By Harold Phillips | June 2026
I've been lifting weights for about five years. Mostly strength training: squats, deadlifts, pressing things, the boring stuff that works. I train at Anytime Fitness three or four times a week. I eat high protein, cook most of my own food, and genuinely enjoy meal prep in that slightly-unhinged way that makes my coworkers ask questions.
And in five years of doing this, the supplement industry has tried very hard to get my money.
It has mostly failed.
The Problem with the Supplement Aisle
Walk into any GNC or Popeye's in this country and you are immediately surrounded by tubs the size of small appliances, each promising to do something vague but impressive-sounding: "fuel your performance," "ignite your gains," "support lean muscle." The price tags on these things are genuinely staggering. You can spend $100 on a month's supply of something that has never been tested in a properly controlled trial, or $200 on a "proprietary blend" that lists its key ingredients as a ratio you can't verify, produced by a brand whose entire marketing budget appears to be influencers in gym parking lots.
I'm not a scientist. I don't have a degree in nutrition or biochemistry. But I am the kind of person who, when spending money on something, reads things. And what I've found, after years of reading things, is that the supplement industry is largely selling expensive urine.
That's the take. Here's what I mean.
My Take
The honest truth about most supplements is that they're filling a gap that doesn't need filling, or filling a real gap in the most expensive way possible.
Take protein powder. This is probably the most defensible supplement category because protein intake actually matters, and some people genuinely struggle to hit their targets from food alone. Fine. But protein powder is, at its core, food. Concentrated food, shelf-stable food, convenient food. But still food. And when you compare the cost-per-gram of protein in a $70 tub of whey isolate to the cost-per-gram in chicken thighs from No Frills, the gap is often embarrassing. I can hit my daily protein target from eggs, Greek yogurt, chicken, and cottage cheese and spend less money than a supplement habit would cost. So I do that.
BCAAs (branched-chain amino acids) are a particular pet peeve of mine. The pitch is that you need them to preserve muscle and reduce soreness. The problem is that if you're eating adequate protein, you're already consuming BCAAs. The research suggesting standalone BCAA supplements provide additional benefit, beyond what you'd get from sufficient dietary protein, is genuinely weak. You're paying for something your chicken breast already gave you. It's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist for most people eating reasonably well.
Pre-workout is its own category of problem. Some of it is just caffeine, which means you could have a coffee instead. Some of it has caffeine plus a handful of other stimulants in combinations I'm not comfortable with, marketed aggressively to people who are already spending their mornings in a gym. The dependency cycle that builds around pre-workout is real and kind of uncomfortable to watch. I've seen people who genuinely can't train without it, which seems like the wrong direction to be moving. A cup of coffee costs 30 cents. The pre-workout doing basically the same thing costs $3. Hard pass.
Fat burners are where I stop being polite. The category is, at best, wishful thinking, and at worst, an exploitation of people who are already trying hard and deserve better than expensive placebo. There is no supplement that burns fat in any meaningful, sustained way that isn't just a stimulant making you temporarily more alert. Thermogenic supplements are not moving the needle on your body composition in ways that diet and training aren't already responsible for. The "studies" cited in the marketing often involve small sample sizes, short durations, or results that don't replicate. I have never met anyone whose body composition actually changed because of a fat burner. I have met many people who bought several rounds of them.
Mass gainers are interesting because they do work, in a narrow sense: consuming an enormous number of calories will cause you to gain mass. But a mass gainer is mostly maltodextrin and milk protein. It's expensive powder you're buying instead of just eating more food. If you genuinely struggle to eat enough calories (and some people do), you can make a high-calorie shake at home with oats, milk, nut butter, and a banana for a fraction of the cost. The convenience premium on commercial mass gainers is massive. I've never bought one.
What I Actually Take
Two things. That's it.
