5mg)
We will never stop singing the praises of piperine. It’s a black pepper extract but it’s has the unusual benefit of being a universal absorption booster.
In simple terms, piperine makes you better at absorbing almost everything. Nutrient uptake is huge with piperine because it increases the permeability of, and active transfer across, intestine walls. This means what you eat – such as supplements – are more effectively digested.
This means that piperine alone is making every single compound in this product more effective. It’s easy to see why we love this compound so much and why it’s a sign of great things for Flow Pre.
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Flow Pre Formula Analysis: Does it Work?
The formula works – and pretty well for a bunch of things. As stated, it’s not got a clear direct goal so we’re going to have to look at the individual benefits as being a part of the larger focus of “generally better workouts”.
For this purpose, it’s not the best product we’ve ever seen, but it is one of the better ones. It’s a shame that it doesn’t contain creatine or similar time-honored strength-support compounds.
However, if your main intention is to improve a workout that doesn’t involve heavy lifting, this product is a great choice. It’s best suited to a workout that requires some big efforts, but primarily focuses on mid-high duration exercise.
All the ingredients work well together and further the general performance and recovery benefits you’re after. This makes it a pretty high-quality supplement and we like the overall effects it will bring to your workouts.
Flow Pre Benefits
The benefits of Flow Pre are pretty even across the range of workouts you could be doing and the goals you have for yourself. This is a generalist supplement: it’s designed to produce better wakefulness and focus, as well as bringing up your performance and stamina in pretty much every kind of exercise.
The endurance benefits are probably the most pronounced with the close synergies between citrulline, beta-alanine, and taurine. This makes up a majority of the product and, while it’s not marketed as an endurance supplement, it’s going to be great for this purpose.
It’s a little lighter on the heavy lifting/muscle gain benefits. However, the generalized benefits of citrulline, for example, can contribute to better recovery. These all add up to a better workout and better recovery, so we can envision them helping in the long-run.
From a physique perspective, this product doesn’t have a specific muscle mass/fat loss bent. Improved workouts help, whatever your goals, but this isn’t going to bring drastic changes to your physique by itself. EGCG can be a useful fat-burner but it’s definitely not aimed at bodybuilding levels of muscle gains or shreds.
It scores above average on most categories, but Flow haven’t planted their flag on any specific goal, so it’s not going to compete well with specialist products. However, if you’re training for general athleticism, fitness, health, or recreationally then it’s going to provide some serious value.
Who Takes It?
Anyone who is working out for a pretty non-specific goal would benefit from Flow Pre. If you’re exercising to be a better version of yourself or get fitter, this is a quality choice. It’s not the cheapest product for general use, but it does provide a serious, well-rounded profile.
In our opinion, it is out-performed in specialist categories or by other premium products. However, this doesn’t diminish Pre’s effects, so you shouldn’t be put off if you don’t have a specialist interest that needs really specific support.
This product is for you if you’re aiming at a well-rounded notion of fitness and you’re willing to invest some cash to get it. It justifies its cost, but it is notable.
Any Potential Side Effects with Flow Pre?
You’re not likely to run into any side effects with this product; there’s nothing on the ingredient list that is particularly controversial. There are always some individual risks based on what you respond well to, but the only person you can talk to about that is your physician.
The low caffeine content means that you’re not even likely to run into concerns with things like jitters, headaches, or digestive distress. Be careful increasing your dose, and always keep an eye on your tolerance.
Otherwise, you should be totally fine.
Flow Pre Summary
Pros:
- Clear synergy between active ingredients
- Big doses of key compounds like beta-alanine and citrulline, especially
- Some clever choices, like piperine
- Generalist can be great or terrible
Cons:
- Quite expensive, comparatively
- Not the best premium product on the market
- Generalist can be great or terrible
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Flow Pre Pricing & Buying Info
This is a premium product and it comes with a relatively premium price point of $49.99. It’s basically $50. It’s not going to be the economy option, that’s for sure.
We’re not convinced on the economy of this product because it definitely does have stiff competition from the premium product market, which offers arguably-better alternatives. It’s also fair to say that there are some top-quality economy products that can compete on the basis of value for money, specifically.
However, we think this product does enough to earn its price point. It’s not blowing our minds on a value-per-dollar basis, but it’s not miles out of where we think it should be. There’s a clear idea of what it’s for and it provides some really valuable, high-dose synergists.
Flow Pre Review: Final Word
We like this product overall, but it sits solidly in the upper-middle of the pack. It’s not providing the kind of quality you’d see with a product line like Opti-Nutra’s Performance Lab, nor the kind of hallmark value for money from a company like Cellucor.
However, it does provide some interesting novelties and if you’re in the market for a strong generalist, it does enough to be a good choice. Its premium price point for a generalist, however, is the main sticking point for us.
As a result, we’d say it’s a good product but not the best. We like it, but we don’t love it. Make it slightly cheaper and our star rating could increase.
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