Why MOVE Has No Beta-Alanine (And Why That Matters)

  • By Tom Coughlin

Published: Wednesday, October 28th, 2026

Quick answer

MOVE doesn’t contain beta-alanine because beta-alanine is not an acute pre-workout ingredient.

Beta-alanine is an effective sports supplement. It increases muscle carnosine, improves intracellular buffering and can improve performance during demanding high-intensity exercise.[1,2]

But those benefits come from taking beta-alanine consistently every day for several weeks, not from taking it 30 minutes before a workout.

That makes it a poor fit for the way MOVE approaches pre-workout formulation.

Rather than adding beta-alanine simply because consumers expect to see it on a pre-workout label — or because its characteristic tingling makes the product feel powerful — MOVE prioritises ingredients that make sense around the actual training session.

If you want to use beta-alanine, I’d use it separately as a properly dosed daily supplement.

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What actually is beta-alanine?

Beta-alanine is a non-essential amino acid.

Its main relevance to exercise performance comes from its role in producing carnosine inside skeletal muscle.

Carnosine is made from beta-alanine and histidine. Of those two amino acids, beta-alanine availability is the main limiting factor for carnosine synthesis.[3]

That matters because carnosine acts as an intracellular buffer.

During hard exercise, particularly high-intensity exercise lasting from tens of seconds to several minutes, hydrogen ions accumulate inside the working muscle and contribute to a reduction in muscle pH.

Carnosine helps buffer those hydrogen ions.

Increase muscle carnosine and you increase the muscle’s capacity to manage that increasing acidity during demanding exercise.[1,3]

That is the basic reason beta-alanine works.

And it does work.

The question is how it needs to be used.

Does beta-alanine improve exercise performance?

Yes.

A large systematic review and meta-analysis including 40 studies and 1,461 participants found an overall beneficial effect of beta-alanine supplementation on exercise performance.[2]

The effects were influenced by the type and duration of exercise.

Beta-alanine appears particularly useful for exercise where intracellular acidosis contributes meaningfully to fatigue.

The International Society of Sports Nutrition highlights particularly pronounced effects during demanding exercise lasting around 1–4 minutes.[1]

That makes beta-alanine interesting for activities such as:

  • Repeated hard intervals
  • Middle-distance events
  • Rowing
  • High-intensity cycling
  • Repeated sprint work
  • High-volume conditioning
  • Some CrossFit and hybrid-style workouts
  • Resistance-training sessions containing prolonged, metabolically demanding sets

So this isn’t an article arguing that beta-alanine is useless.

Quite the opposite.

It is a genuinely evidence-based sports supplement.

Why is beta-alanine in so many pre-workouts?

There are two reasons.

The first is completely reasonable: beta-alanine is a recognised performance supplement.

If someone takes enough beta-alanine consistently through a pre-workout, it can contribute towards increasing muscle carnosine.

The second reason is more problematic.

Beta-alanine makes you feel something.

Take a sufficiently large dose and you can experience tingling, itching or pins and needles across the skin.

This is called paraesthesia.[1,4]

If you’ve ever taken a traditional pre-workout and felt your face, ears or arms start tingling 15–30 minutes later, beta-alanine was probably responsible.

From a marketing perspective, that is extremely powerful.

You take the scoop.

Your skin starts tingling.

You think: This pre-workout is kicking in.

But the tingling itself has absolutely nothing to do with the performance benefit.

Does the beta-alanine tingling mean it’s working?

No.

This is probably the biggest misconception around beta-alanine.

Paraesthesia is simply an acute sensory response to beta-alanine.

It does not mean that muscle carnosine has suddenly increased.

It does not indicate improved buffering.

And it does not tell you that your training performance is about to improve.

The actual performance mechanism develops gradually as muscle carnosine accumulates over repeated supplementation.[1,3]

The tingling is therefore a side effect rather than the mechanism.

Research also shows that paraesthesia can be reduced by splitting beta-alanine into smaller doses or using sustained-release formulations.[1,4]

That’s actually another useful clue.

If you can reduce the tingling without reducing the long-term purpose of the supplement, the tingling clearly isn’t what makes beta-alanine effective.

Does beta-alanine work if you take it 30 minutes before training?

Not because you took it 30 minutes before training.

This is the key reason MOVE doesn’t include it.

Caffeine has an acute role.

You consume caffeine before exercise, blood caffeine concentrations rise, adenosine receptors are antagonised and you can experience improvements in alertness, perceived effort and exercise performance during that session.

Beta-alanine doesn’t work like that.

Its main purpose is to increase muscle carnosine over time.

