Best Muscle-Building Stack

Building muscle is supposed to be a simple equation. You lift weights and eat more than maintenance calories, and the muscle should grow. But it doesn’t always work this way — certainly not the same way for everyone. Multiple factors can get in the way of success in the gym, from your genetics to the quality of the food you’re eating, and even the most successful bodybuilders would want to improve their performance and results if they could.

That’s why so many people looking to put on and retain muscle will turn to supplements that claim to give them an edge.

Multiple clinical studies confirm that supplementation with protein, vitamins, specific amino acids, and other nutrients can help you get more gains out of the same amount of work in the gym.1 However, one supplement or protein powder on its own might not be enough, especially when you consider that different ingredients work better at specific times around your workout.

Muscle-building stacks account for this by breaking up vital nutrients into pills and drinks you consume at various points throughout the day. This allows you to maximize each benefit and lets the supplements work together to achieve desired results.

If you’re a little pressed for time, here’s a quick rundown of our favorite muscle-building stacks.

Best overall: Custom stack from Animal

Specifically, we recommend you combine:

• Animal Pump Non-Stim
• Animal Creatine HMB+
• Animal Meal
• Animal Flex Powder

These four products represent the best combination you can get from a single company to cover pre-workout and recovery needs toward maximizing gains. Also, sticking with one company allows you to use its custom bundle discounts (Animal applies these automatically) to maximize savings.

But Animal isn't the best option for everyone. Here are our top picks among prefabricated stacks from other brands that might fit a specific need:

• Best value pick: Swolverine Vegan Build
• Best for recovery and testosterone support: Swolverine Performance Series
• Best plant-based option: Swolverine Vegan Build
• Best tasting: JYM System

At Innerbody Research, we extensively test each health service or product we review, including muscle-building stacks. No one on our testing team is a professional bodybuilder or fitness model, but we try to exercise and eat well. Incorporating these products into our lives, even for a short while, allows us to report back to you about things like taste and efficacy, albeit at a subjective, anecdotal level.

But rather than just try the products and tell you if we liked them, our team also spent nearly 2,000 hours poring over hundreds of research papers looking into the various ingredients found in these stacks. That knowledge base, combined with our personal experience, makes this a review you can actually trust.

Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this review was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy. We’ll keep tabs on these supplements as they evolve and keep trying them for ourselves to make sure this guide stays current.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

Choosing the right muscle-building stack for you depends on several factors. Here are the criteria we paid the closest attention to when making our selections.

Effectiveness

Advantage: Animal

Numerous companies make prefabricated stacks they curate and sell for a discount, but no company on the market has combined its best components into an ideal stack that aligns with current exercise and recovery science to maximize muscle growth. There were too many instances where a company would leave a better product from its own lineup out of a given stack.

The most effective combination of supplements to build muscle would include a pre-workout, a meal replacement or mass gainer with the right macronutrient balance, a creatine supplement, and something for joint health and general recovery. Animal is the only company to offer a top-tier version of each product that can all be combined into a discounted stack.

Here’s what it looks like:

• Pre-workout: Animal Pump Non-Stim
• Creatine: Animal Creatine HMB+
• Meal replacement/mass gainer: Animal Meal
• Joint health/general recovery: Animal Flex Powder

Animal’s automatic bundling option also allows you to make adjustments to this stack to suit your needs. For example, you might prefer the highly caffeinated pre-workout to the non-stim version. (However, in our research, 300mg of caffeine anhydrous is a lot, and you might experience a heavy crash after use.) Or, if you’re a younger lifter, you might not have a need for the kind of joint support that Flex offers, so you could swap it out for something else.

Ultimately, building any stack around Animal’s meal replacement and creatine supplement would be a fantastic place to start. By comparison, prefabricated stacks included in this guide from Swolverine and JYM come close, but neither company offers quite the same quality in meal replacements or mass gainers, which, as we’ll discuss below, are the cornerstone of any muscle-building supplement regimen.

Cost

Advantage: Swolverine

The range of prices among muscle-building stacks isn’t particularly wide, but you might get a lot more for your money from one company than another. Among the best stacks from the three companies included in this guide, the lowest price is $167 and the highest is $216. That $167 price point comes from JYM, but Swolverine’s $216 Vegan Build stack is actually the best of the deals, all due to the number of servings per stack.

Several companies also offer custom bundling platforms, and Animal automatically applies bundling discounts to any multiple-product purchase. That means you can create your own stack from our nuanced recommendations and still save 25% off the price each would be on its own.

