Published on June 5th 2026
There is a conversation I have had probably a hundred times now. Usually in a kitchen. Sometimes at a coffee meeting. Once memorably in the supplement aisle of the Chicago Marathon expo with a runner from Connecticut who had a stressed look I will not forget and a question about which tub she should buy. The honest answer was that none of the tubs in front of us would help her enough to be worth what they cost. I said something more diplomatic at the time. The honest answer has not changed.
Most of what gets bought in this category is wasted. Not because the products are bad. Because the people buying them have not done the unglamorous things that let any supplement matter at all. You can sleep five hours a night, skip breakfast, race three marathons a year and rely on willpower to get through training, and no amount of carnitine or pre-workout is going to fix any of it. The basics get a runner most of the way to whatever supplements can offer. People skip the basics because they are dull and reach for the tub because it has a flavour and a name.
So here is roughly what I tell people, in the order I think it matters.
Get the basics right first
Protein is the one almost everyone gets wrong. Recreational marathoners undereat it, especially women. Public health says 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, which is fine if the goal is to avoid a deficiency. If the goal is to run a marathon and keep your body together past 40, the number is more like 1.4 to 1.8 grams. I have watched runner after runner add this one thing and feel a difference inside a month. The first thing that improves is usually recovery. The second is sleep. Why sleep, I do not entirely know.
Spread it across three or four meals. The shake at the end of a long run helps. The Sunday lasagne with a proper portion and the Tuesday morning eggs at six matter more.
Get the blood tests next. Most runners I work with are running on assumed vitamin D and assumed iron status, and either could be the actual reason a training block is not catching. The vitamin D test costs less than a pair of running socks. The iron panel, ferritin specifically, costs less than a race entry. Without the numbers, supplementing is a guess. Sometimes a useful guess. Mostly a wasted one.
Electrolytes finish the boring layer. Sodium matters most. Salt your food. Use a sports drink in heat or on anything over two hours. People who cramp regularly are usually undersalting their diet, which is fixable for the price of nothing.
For runners putting together a starter kit and looking for a single place to compare formulas without bouncing across six websites, retailers like EliteSupps carry most of what the foundational layer needs at reasonable prices.
The supplements that actually do something
The second layer is what most runners assume is the first. It is shorter than the marketing suggests.
Caffeine works. The research is by now unkillable. Three to six milligrams per kilogram, taken 30 to 60 minutes before a key session, perceptibly drops the sense of effort and extends what the body can do at a given pace. The catch is that taking caffeine every day blunts the effect for the sessions where you actually want it. Use it for hard sessions and race day. Coffee handles social mornings.
Creatine has been the bigger shift over the last decade. I was sceptical for years, mostly because the research had been done on young men in gyms and the extrapolation to endurance felt thin. Then the newer studies started coming in (women’s lean mass preservation into perimenopause, glycogen recovery between hard sessions, possible cognitive support under sleep deprivation) and I changed my mind. Three to five grams a day, taken with anything.
It takes about a month to feel. Worth skipping entirely if a runner is not going to take it every day, because intermittent supplementation never gets the muscle stores full.
Beta-alanine is the one most runners skip. The tingling sensation puts people off. The defensible case is for repeated short efforts between 60 seconds and 5 minutes, so think hard intervals, track sessions and any 5K or 10K race effort. Less relevant for steady long runs.
If a runner wants a sense check on whether a supplement is worth the money before buying it, the Australian Institute of Sport classifies all three of the above in Group A of its Sports Supplement Framework, which is the tier reserved for evidence-supported ingredients with established benefit for athletes. AIS is a government body with no financial reason to promote particular products. When a tub is making claims for something AIS has not placed in Group A, that is usually a sign.
Recovery, the bit most runners forget
Adaptation does not happen during a workout. It happens in the hours between them. Most supplements that earn their place quietly do their work here.
Magnesium glycinate in the evening, 200 to 400 mg, has reasonable evidence for sleep quality and a real subjective effect on recovery. A lot of runners I have worked with take it for a month and quietly stay on it for years.
Fish oil is one of the most studied supplements going, but the quality of what is on the shelf varies wildly. The number that matters is the EPA and DHA content per capsule, not the capsule size. The cheap stuff tends to be filler with token active ingredients, which is why it is cheap.
Beyond those two, the recovery shelf gets murky. Tart cherry. Curcumin. Beetroot juice. Each has some research. None has the kind of evidence base that earns it a permanent spot in a recreational athlete’s stack. Use any of them tactically before a race block, not year-round.
The stuff to skip
A few categories deserve direct scepticism.
BCAAs are at the top of the list. They were sold heavily a decade ago, the research has not held up for anyone already eating adequate protein, and the marketing is still operating on a story the science no longer supports. If you eat enough chicken, eggs and yoghurt, you do not need them.
Pre-workout proprietary blends are next. If a product is not telling you how much of each ingredient is in the scoop, the product is hiding the answer because the answer is unimpressive. With stimulants, the dose is the whole story. Anything that obscures the dose has decided you should not know it.
Glutamine sits in a similar bucket. Studied for years in endurance contexts. Repeatedly fails to do much in healthy adults. Still sells reliably, which says more about the supplement industry than about glutamine.
The pattern across all of this is the same. Anything promising to fix five problems at once is doing so by underdelivering on each of them. Single-ingredient products at proven doses almost always beat blends. Products advertised with race photos and a tagline rather than a published dose are selling identity, not nutrition.
One last thing
I say this every time I have the conversation, so I might as well say it here too. What makes the biggest difference is rarely the stack.
Sleep. Food. The actual training plan. The recovery between sessions. A marathoner running on six hours of sleep and skipping meals is not going to be rescued by supplements. The one sleeping eight and eating like an adult rarely needs a complicated stack to keep training quality high.
The stack supports the work. It does not replace it. The runners I know who get the most out of supplements are mostly the ones who would have done fine without them. Which is not a coincidence. They are the ones doing the rest of the work consistently enough to notice the small effects that supplements produce. The runners still trying to outsource recovery to a tub are the ones still confused about why nothing seems to be working.
The stack you do not need is the sign that you are doing the rest of it right.
Contributed by West Media on behalf of EliteSupps