Things that are not steroids: pre-workout

People often ask me “what I think” of various supplements: protein, creatine. Most people have a rightful wariness of basically anything this is sold in a supplement shop, and anything that might have caused guys in gyms to be wilding out the way they sometimes are. The packaging of supplements often looks deranged; the ingredients are a laundry list of stuff no one has ever heard before. And it is true that, since our government regulates supplements reactively, it is possible for all kinds of weird stuff to reach the market and even get comfortable before its negative impacts reveal themselves and force the FDA to do something.

Still, I feel that supplements are mostly nothing to fear, even as I don’t bother with virtually any of them. But then people ask me about pre-workout, or powdered stimulants that people take before they go to the gym, and I remember Jack3d.

Does anyone else here remember Jack3d? I would like a show of hands if you remember Jack3d.

Jack3d was on the market in the heady days of the early 2010s. I’m not sure if it was the recession that gave rise to the same street-legal substance market that produced Four Loko, but there was truly something in the air.

Anyway—Jack3d was a pre-workout that was sold off the shelves of stores like GNC. At any given time, for the last several decades, there have been many pre-workouts available in the world. But gym bros loved Jack3d. My firsthand experience with Jack3d was that at one point, my then-boyfriend and his friends started to work out, and Jack3d was their pre-workout of choice. These normally mild-mannered guys would come back from the gym basically cracking their skulls together like goats, yelling, aggro, filled with ambitions like planning a boys’ vacation and reorganizing every closet in the apartment. “Urggg I feel so GOOD!” I remember my then-boyfriend shouting. It was a little funny, but mostly frightening. Even as I’ve dabbled in pre-workouts myself, I was never quite able to forget Jack3d. So it does not surprise me to learn years later that that primary active ingredient in Jack3d was DMAA, an actual amphetamine derivative, and that there are five deaths associated with DMAA. In 2013, Jack3d and other DMAA-based pre’s were literally seized from store shelves and destroyed.