Here’s how it works out:

As you can see, Animal and JYM appear to have better deals at the outset — and, to be fair, they do offer a lower barrier of entry for people without a lot of capital — but Swolverine’s stack is dramatically less expensive per serving.

Now, this math is imperfect because you might not want or need to take every supplement in a given stack on a daily basis. For example, that stack from Animal provides 30 servings of creatine and joint support, but only 20 servings of its meal replacement and pre-workout. If you average five workouts a week and only want to take the pre-workout and meal replacement on gym days, then the stack will last you a month. However, if your regimen is different, you may see variations in cost savings from one brand to the next.

Safety

Advantage: Swolverine

Compared to taking steroids (which is not advised), most muscle-building stacks are incredibly safe. But some are safer than others. One important factor we look for is third-party testing. This ensures that any given supplement contains exactly what the company says is in it, with no contamination or dilution.

Swolverine goes further than most other companies by subjecting its products to third-party testing and releasing batch-specific results to the public. You can compare the lot number printed on any product you receive to a long list on the company’s certificates or analysis page. That will lead you to results detailing purity, dose accuracy, and microbial contamination.

Animal advertises a minimum of third-party testing, but the company doesn’t share the results of those tests on any public-facing webpage, nor does it provide them via customer service. Our team reached out on several occasions to ask for certificates of analysis, and we were denied at every turn. As for JYM, it does not perform third-party testing on its products.

Another safety point worth considering is simplicity. Swolverine’s Vegan Build stack combines four well-researched ingredients with a straightforward pea-based protein powder. Most single products in the other stacks in this guide contain more ingredients than the entire Vegan Build stack. That helps ensure a low incidence of side effects while providing you with well-researched, effective ingredients.

One last thing we appreciate about Swolverine is that it’s the only company in our guide to keep sucralose out of all its flavored drinks. Sucralose has been linked to things like increased tumor formation in some animal studies.2 There’s also evidence that it produces negative disturbances in gut bacteria.3 These studies typically use much higher concentrations than you’d find in everyday products, and they were conducted mostly in animals, but they’re still worrisome, to say the least.

Taste

Advantage: JYM System

By ordering these products for ourselves, we can speak to one of the most important things you’ll want to consider before buying them: how they taste. Granted, this is ultimately a subjective measure, but there were some unanimous findings among our testers that could easily sway your decision.

For example, on the protein powder side, JYM's Rocky Road was a runaway winner, and it really illustrates JYM's obvious attention to how consumers enjoy their products. For one thing, it tastes great in plain water (that allows you to save on both money and calories, if desired). The flavor itself is actually nuanced, too. Although it doesn't contain nuts à la Rocky Road ice cream, it actually provides a hint of nutty flavor in the background.

For another thing, it contains little marshmallows, a traditional Rocky Road ingredient. They're like the marshmallows you sometimes get in hot chocolate packets, and they taste like the marshmallows in Lucky Charms cereal. We had a similar experience recently trying JYM’s newest protein powder flavor, Chocolate Cookie Crunch, which, you may have guessed, contains little cookie pieces. What's more, a serving of either contains no more than 2g of sugar. That's thanks to the use of sucralose, which somehow doesn't give the mix the artificial taste typically associated with the sweetener.

But if you're looking to avoid sucralose for health reasons, go with Swolverine, whose protein powders are tasty, have a much simpler ingredient list, and use only stevia for sweetness. (JYM also offers naturally sweetened versions of its protein powders, pre-workouts, and post-workouts, but they aren't yet part of any stack.)

Convenience

Advantage: Animal

Convenience in a muscle-building stack comes from a handful of places. It starts with a company’s website, ease of use, and customer consideration. Simple navigation, money-back guarantees, and privacy policies also play into this category. Flexible subscription options are also a big plus when available.

The easiest company we’ve dealt with in researching and purchasing a good stack has been Animal. This wasn’t always the case, as previous iterations of this guide and similar content on our site have excluded Animal owing to a few issues with product formulation and problems with the website and customer service. Those formulas have been vastly improved, and the service experience is now outstanding.

The best part of the company’s revamped system is its automatic bundling discount. With certain competitors, you have to do a specific Google search to find their custom bundle builders; they don’t offer easy-to-navigate links anywhere on their pages. Animal is the complete opposite. It applies a bundling discount to any products you add to your cart, reaching up to 25% off for four or more products.

Animal also shipped its stack to us faster than anyone else, with the package arriving at a location outside Philadelphia just two days after we ordered it. JYM was also admirably fast, taking just four days. In contrast, Swolverine’s shipping time was abysmal. Our package wasn’t even shipped until eight days after we placed the order, and it arrived another six days later. That’s two weeks from order to delivery, compared to two days from Animal.