Studies consistently show that repeated supplementation increases muscle carnosine, with the effect accumulating as the total beta-alanine dose increases.[3,5]

Whether today’s beta-alanine dose was taken immediately before training, at breakfast or later in the day is far less important than whether you are taking enough beta-alanine consistently.

That makes it much closer to creatine in terms of supplementation philosophy.

Consistency matters more than acute timing.

How much beta-alanine do you actually need?

The commonly recommended evidence-based strategy is approximately 4–6 g per day for at least 2–4 weeks.[1]

Longer supplementation can continue increasing muscle carnosine.

The dose is normally divided across the day to improve tolerance.

For example, rather than swallowing 5 g at once and spending the next hour wondering why your scalp is vibrating, you could divide the intake into several smaller servings.

The important word there is daily.

If your pre-workout contains 1.5 g beta-alanine and you use it three times per week, you’re only getting 4.5 g across the entire week from that product.

By comparison, 4–6 g per day would provide 28–42 g per week.

Those are very different supplementation strategies.

Putting beta-alanine on the label isn’t the same as implementing an effective beta-alanine protocol.
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Why doesn’t MOVE Strength contain beta-alanine?

Because MOVE Strength is designed around what you need before a strength session.

One serving provides:

  • 228 mg caffeine
  • 2 g L-tyrosine
  • 2 g L-arginine
  • 500 mg vitamin C

Caffeine has a clear acute role in strength training and improves strength, muscular endurance and movement velocity.[6-8]

L-tyrosine supports cognitive performance and resilience under demanding conditions.

L-arginine and vitamin C support nitric-oxide availability, blood flow and oxygen delivery.

Those are ingredients we deliberately want available around the training session.

Beta-alanine is different.

If you want to use beta-alanine alongside MOVE Strength, that’s perfectly reasonable.

I’d just rather you take an evidence-based daily beta-alanine dose separately than put a smaller amount inside the pre-workout and create the impression that its timing is important.

MOVE STRENGTH

But isn’t beta-alanine useful for muscular endurance?

Yes.

That’s why the distinction is important.

Not including beta-alanine in MOVE isn’t a claim that beta-alanine has no relevance to strength training.

Resistance training can involve significant metabolic stress, particularly during high-volume sets, short rest periods and bodybuilding-style training.

Beta-alanine can therefore make more sense as the metabolic demands of the session increase.

But it remains a chronic supplementation strategy.

If someone is doing a demanding hypertrophy block, repeated high-repetition work or conditioning alongside strength training, I’d absolutely consider beta-alanine.

I’d just prescribe it daily.

I wouldn’t tell them that they need to swallow it immediately before their first working set.

Why isn’t beta-alanine in MOVE Endurance?

For similar reasons.

There are situations where endurance athletes can benefit from beta-alanine, particularly when their event contains repeated or sustained high-intensity efforts.

But MOVE Endurance is intended to do something useful around that specific endurance session.

It provides:

  • 150 mg caffeine
  • 1.5 g taurine
  • 900 mg blackcurrant extract
  • 2 g L-arginine
  • 500 mg vitamin C
  • Sodium, chloride and potassium

Caffeine supports perceived effort and endurance performance.

Taurine supports muscular endurance and fatigue resistance.

Blackcurrant extract has direct endurance-performance research, including improved 5 km running performance.

The electrolyte blend supports hydration.

Those are all deliberately connected to the period around exercise.

Beta-alanine doesn’t need to be tied to that window.

MOVE ENDURANCE

Could MOVE have added a small amount anyway?

Of course.

We could have put 1–2 g beta-alanine into the formula.

The ingredient is familiar.

It would make the label look longer.

A lot of customers would recognise it.

And, importantly, plenty of people would experience the tingling sensation and immediately feel as though they had taken a powerful pre-workout.

But that isn’t how I wanted to formulate MOVE.

An ingredient has to have a reason for being in that particular product.

I don’t want to include something simply because consumers expect it or because it creates a noticeable sensation.

If beta-alanine is worth taking, it’s worth taking properly.
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Does removing beta-alanine make a pre-workout weaker?

No.

It might make it feel less dramatic.

That’s different.

This is one of the wider problems with judging pre-workouts through sensation.

Tingling doesn’t equal performance.

A racing heart doesn’t equal performance.

Feeling aggressively stimulated doesn’t equal performance.

The goal is to improve the training session.

A pre-workout should therefore be judged on its formulation, doses and evidence rather than how many physical sensations appear 20 minutes after drinking it.

MOVE deliberately avoids beta-alanine, but it also avoids compensating by simply pushing caffeine to an extreme dose.

The idea is controlled, purposeful performance support.

Is beta-alanine similar to creatine?

There’s an important similarity.

Both work primarily through consistent supplementation rather than acute timing.

