Why I Threw My Pre-Workout in the Trash (And Started Drinking Fungus)

Look. We need to have a serious talk about pre-workout powders because I am honestly sick of seeing people at my gym dry-scooping neon radioactive sludge that makes their skin crawl like they just walked through a spiderweb.

And yeah, I used to be one of those idiots.

Back in 2019 I was absolutely pounding this garbage. I'm talking two scoops of the blue raspberry "C4" knockoff right before doing heavy deadlifts, which, by the way, is a fantastic way to ensure your heart rate hits 180 before you even touch the barbell. But what choice did I have? I was working a miserable desk job until 5 PM, sitting in terrible Los Angeles traffic on the 405 for an hour and a half, and by the time I walked through the doors of my local 24 Hour Fitness at 6:45 PM I was practically a zombie.

I needed the caffeine. Or so I thought.

Then my friend Marcus—who is this bizarrely healthy dude that runs ultramarathons and eats literally nothing but venison and sweet potatoes—told me to throw my pre-workout in the actual garbage bin and buy a bag of cordyceps mushroom extract instead.

I laughed in his face. A mushroom? You want me to eat a fungus to help me squat 315 pounds? It sounded like the most Portland, Oregon hipster nonsense I had ever heard in my entire thirty-two years on this planet.

But Marcus was relentless. He gave me a little glass jar filled with this dark orange powder. The militaris strain, he called it. It smelled earthy. Like dirt after a heavy rain. Not exactly appetizing when you're used to artificial watermelon flavor, but whatever. I mixed three grams into a shaker bottle of water the next day and drank it on the drive to the gym.

Here is exactly what happened.

I didn't feel anything for the first twenty minutes. No jitters. No face tingling. No sudden urge to run through a brick wall. I was actually kind of mad, thinking Marcus had pranked me with expensive dirt.

But then I started my warmup sets. And then my working sets. And I realized something entirely weird was happening—I wasn't getting out of breath. Usually, by the fifth rep of a heavy set, I am gasping for air like a fish flopping around on a boat deck. But my lungs just felt... massive. Like someone had installed a secondary oxygen tank in my chest cavity while I wasn't looking.

I hit 315 for eight reps that day. My previous best was five.

So what the hell is actually going on here?

Well, if you dig into the research behind cordyceps for athletic performance, you find out that this weird little mushroom doesn't stimulate your central nervous system like caffeine does. Caffeine is basically fake energy. It just blocks the adenosine receptors in your brain so you don't realize you're tired, while simultaneously jacking up your cortisol and adrenaline. You are borrowing energy from tomorrow to pay for today, and the interest rate is terrible.

Cordyceps works completely differently. It actually increases the production of ATP—adenosine triphosphate—which is the literal molecular currency of energy in your cells. It also dilates your airways. More oxygen in the blood means more endurance for your muscles.

There's a famous story from the 1993 National Games in Beijing. A bunch of female Chinese runners absolutely shattered multiple world records, and everyone immediately accused them of taking illegal steroids. They were tested. The tests came back completely clean. The coach finally revealed their secret: they were drinking a soup made from turtle blood and Cordyceps sinensis. (We use the militaris strain now because sinensis is harvested from the heads of dead caterpillars in the Himalayas and costs like twenty thousand dollars a pound, which is frankly ridiculous).

Let's talk about the crash for a second. With standard pre-workout, you get a solid ninety minutes of feeling like a Greek god, followed immediately by four hours of feeling like you got hit by a bus. I remember sitting at my kitchen table at 9 PM after a heavy leg day, my hands shaking so bad I couldn't even hold a fork to eat my chicken and rice. My anxiety was through the roof. I couldn't sleep until 1 AM, and then my alarm went off at 6 AM, restarting the terrible cycle all over again.

With the mushroom extract? None of that. Zero crash. Because you aren't spiking your central nervous system, there is no cliff to fall off. You just finish your workout, go home, eat dinner, and go to bed like a normal human being. It was such a bizarre feeling those first few weeks. I kept waiting for the crash. I kept waiting for the sudden exhaustion to hit me while I was driving home, but it never did. My energy levels were just consistently... good.

My girlfriend thought I was losing my mind, by the way. She saw me mixing this brown powder into a glass of water every afternoon and asked if I had joined a cult. I told her I was drinking fungus to make my muscles bigger. She rolled her eyes and went back to drinking her chemical-tasting pink lemonade amino acids. Three weeks later, after watching me breeze through a Saturday morning hike that usually left me panting on a rock halfway up the trail, she asked to try some. Now we go through a bag of the extract every two weeks. She literally won't go to her spin class without it.

I've also noticed a massive difference in my recovery time. This is something people don't talk about enough. When you use artificial stimulants, your body is under massive oxidative stress. You are pushing your engine past the redline, and you pay for it the next day with horrible DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness). The cordyceps actually helps clear lactic acid from your muscles faster. I used to be basically crippled the day after doing heavy lunges. Now? I wake up, my legs are a little stiff, but I can actually walk down the stairs without holding onto the railing for dear life.

If you are trying to figure out the best time to take mushroom supplements, the rule for this one is simple. Take it thirty to forty-five minutes before you plan on doing something exhausting. Running, lifting, cycling, whatever. If you are just sitting at a desk all day, you probably don't need a huge dose of it, although it does help a bit with mental fatigue. But the real magic happens when your heart rate goes up and your lungs start demanding oxygen.

Look, I'm not saying you have to completely give up coffee. A lot of people love mushroom coffee because it blends the two worlds—you get a little bit of caffeine for the immediate mental wake-up, combined with the sustained physical endurance of the mushrooms. But if you are using high-stimulant pre-workouts to force your body to exercise when it's exhausted, you are going to burn out your adrenal glands. I've seen it happen to a dozen guys at my gym. They start with one scoop, then two scoops, then three scoops, until eventually they are taking enough caffeine to kill a small horse and they still feel tired. It's a trap.

There's a lot of debate online about which specific type of cordyceps you should buy. You'll see a lot of companies selling "CS-4" which is a lab-grown fermented mycelium product. Don't buy that stuff. It's mostly starch and grain filler. You want pure fruiting body extract, specifically the militaris species. It has way higher levels of cordycepin, which is the active compound that actually does all the heavy lifting for your ATP production. Check the label. If it doesn't clearly say "fruiting body extract," leave it on the shelf.

And whatever you do, please do not dry-scoop this stuff. It tastes absolutely foul by itself, and inhaling a cloud of fine mushroom powder into your lungs is a really fast way to ruin your afternoon. Mix it with warm water. Stir it up. Chug it. It dissolves pretty easily if the water isn't ice cold. Some days I throw a little bit of lemon juice in there to cut the earthy flavor, but honestly, after the third time drinking it, you don't even notice the taste anymore. Your brain just associates that dirt-water flavor with feeling indestructible, so you start looking forward to it.

Throw the blue powder away. Get the extract. Try it for exactly one week. When you realize you can suddenly run an extra mile without your chest burning, or add another plate to your squat without feeling like your heart is going to explode, you can send me a thank you note. Stop letting supplement companies poison your nervous system with cheap stimulants. Your body deserves better fuel than that.