Non-food supplements fall roughly into three different subcategories. We have ergogenic aids which can augment performance in some way, either by improving your output per unit of time, or by increasing your time to exhaustion without stimulant-like properties.
There are stimulants which excite your central nervous system in some manner therefore improving the same performance metrics, and then there are a heterogeneous group of ‘other’ products that don’t necessarily fit within any broad bracket.
Generally speaking, non-food supplements are things that you can typically find in foods that you may consume anyway, or things that you consume the precursors for, but which you cannot typically find in a normal diet at the doses needed for proving to be of benefit. As an example of what we mean by this consider creatine. Around 1kg of beef (weighed raw) would yield around 5g of usable creatine but this means 600-1000g of meat would need to be eaten daily just to get the 3-5g dose shown to improve sporting performance. This would be inordinately expensive (as well as being likely to result in a hugely unbalanced diet), and so supplemental creatine is considered the preferable source. Below we will outline most prominent examples from each category. Please note that this list is not exhaustive but we have endeavoured to include as many categorically useful supplements as possible. There may be other things available on the market which can theoretically provide a benefit but these are not yet proven and so it wouldn’t be possible at the time of writing to make any claims about them.
Consider it to be the case that if a supplement isn’t found below, there isn’t a great deal of robust evidence to support its efficacy. It would be prudent to follow the steps detailed at the end of this module to ascertain whether any given product should be considered.