To give you a quick overview of how our top muscle-building stacks compare to one another, we’ve put together this chart outlining their costs, supplement quantities, and protein types.

To create muscle-building stacks, companies identify various supplements that can improve workout performance and boost results, combining them into an effective system. Instead of taking everything at once, you might take a daily vitamin supplement in the morning, a pre-workout before heading to the gym, and a protein powder or recovery aid after your lifting session.

As we’ve reviewed the science behind various supplemental approaches to muscle growth, we’ve seen that the most effective supplements typically take one of two approaches. One approach is to aid in recovery after a workout, providing the body with glucose to restore muscle glycogen, extra calories and a balanced macronutrient load to improve muscle protein synthesis, or ingredients shown to reduce delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) and improve joint health. The other approach is to increase energy and performance while in the gym, typically with caffeine, amino acids, and electrolytes.

However, there’s one ingredient we’ll explore below that doesn’t fit neatly into either of these categories but is among the most widely studied and successful muscle builders on the market.

Let’s take a look at the types of supplements included in various muscle-building stacks and how some of the ingredients you’re likely to find in them should work, starting with that very effective outlier: creatine.

Creatine

Creatine has been a favorite among bodybuilders for decades, and the scientific literature largely supports its use. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis looking into creatine’s role in muscle hypertrophy concluded that “creatine supplementation combined with resistance training promotes a small increase in the direct measures of skeletal muscle hypertrophy in both the upper and lower body.”30 That means there was a definitive improvement in muscle growth for participants adding creatine to their workouts, compared to those who didn’t, across ten qualified studies.

But unlike protein consumption and a calorically dense macronutrient balance that can spur muscle protein synthesis, creatine works through another mechanism. It actually causes your muscles to hold more water, which stresses muscle cells out enough to force them into further growth that training can’t achieve on its own.31 An added benefit to that extra intracellular muscle volume is that you’ll likely see a swelling in your muscles that’s greater than resistance training would provide without creatine, adding visible size to your muscles and potentially giving you a little motivational boost that your program is working.

Pre-workouts

Pre-workouts are usually drinks that either help give you more energy in the gym so you can perform at your best, or help protect your muscles from catabolism.1 That means your body won’t target your muscles for energy and potentially undo your hard work.

Common ingredients in pre-workouts include:

Post-workouts (recovery)

Recovery supplements also often come in the form of drinks. They’re occasionally combined with your protein supplements but also regularly exist on their own. Like pre-workouts, their ingredients can guard against catabolism, but they can also provide your body with carbs to replenish glycogen stores spent during your training sessions.

Common ingredients in post-workouts include:

Protein powders and mass gainers or meal replacements

If you want to build muscle, you have to get enough protein, but balancing out your other macronutrients (fats and carbs) is also critical. For many, that means supplementation, as few of us have the time to prepare enough calorically dense, protein-rich, and macro-balanced meals every day. When bulking, you want a high-calorie protein powder that offers a complete amino acid profile.

Many protein powders try to deliver as much protein as possible with as few calories as possible, so users can more easily fit them into a diet deficient in the protein necessary for muscle-building. But ignoring carbs and fats isn’t ideal for recovery, making a mass gainer or meal replacement a superior choice for muscle growth.

In our guide to the best recovery supplements, we break down why mass gainers are your best bet to replenish glycogen stores and maximize muscle protein synthesis. The argument is grounded in scientific research that concluded you could get the best boost to recovery and protein synthesis with a carb-to-protein ratio of roughly 4:1 while taking in about 1.2g of carbs per kg of body weight every hour for about 2-4 hours post workout.13

So, if you weigh 90kg, or about 200lb, you’d need a little over 100g of carbs and about 25g of protein every hour for about 2-4 hours after you finish your routine. Most protein powders offer the protein without much in the way of carbs or fats, but mass gainers and meal replacements deliver a better balance, typically a carb-heavy one closer to the ratio preferred by these researchers.

You can still rely on a stack built around a protein powder, but we recommend ensuring that a sufficient carbohydrate load is either part of the stack or part of your diet alongside it.

Testosterone boosters

In many men, an inability to put on muscle is tied to lower testosterone levels. In clinical studies, various ingredients found in testosterone boosters have been shown to increase testosterone.14 Even if you don’t have clinically low testosterone, a boost might help give you an edge in muscle repair and production.

