I’m not here to sell you tubs of neon powder with lightning bolts on the label. I’m here to tune the chemistry of your engine.
The supplement market is a multi-billion industry built on two fuels: your insecurity and your impatience. You want the magic pill that covers for six-hour nights and the nutrition of a teenager in crisis. It doesn’t exist.
Until your sleep, your hydration and your macros are calibrated, supplements do exactly one thing: they turn your urine into a very expensive liquid. Call it rich man’s piss.
Once the foundations are laid, once, not before, we can talk marginal gains. Exactly three supplements carry a real physiological return on investment for endurance. Three. The rest goes in the bin, and we’ll get to that.
Creatine Monohydrate
The most studied supplement on the planet. And cyclists and runners still avoid it like the plague, because of an old locker-room myth from the 90s.
No, you will not bloat up
Wrong. Creatine causes intracellular water retention: inside the muscle cell, not under the skin. Subcutaneous retention is the one that makes you look puffy and soft. You won’t get that one. What you get instead: a better hydrated muscle, more resilient to heat, structurally denser. A positive anabolic signal and a buffer against dehydration.
The mechanics
Creatine saturates your phosphocreatine stores, the fuel of the alactic anaerobic system: efforts from 0 to 10 seconds.
Endurance doesn’t care about that, right?
Wrong. Modern cycling and trail running are not linear efforts. They are a string of micro-accelerations: smoothing out a steep ramp, closing a gap in the bunch, surviving the violent start of a Zwift race, launching the final sprint. Between each of those, creatine lets you recycle ATP faster.
The bonus: your brain
The brain burns a huge amount of ATP, and studies show creatine cuts cognitive fatigue. On an ultra or a five-hour ride, when clarity drops and you start making stupid calls on lines and on food, creatine protects your CPU.
Prescription: 3 to 5g per day, every day. Plain monohydrate, the cheapest one. HCL and buffered versions are marketing.
Coenzyme Q10 / Ubiquinol
If your mitochondria are the factory, CoQ10 is the spark plug.
The science
Deep in your cells, in the electron transport chain, cellular respiration if you prefer, CoQ10 converts nutrients into ATP. Without it the chain breaks and the factory idles.
The target
Your body makes its own. Except production drops hard after 30 to 35, and a big training volume, with the oxidative stress that comes with it, drains your reserves. A masters athlete over 40 training hard is probably running a deficit. The engine is there. The ignition is shot.
Prescription: the active form, ubiquinol, not ubiquinone, cheaper but poorly absorbed. Yes, it costs. It works.
Sodium
Not sexy. Doesn’t sell in black and gold tubs. But it’s the number one cause of DNFs and of massive performance drops.
The reality
Athletes drink plain water. A lot of water. Too much water. They dilute their blood sodium concentration, and that’s hyponatremia: blood volume drops, the blood turns thick like mud, the heart has to pump harder to move that mud, hello cardiac drift, and nerve signalling jams.
Cramps? In 90% of cases, forget magnesium and potassium. The culprit is a sodium deficit, or plain neuromuscular fatigue.
Prescription: stop being scared of salt. If you sweat, you replace. Salt your food. On the bike, aim for 500 to 1000mg of sodium per litre of water depending on the heat.
The blacklist
Save your money.
BCAAs. The fitness industry’s masterstroke: selling flavoured water for 40€. If you eat enough complete protein (meat, eggs, whey, legumes), you already have every BCAA you need. Adding more is building a wall with red bricks only, no cement, no grey bricks. Pointless.
Glutamine. Sold for muscle recovery. Studies show your gut absorbs nearly all the glutamine you swallow before it ever reaches your muscles. Good for gut health? Maybe. For your quads? Zero.
Fat burners. Overpriced caffeine mixed with pepper. Drink an espresso and go run in zone 2.
Conclusion
Optimisation is engineering, not magic. Sleep 8 hours. Eat real food. Train with progressive overload. That’s 95% of the job, and it costs nothing.
Once that’s done? Creatine, sodium, and CoQ10 if you’re past 30. Anything past that list is noise.
Close your wallet, and go to sleep.