Creatine increases muscle creatine stores.

Beta-alanine increases muscle carnosine.

Neither suddenly starts working because you consumed it while putting your gym shoes on.

That is why MOVE keeps creatine separate too.

MOVE Creatine Booster provides 5 g creatine monohydrate and can be taken consistently every day regardless of whether you use a pre-workout.

I think beta-alanine is best approached in exactly the same way.

If your sport or training makes beta-alanine relevant, build it into your daily supplement routine.

Don’t make it dependent on whether you happened to take a caffeinated pre-workout that day.
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Who should consider taking beta-alanine separately?

I’d consider it most strongly when an athlete regularly performs demanding bouts where muscle acidosis is likely to meaningfully contribute to fatigue.

Examples include:

  • 400–1500 m running
  • Rowing
  • Track cycling
  • Combat sports
  • Repeated sprint training
  • High-volume resistance training
  • Hard interval programmes
  • CrossFit-style competition
  • Some HYROX and hybrid training demands

The strongest evidence is not simply for “strength” or “endurance” as broad categories.

It’s about the nature of the exercise.

If you’re performing prolonged high-intensity work where buffering capacity can influence fatigue, beta-alanine becomes more interesting.[1,2]

For a single maximal lift, the rationale is much weaker.

For a relaxed two-hour Zone 2 run, it’s hardly the first supplement I’d prioritise.

Context matters.

Can you take beta-alanine alongside MOVE?

Yes.

There’s no reason an athlete using MOVE can’t implement a separate beta-alanine strategy.

If beta-alanine makes sense for your training, I’d use approximately 4–6 g daily, divided into smaller doses if needed for tolerance, and maintain that consistently for a number of weeks.[1]

Then use MOVE according to the session.

MOVE Strength before strength and power training.

MOVE Endurance before prolonged endurance, conditioning or team-sport sessions.

MOVE Decaf when caffeine isn’t appropriate.

That separation actually gives you more control.

You’re no longer forced to take caffeine simply because you need today’s beta-alanine dose.

And you don’t miss your beta-alanine because today happens to be a rest day.

MOVE RANGE
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Tom’s Take

I actually like beta-alanine.

I’ve used it myself, I’ve recommended it to athletes, and there are situations where it’s a really useful supplement.

That’s precisely why I didn’t want to stick a token amount into MOVE just so we could put “beta-alanine” on the label.

If I prescribe beta-alanine to an athlete, I want them taking it every day for weeks. I’m thinking about muscle carnosine loading, not whether their face starts tingling before Tuesday’s gym session.

That tingling has probably done a lot for beta-alanine’s popularity in pre-workouts because you immediately know you’ve taken something.

But sensation and effectiveness aren’t the same thing.

My approach with MOVE has always been that ingredients need to make sense in that specific formula.

Caffeine before training makes sense.

Taurine in an endurance formula makes sense.

Beta-alanine can absolutely make sense for an athlete.

It just makes more sense as a separate daily supplementation strategy.

 

 

References

1. Trexler ET, Smith-Ryan AE, Stout JR, Hoffman JR, Wilborn CD, Sale C, et al. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: beta-alanine. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2015;12:30.

Study link

2. Saunders B, Elliott-Sale K, Artioli GG, Swinton PA, Dolan E, Roschel H, et al. β-alanine supplementation to improve exercise capacity and performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Sports Med. 2017;51(8):658-69.

Study link

3. Artioli GG, Gualano B, Smith A, Stout J, Lancha AH Jr. Role of beta-alanine supplementation on muscle carnosine and exercise performance. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2010;42(6):1162-73.

Study link

4. Décombaz J, Beaumont M, Vuichoud J, Bouisset F, Stellingwerff T. Effect of slow-release β-alanine tablets on absorption kinetics and paresthesia. Amino Acids. 2012;43(1):67-76.

Study link

5. Stellingwerff T, Decombaz J, Harris RC, Boesch C. Optimizing human in vivo dosing and delivery of β-alanine supplements for muscle carnosine synthesis. Amino Acids. 2012;43(1):57-65.

Study link

6. Guest NS, VanDusseldorp TA, Nelson MT, Grgic J, Schoenfeld BJ, Jenkins NDM, et al. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: caffeine and exercise performance. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2021;18(1):1.

Study link

7. Grgic J, Trexler ET, Lazinica B, Pedisic Z. Effects of caffeine intake on muscle strength and power: a systematic review and meta-analysis. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2018;15:11.

Study link

8. Warren GL, Park ND, Maresca RD, McKibans KI, Millard-Stafford ML. Effect of caffeine ingestion on muscular strength and endurance: a meta-analysis. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2010;42(7):1375-87.

Study link
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