Testosterone-boosting ingredients include:14 11

• Zinc
• Ashwagandha
• Tongkat ali
• Fenugreek
• Magnesium
• Vitamin D3
• D-Aspartic acid

If you think low testosterone could be the cause of your struggles in the gym, you can find out what your T levels are without leaving your house. Check out our complete guide to at-home testosterone testing for more.

Anyone looking to get the most out of their efforts in the gym may benefit from a muscle-building stack. Many people already use one or more of the supplements found in stacks, just not in combination. Some grab a pre-workout for an added boost in the gym or enjoy a protein shake afterward. But since buying a stack will often save you money compared to buying the supplements individually, the increase in cost to upgrade to a full stack is nominal.

So, if you use any kind of supplement in the hopes that it will increase your effectiveness in the gym and the gains you see from your hard work, it might be well worth your while to use a stack instead.

Who might want to look elsewhere?

Those working out primarily to lose weight might not find certain muscle-building stacks as beneficial as other solutions. Ingredients like creatine can cause water retention, and protein powders and mass gainers may contain more calories than you’d like to consume in a given day. Either way, those things can cause the number on the scale to go up, not down.

Lower-calorie protein powders and creatine-free pre-workout supplements can still play a role in weight loss, but you’d probably do better buying these things on their own.

Because of the wide variety of ingredients and caloric loads these stacks can deliver, it’s impossible to say that they’re all safe for everyone. Most of their ingredients are well-tolerated in the hundreds of studies we’ve reviewed, but there are some exceptions worth noting:

Also, as with any supplement, it’s ideal to talk to your doctor before adding muscle builders of any kind to your regimen.

Best overall (custom stack)

Animal stood out in our research for the company’s simple automatic bundling feature, which essentially applies a deep stack-level discount to any combination of products you put in your cart. Combined with the high-quality options in the company’s lineup, which can very successfully check all of the boxes we want to see in a muscle-building stack, you have the opportunity to create an effective stack with relative ease.

Specifically, the four products we recommend combining into a custom stack from Animal are:

• Animal Pump Non-Stim
• Animal Creatine HMB+
• Animal Meal
• Animal Flex Powder

Ideally, you would take Pump before a workout, Creatine HMB and Meal after your workout, and Flex on a daily basis whenever it suits your schedule. That combination would provide your body with the ingredients to push harder in the gym, recover more quickly, maximize muscle protein synthesis, and protect your joints from overexertion.

The stack comes together by adding each of these products to your cart, the four of which unlock 25% savings compared to buying them individually. All told, the stack costs $170 and provides 30 servings each of Flex and Creatine HMB, but only about 20 servings each of Meal and Pump.

Let’s take a closer look at these products to see why they excel:

Animal Pump Non-Stim

Pumps is the most well-rounded pre-workout in our guide, delivering higher doses of better-researched ingredients than most competitors. Animal sells other pre-workouts that contain caffeine, but we prefer its non-stim option. Not only do its caffeinated varieties contain too much caffeine to add to the average person’s daily intake, but those versions also have inferior ingredient profiles. Pump is decidedly simpler and more in line with available, high-quality scientific research.

Here’s a look at the ingredients in the non-stim Pump:

• L-Citrulline: 6g
• Nitrosigine (inositol-stabilized arginine silicate): 1.5g
• Beta-alanine: 3.2g
• Betaine anhydrous: 2.5g
• L-Taurine: 2g
• L-Tyrosine: 2g
• Sodium chloride: 320mg
• Monopotassium phosphate: 244mg
• Magnesium oxide: 17.5mg
• Sea salt: 60mg

Together, these ingredients can improve performance and recovery while keeping your electrolytes and hydration up.

Right now, Pump is only available in Dragon Berry and Lemon Surge flavors.

Animal Creatine HMB+

Creatine and HMB are two well-researched muscle builders that are occasionally packaged together like this. The most notable competitor with a similar product is Transparent Labs, whose Creatine HMB had been included as a top choice in several of our creatine guides over the years. But Animal recently released its Creatine HMB+, and it offers a more scientifically accurate dose for the HMB content.

Specifically, the doses are as follows:

• Creatine monohydrate: 5g
• HMB (as myHMB®): 3g
• Monopotassium phosphate: 100mg
• Sodium bicarbonate: 100mg
• Magnesium oxide: 25mg
• Sea salt: 250mg
• Vitamin D: 12.5mcg

In the research we’ve reviewed, a 3g daily HMB dose has been the most common, but Transparent Labs only offers 1.5g per serving. This gives Animal a distinct advantage.