Creatine monohydrate. The unflavoured, boring, five-dollar-per-hundred-grams stuff. Not creatine HCL, not buffered creatine, not anything with "advanced" in the name. Just creatine monohydrate, which is one of the most-studied supplements in existence and one of the very few that has consistently demonstrated benefit in proper research. It works. It's cheap. The mechanism is well-understood: it supports phosphocreatine stores, which helps with short, high-intensity efforts, exactly the kind of thing that happens in strength training.
Here's what creatine doesn't do, to be honest about it: it's not magic, and it's not fast. The water retention when you first start is real. I put on a couple of kilograms in the first two weeks, almost none of it from muscle. This surprises people who expect to immediately feel different. You probably won't immediately feel different. The benefits accrue over weeks, not days.
And the loading phase that supplement companies push — taking four or five times the normal dose for a week to "saturate faster" — is pretty unnecessary. Taking three to five grams a day and being patient works fine. The loading phase mostly benefits supplement companies who sell you five times as much product in week one.
I don't cycle off it. I don't take it at any specific time. I just take it. It costs me roughly $20 every few months.
The second thing is electrolytes. Specifically, Organika's Wild Raspberry electrolytes, post-training, on harder days. This one took me longer to come around to, because for a long time I thought electrolyte drinks were a sports-marketing product aimed at people who don't drink enough water. And a lot of them are. But when you're training hard, sweating, and trying to recover, there's a real case for sodium, potassium, and magnesium beyond what plain water provides. The question is whether you're paying for those minerals or paying for branding.
Organika is a Canadian company, and their electrolyte product is straightforward. The ingredient list reads like an ingredient list, not a chemistry exam. The Wild Raspberry flavour is good enough that I actually want to drink it after a workout rather than tolerating it. The price per serving is competitive with the US brands that get more attention online. I found it at a Shoppers near me and I've been buying it since. You can find it through their website if you want to try it.
That's it. Everything else in my routine is food. I wrote about how I've been eating to support training in a bit more depth in my post about trying Factor meals while prepping for a powerlifting meet. That piece covers the food side. This one is about why I've never bothered with most of what gets sold alongside it.
The Other Side
The reasonable counterargument is that I'm missing out on benefits I don't notice, or that specific training goals demand more targeted supplementation. And sure, if you're a competitive athlete, there are edge cases where specific interventions make sense. But I'm an amateur lifter who trains at a community gym and has never competed in anything. My goals are straightforward: get stronger, stay healthy, feel good. You don't need a stack for that.
The other counterargument is that I'm being unfair by focusing on the worst-case products. Also fair. There are decent supplement companies making clean products with honest labels. Creatine exists. Vitamin D is probably worth taking if you live in Canada and spend nine months indoors. Magnesium has reasonable evidence for some people. I'm not anti-supplement as a category.
I'm anti-spending money on things that don't work, which a lot of the industry is.
Look, I'm not a doctor, and I want to be clear about that. My creatine habit is based on my own reading and my own experience, not a conversation with a sports medicine professional. If you're on any medication or have underlying health conditions, you should talk to someone who actually went to medical school before adding anything to your routine. That applies to me too. I just haven't had a reason to revisit it.
Where This Leaves Us
The supplement industry in Canada is a largely unregulated space, notably less scrutinized than pharmaceuticals. It's structured to sell you more things than you need at prices higher than they should be. The marketing is sophisticated, and the fitness influencer pipeline means the promotion machine is enormous. The people spending money on this stuff are mostly people who are already doing the right things: training consistently, trying to eat well, putting in the work. They deserve better than what most of those tubs are offering.
My approach is food first, always. Supplements for the gaps food can't close, and only where the evidence is solid. That leaves me with two products and a lot more money for groceries.
The proprietary blend gathering dust at the gym is not the reason anyone's making progress. The training is the reason. The food is the reason. The consistency is the reason.
Everything else is, mostly, noise.
- This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience with supplements and strength training. I'm not a medical professional — talk to your doctor or a registered dietitian before making changes to your routine. I've included a referral link for the Organika product I personally use; if you buy through it, I may receive a small reward at no extra cost to you.