The one downside to taking creatine like this is that it prevents you from entering a loading phase for the first few weeks of supplementation, which is typically recommended to get the most out of your workouts as quickly as possible.7 It’s not strictly necessary, but it’s a good practice if you don't experience GI discomfort.5

To use a stack like this and still perform a loading phase, you’d need to add a standalone creatine to the picture. Fortunately, Animal sells a traditional creatine monohydrate powder, as well. You can add a 300g bottle to your first stack purchase for just under $14, then remove it from subsequent stacks in your subscription.

Like Pump, Creatine HMB is currently available in only two flavors: Dragon Berry and Power Punch.

Animal Meal

Animal Meal strikes a really compelling balance between providing a big carbohydrate load for glycogen replenishment after an intense lift and also delivering a hefty protein dose for lifters determined to max out that particular macronutrient. The ideal ratio for recovery may be around 4:1 carbs to protein, but Meal provides something closer to a 1:1 split, with 49g of carbs and 46g of protein per serving.

This might make it somewhat less effective than something like Naked Vegan Mass, which we’ve previously exalted among recovery supplements. But that product was near the top of Consumer Reports’ list of protein powders and meal replacements that were tested to contain unsafe amounts of lead.18 So Animal Meal may be the next best thing, at least among products that are available in a well-curated stack.

Meal’s primary protein sources are pea, egg white, and beef, with some tangential protein coming from other ingredients such as sweet potato, cocoa, and oats. It’s sweetened with monk fruit and stevia and contains 14g of fat per serving, mostly from olive oil powder.

Meal is only available in Chocolate or Vanilla at this time.

Animal Flex Powder

The custom stack we’ve curated through Animal is the only one in our guide to include a joint support supplement. JYM has prefabricated stacks that also include joint health products, but they’re not among the better stacks from the company, making this the best option for lifters concerned with aging joints or lingering injuries that could slow their gains.

Before it was available as a powder, Flex was a capsule-based supplement. But producing a powder allowed the company to push past the limitations of size and count that can harm capsule formulation out of consideration for the consumer. The result is Flex Powder, which replaced a modest flaxseed oil dose in the capsules with an impressive 5g dose of collagen.

Collagen has a great reputation for body recomposition and joint support, with a systematic review from 2021 illustrating the usefulness of a 5g daily dose.19 It’s a welcome addition for both muscle growth and joint health.

Some other doses in Flex are frustratingly hidden behind proprietary blends, which makes it hard to determine their exact potential. But the included ingredients that are most likely to help — collagen, glucosamine, chondroitin, and MSM — are present in high enough blended doses that we can safely assume they line up with successful scientific research.

Here’s a closer look at the ingredients:

• Vitamin C: 100mg
• Vitamin E: 64mg
• Zinc: 15mg
• Manganese: 1mg
• Joint construction complex: 3,000mg
• Joint lubrication and support complex: 6,000mg

Note that the joint construction and joint lubrication complexes are proprietary blends. The company advertises the 5g collagen content of the latter, but it conceals the doses of all other ingredients in either complex. We'd far prefer to see the doses of each spelled out for consumers, so we could more faithfully compare them to those provided by competitors.

Ingredients in the construction complex include:

• Glucosamine HCl
• Methylsulfonylmethane
• Chondroitin sulfate A
• Chondroitin sulfate C

And ingredients in the lubrication and support complex include:

• Collagen hydrolysate (5g)
• Ginger root
• Turmeric root
• Boswellia serrata extract
• Quercetin dihydrate
• Bromelain
• Cetyl myristoleate proprietary blend
• Hyaluronic acid

Taste and mixability

Animal’s taste and mixability are a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, its products are much more limited in flavor selection than many competitors, especially compared to JYM. For example, its Pump pre-workout is only available in two flavors, while JYM offers its pre-workout in 11 flavors. On the other hand, Animal’s flavors are among the most enjoyable on the market, and its powder mixes more smoothly than anyone else’s. That said, JYM’s protein powder flavors remain our testers’ favorite.

Among Animal Meal’s protein sources, the company lists beef protein isolate, which was of some serious concern to our testers. Would the drink have a meaty taste? The consensus was a resounding “I don’t think so.” Somewhere in the background, some testers claimed they could taste a meatiness lingering, but it was hard to determine whether that was because we were all aware of the ingredients before consuming the drink. Even with the phantom meatiness, Meal’s Chocolate flavor was the second favorite among all the powders we tested, losing out only to JYM’s Rocky Road.

Shipping and returns

Shipping from Animal is free for an order as large as our recommended stack, and it’s the fastest among the companies we tested. It took about two days from the time we placed the order to the time it arrived at a shipping location in Philadelphia.

Animal also has the best return policy of any company in our guide, offering up to 90 days for you to try its products before electing to return them. That’s 60 more days than JYM and 90 more days than Swolverine, which has no money-back guarantee. However, it’s worth noting that products must be at least half full to qualify for a return, which we wish Animal would reconsider. It makes sense that they would want to deter people from buying the products just to use them all and claim they don’t work, essentially getting them for free. But for real people who need to return a product that didn’t work for them, this becomes unrealistic. What good is a 90-day policy if you can only try 15 days’ worth of a supplement?

Still, it’s better than JYM’s 30-day policy that demands 70% of a product remain unused. (Seriously, are these companies breaking out a food scale and refusing returns if there’s only 69.8% of a product left?)

Best-tasting

JYM has an impressive array of supplements aimed at improving your fitness, performance in the gym, and recovery. The components in the JYM System stack might make it a better choice for muscle growth than the company’s two dedicated muscle builders. This depends a little bit on your diet apart from the stack.

JYM’s Muscle Building Stack consists of a protein powder, pre- and post-workouts, and a fish oil supplement. It costs $152.96 with 22 servings of its protein powder or $179.96 with 45 servings. Its Hyperemia Muscle Stack contains only three supplements: the protein, a newer “Extreme” pre-workout, and a fast-absorbing high-glycemic carbohydrate drink. It costs either $112.47 or $139.47, depending on protein size. (Consuming high-glycemic carbs after an intense workout has been shown to improve sleep and overall recovery.)8

The JYM System Stack contains the protein powder and fast-digesting carbs along with pre- and post-workouts. That makes it the most well-rounded option in the lineup. It costs $139.46 or $166.46, depending on protein size.

If you eat a healthy, high-protein diet that contains foods like wild-caught salmon, sardines, and anchovies, you may not need the fish oil supplement.

Let’s look at each component in the stacks to better understand what JYM has to offer.

Pro JYM Protein Powder

You can get JYM’s protein powder in 2lb or 4lb jars, depending on your needs. One 2lb jar delivers 24 servings, which is enough if you only consume it around workouts. If you want to supplement your daily protein intake, you might want to opt for the larger jar. It comes in eight flavors:

• Cookies and Cream
• Banana Bread
• Chocolate Peanut Butter
• Rocky Road
• Chocolate Mousse
• Tahitian Vanilla Bean
• Strawberry Milk
• Chocolate Cookie Crunch

There used to be a Root Beer Float flavor, as well, but that has been removed from the catalog.

JYM uses a blend of protein sources for its powder that looks like this:

• Whey protein isolate: 8.5g
• Micellar casein: 7.75g
• Milk protein isolate: 7.75g

With just 150 calories, 3.5g of fat, and 6g of carbs per serving, this is certainly a protein powder first, not a meal replacement or mass gainer like Animal Meal is. It can augment your diet, but you’ll still need to eat an abundance of well-balanced macronutrients throughout the day.

Pre JYM High-Performance Pre-Workout

JYM’s pre-workout provides plenty of energy to get you through a training session. The lion’s share of that boost might come from the 300mg of caffeine in each serving. Considering that JYM doesn’t offer a non-stim option, this seems like more caffeine than necessary for most lifters. And anyone sensitive to stimulants will be out of luck.

The highlights of JYM’s pre-workout ingredient list include:

• Citrulline malate: 6g
• BCAAs: 6g
• Creatine HCl: 2g
• Beta-alanine: 2g
• Betaine: 1.5g
• Beet root extract: 500mg
• Caffeine: 300mg
• Alpha-GPC: 150mg
• Huperzine A: 50mcg
• BioPerine: 5mg

While nearly all of these ingredients should help boost energy levels, provide enough of a push to gain a rep or two per set, and promote muscle preservation, the BioPerine is one of the most interesting. It’s there to increase the bioavailability of the rest of the ingredients so your body absorbs them more thoroughly.9

You can get JYM’s pre-workout in 20- or 30-serving tubs in the following flavors:

• Tangerine
• Grape Candy
• Pink Lemonade
• Rainbow Sherbert
• Pineapple Strawberry
• Black Cherry
• Strawberry Kiwi
• Raspberry Lemonade
• Cherry Limeade
• Orange Mango
• Blueberry Pineapple

Post JYM Recovery Matrix

JYM’s post-workout has a few of the same ingredients as its pre-workout, as well as a handful of others that can help speed up recovery and promote muscle growth. The list includes:

• BCAAs: 6g
• Glutamine: 3g
• Creatine HCl: 2g
• Beta-alanine: 2g
• L-Carnitine L-tartrate: 2g
• Betaine: 1.5g
• BioPerine: 5mg

JYM’s post-workout contains enough powder for 30 servings, and it’s available in seven flavors:

• Blue Arctic Freeze
• Lemonade
• Mandarin Orange
• Rainbow Sherbet
• Bombsicle
• Fruit Punch
• Watermelon

Post JYM Dextrose Carbs

It might seem strange to drink such a sugary beverage right after putting in a lot of work at the gym, but if your primary goal is building muscle and you work hard enough to burn the associated calories, you could see some significant benefits from doing so. Specifically, this works when it’s a high-glycemic index drink. That means it gets into your system quickly. It’s the opposite of what you’d want if you‘re diabetic, but if you have a healthy sensitivity to insulin, you should be okay.

Studies suggest that high-glycemic-load carbs consumed after an intense workout can be a boon to recovery. Specifically, they can help prevent the more energizing aspects of good gym work from interfering with your sleep.8 And if you’ve completely raided your muscles’ stores of glycogen through a lifting session, this can replenish them quickly, allowing you to maintain greater strength in future workouts throughout the week.

Dextrose is the primary ingredient here, delivering a 29g dose of sugar. The supplement is available in the following flavors:

• Blue Arctic Freeze
• Lemonade
• Mandarin Orange
• Rainbow Sherbet
• Unflavored

Omega JYM

Given the multitude of potential benefits your body can reap from omega-3s — especially in the gym — it makes a lot of sense for a company like JYM to include an omega-3 supplement in its stacks.10 This fish oil-derived option includes the three main omega-3s — DHA, EPA, and DPA. The company packs a lot of each into its capsules, so the serving size is just two pills twice daily.

Here are the measurements of the omega-3s in Omega JYM:

• DHA: 1,500mg
• EPA: 1,500mg
• DPA: 300mg

This supplement is part of the JYM Muscle Building Stack but not the System Stack. We think both stacks are good choices, but we prefer the combination of the System stack with a healthy, protein-rich diet including lots of fish.

Taste and mixability

Taste was our favorite aspect of JYM’s offering, particularly its protein powder. We weren’t terribly impressed by its pre- and post-workouts, but they were more or less on par with similar products from other companies.

But the protein powders mixed wonderfully into plain water and had rich, complex flavors. They were most enjoyable!

JYM takes extra steps to make them taste so good. Take, for instance, the small, hard marshmallows in the Rocky Road flavor. Like the marshmallows in a good hot cocoa mix, these were firm enough to stay intact after 15 seconds of intense shaking in a shaker cup.

Shipping and returns

JYM offers free shipping on all orders over $100. That means any of its muscle-building stacks will ship to you for free. The return policy is a little more disappointing. The company offers 30 days for its money-back guarantee, but it also demands that your products still be at least 70% full. That means you can likely return something because you don’t like how it tastes, but you’re unlikely to know whether it would have worked well for your muscle-building goals.

Best budget pick and best for recovery and testosterone support

As a company, Swolverine is all about enhancing athletic performance. It has an impressive supplement catalog that includes products designed for muscle building, fat loss, performance improvement, and even gut health.

Swolverine makes a point to be as transparent as possible.

• It doesn't employ proprietary blends.
• It offers certificates of analysis on all its supplements.
• Its stacks often contain single-ingredient products, making it easier to determine which product is working for you than if you took a single scoop of 30 ingredients.

Swolverine offers three muscle-building stacks. Two of them are fully vegan, and all three are stimulant-free. Here’s a look at how they differ in cost and contents:

Depending on whether you go for the vegan or non-vegan Build stack, you’ll either get whey protein (non-vegan) or a combination of pea and pumpkin seed protein (vegan). The vegan formula contains two protein sources because pea protein doesn’t offer as bioavailable an amino acid profile. Adding pumpkin seed protein ensures you get more bioavailability and all the amino acids your body needs to build healthy muscle.

The Performance Series protein powder clearly has less protein than the two Build stacks, so you might want to make sure you’re getting extra protein from elsewhere in your diet. But that powder isn’t billed as a protein powder specifically. Swolverine considers it a post-workout blend that offers protein in conjunction with a moderate carbohydrate load from pea starch and several other useful ingredients we’ll explore below.

Supplement stack

Both vegan and non-vegan Build stacks come with identical components beyond the protein powder. You can mix all of these in a single drink to consume before or during a workout, though Swolverine recommends additional L-glutamine after your workout to optimize recovery (which is one of the reasons you see L-glutamine in the Performance Series Post drink). Here are the four supplements in the Build stacks:

• Beta-alanine (5,000mg): a nonessential amino acid
• L-Citrulline malate (5,000mg): a nonessential amino acid combined with malic acid
• L-Glutamine (5,000mg): a conditionally essential amino acid
• Creatine monohydrate (5,000mg): micronized creatine, which is a combination of arginine, methionine, and glycine

Performance Series stack

There are certainly ingredients in the Build stacks that promote recovery, but the Performance Series takes it to another level. It includes a pre-workout and an intra-workout supplement. The pre-workout contains a high dose of citrulline malate, which has been shown to increase nitric oxide levels to improve exercise performance and also has some research into its ability to reduce muscle soreness afterward.21 There’s also L-carnitine to guard against muscle loss during intense cardio, and coconut water powder to promote hydration and protect renal health.37

Swolverine’s intra-workout supplement, called Intra, is relatively unique among muscle-building stacks. The other companies on this list all provide pre-workouts, and many of those can be taken during your workout if you like, but none of them are designed specifically for consumption in the middle of a session, the way Intra is. It contains all nine essential amino acids, including the three branched-chain amino acids. It also offers a 2.5g blend of ingredients the company claims are there for hydration and endurance, but there’s limited evidence behind the endurance side of that claim.

Crucial to our regarding the Performance Stack as your best choice for recovery support is the included ZMT supplement. Swolverine ZMT contains ingredients designed to promote deep, restful sleep, which is essential for muscle recovery and also plays a role in fat loss and overall mental health.22 23 24 No other stack in this guide offers a product focused on improving sleep.

Here’s a quick look at the full list of ingredients:

• Vitamin B6: 25mg
• Magnesium: 422mg
• Zinc citrate: 50mg
• L-Taurine: 1,000mg
• L-Theanine: 500mg
• L-Tryptophan: 500mg
• Ashwagandha root extract: 300mg
• GABA: 100mg
• Valerian root extract: 100mg
• Tongkat ali root extract: 50mg
• Rhodiola rosea root extract: 50mg
• DIM (3,3'-Diindolylmethane): 50mg
• BioPerine: 5mg
• Melatonin: 3mg

Melatonin on its own is typically enough to get most people to sleep,25 but combined with valerian root and L-tryptophan (each of which affects your serotonin levels), it becomes an even more powerful sleeping aid.26

ZMT also includes ingredients that may help normalize testosterone levels, including ashwagandha and zinc, both of which have been shown to increase testosterone levels in clinical studies.20 27 That translates to more than 15mg of elemental zinc in ZMT.

The Performance Series stack also includes a vegan post-workout protein fortified with pea starch, electrolytes, and other useful ingredients. It doesn’t have quite as much protein as powders from its competitors or as much as Swolverine’s other protein powder, so you may wish to supplement your protein further. Here’s the full list of its ingredients:

• Pea starch (Carb 10®): 12g
• Pea protein isolate: 8g
• L-Glutamine: 4g
• Bromelain: 500 mg
• Coconut water: 500mg
• Pomegranate: 500mg
• Papaya: 500mg
• Pineapple: 350mg
• Spirulina: 250mg
• Pink Himalayan salt: 200mg

Taste and mixability

Since we feel that the Performance Series stack is the standout here, we were eager to test it in-house for taste and mixability. In this regard, it didn’t perform quite as well as the competition. The pre- and intra-workout drinks mixed relatively well, but the intra-workout is sweetened with sucralose, whereas the pre-workout uses stevia. We typically find that sucralose imparts a vaguely artificial flavor to beverages, and that is also the case with the intra-workout. Why it couldn’t use the same sweetener as the pre-workout is a mystery.

The post-workout pea protein drink falls a little flat when mixed with plain water. Its flavors are very well balanced (we tried the Chocolate Peanut Butter), but none of them are quite punchy enough to make us want to come back for more. And compared to the other protein powders we tried in creating this guide, this one left the barest amount of film both in the glass and on our palates. For anyone looking for a vegan stack with great recovery support, these shortcomings likely aren’t enough to put you off this option — they wouldn’t deter us — but those seriously concerned with taste might want to start elsewhere.

Shipping and returns

Swolverine offers free shipping on all U.S. orders over $100. Its three muscle-building stacks are expensive enough to qualify for free shipping.

Swolverine’s return policy isn’t as good as some of its competitors. It gives you a 30-day window to initiate a return but doesn't accept returns on opened products. That means you can really only return something if you change your mind before even trying it out. That said, the company states that it processes returns on a case-by-case basis and that there’s some leeway in certain scenarios.

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