By Oleksandr Foka — sports nutritionist. Has worked in world title camps with Oleksandr Usyk, Oleksandr Gvozdyk, Denys Berinchyk, Vladyslav Sirenko, Murodjon Ahmadaliev, Israil Madrimov, Sergiy Bogachuk, Sabirzhan Akkalykov and Abylaikhan Zhussupov, and ran an online supplement shop for 7 years.
The list of things with real evidence behind them is short. Four, arguably five. Which ones work is settled. The interesting part is what each of them does to a body that is deliberately removing water and sodium.
Nobody writes that second part. The position stands are written for sports where the athlete arrives fed and hydrated.
Two of these are worth reading together: nitrate and protein powder are the two most bought and the two least examined.
The short list
These four have position stands or equivalent bodies of evidence behind them, and three of the four have been tested in combat sports specifically.
| Supplement | What it does | Loading needed |
|---|
| Creatine monohydrate | Strength, power, fat-free mass | weeks |
| Caffeine | Power, endurance, perceived effort | no |
| Beta-alanine | Buffering, tasks of 1 to 4 minutes | 2 to 4 weeks |
| Sodium bicarbonate | Buffering, tasks of 30 s to 12 min | no |
| Dietary nitrate | Blood flow, muscle efficiency, recovery between efforts | no, or 3 days |
Everything else in a fighter's cupboard is either a food in powdered form, an insurance policy against a deficiency, or marketing. HMB sits at the edge of that line, which is why it gets its own article rather than a sentence.
What decides whether they fit
Three questions, in this order, and the third is the one that gets skipped.
Does it work? For the four above, yes, with caveats each article covers.
Is it permitted? All four are. That is not the same as saying the tub is clean, which is a separate problem entirely.
What does it do to the weight? This is where combat sports diverge from every other sport, and where the published guidance goes quiet.
The example that makes the point
The ISSN position stand on sodium bicarbonate names boxing, judo, karate, taekwondo and wrestling as sports where it improves performance. It does not mention that a dose of 0.3 g per kilogram delivers around 6.6 grams of sodium to an 80 kg athlete, several times a normal day's intake, in one go, to somebody who has spent the week removing sodium to shift water.
Everything in this cluster
Boxing
Best supplements for boxing
The 5 with evidence, what 7 years of shop orders showed about what people rebuy, and the categories behind most failed tests.
MMA
Best supplements for MMA
The 5 with evidence, the 7 certifications the UFC anti-doping program approves, and what a morning weigh-in changes.
Wrestling
Best supplements for wrestling
What an NCAA school can hand out, the college caffeine limit, and why high school wrestlers start with food.
Judo
Best supplements for judo
The 5 with evidence, the WADA rules judo lives under, and what creatine does to the 5 percent morning allowance.
BJJ
Best supplements for BJJ
USADA testing at IBJJF majors, and supplement timing when the weigh-in is right before the first match.
Foundation stack
Probiotics: the strain is the intervention, not the number
Two products both say 50 billion CFU. One has published trials behind it and the other has nothing. How to tell them apart in 10 seconds.
Recovery
Tart cherry: what it recovers, and when not to take it
Stronger for strength recovery than for soreness, and almost all the evidence comes from juice a fighter cannot drink in fight week.
Optional
Ashwagandha: the evidence thins exactly where you are standing
The effects are most pronounced in untrained people. In athletes the recovery side survived and the testosterone claim did not. Plus the liver injury cases behind it.
Foundation stack
Collagen: the protocol nobody copies properly
In the study everybody cites, collagen without exercise did almost nothing. The dose, the one-hour window, and why the separation rule does not fit a fight camp.
Foundation stack
Zinc: the ceiling, the copper problem, and the ZMA story
The wrestler study everyone quotes ran well above the safe ceiling for 4 weeks. Plus why chronic zinc creates a copper deficiency, and what happened when ZMA was replicated independently.
Foundation stack
Omega-3: the dose in the research and the dose in your capsule
Every head-impact study used at least 2 g of DHA. Most capsules carry a fraction of it. Plus the rancidity problem and bleeding in a contact sport.
Foundation stack
Vitamin D: the deficiency that training outdoors does not fix
Over half of athletes tested come back inadequate, and weight-managed sports are a documented risk group. D3 not D2, the dose, and what the strength trials really found.
Sleep and travel
Melatonin: a timing signal, not a sleeping pill
Half a milligram works as well as five, and the hour matters more than the dose.
Foundation stack
Magnesium: the right form, the real dose, and the claim that does not hold
A capsule labelled 1,000 mg contains about 140 mg of magnesium. The label problem, the supplemental ceiling, and why there is not one trial behind the cramp claim.
Rehydration
Electrolytes and ORS: why the sachet works and the sports drink does not
Sodium-glucose cotransport, what is in a WHO sachet, and why the sugar-free tablet is right before the scale and wrong after it.
Access
When certified supplements are not sold where you live
Six programmes, four countries. What importing solves, what it does not, and how the risk calculation changes when verification is impossible.
Certification
Informed Sport, NSF, Cologne List: which certification applies to you
Three programmes, three different promises. Every-batch testing, a facility audit programme, and the European list that English-language comparisons leave out.
Highest risk
Pre-workouts: the category that ends the most careers
Of 27 doping cases where a supplement was proven to be the source, 20 were pre-workouts.
Highest risk
Do fat burners contain banned substances?
Close to half of them did in one 200-product analysis, and most tainted products never named the substance on the label.
Recovery
Curcumin: the meta-analysis says yes, the elite data says maybe
Strong results in standardised damage models, far less consistent in professionals, and the plain capsule is not what was tested.
Gut
Glutamine: wrong for muscle, interesting for the gut
The pooled evidence rejects the claim on the tub. The permeability work in heat is a different story.
Ingredients
Halal and the supplement aisle
The capsule shell is the biggest unlabelled question, and halal certification does not mean batch tested.
Weight cut
Nicotine pouches: not banned, still the wrong tool
It does not remove the energy you need. It removes the signal telling you that you need it.
Foundation stack
Iron is not only a women's problem
Men are protected by eating more food, which is what a restricted phase removes. And training itself blocks absorption for hours.
Foundation stack
Does a fighter need a multivitamin?
A 33 percent calorie cut pushed micronutrient intake below 90 percent of allowances without changing a single food choice.
Recovery
Glucosamine, chondroitin and MSM: tested on the wrong people
Across 10 trials, who funded the study predicted the effect better than the dose did.
Weight cut
L-carnitine: the fat burner that needs 160 g of carbs a day
The carnitine group did not lose fat. They avoided gaining the fat caused by the carbohydrate needed to make it work.
Protein
BCAA: three amino acids out of 20
The one oral study found half the response of the same BCAAs inside whey. That gap is the whole category.
Weight gain
Ecdysterone and turkesterone: the one that works is the problem
One is on WADA's Monitoring Programme under anabolic agents. The other has two trials showing nothing.
Anti-doping
Testosterone boosters: the legal supplement that bans you
DHEA is sold openly in shops and prohibited at all times in sport. It is the most common banned anabolic agent found in supplements.
Weight cut
HMB: does it protect muscle in a weight cut?
One trial reported 7.4 kg of lean mass in 12 weeks. A later meta-analysis threw it out. What the three combat sports studies actually found.
Buffering
Sodium bicarbonate: it works, and it is a sodium load
Named for boxing, judo, karate, taekwondo and wrestling in the position stand. Then work out how much sodium the dose contains, and when a fighter would be taking it.
Buffering
Beta-alanine: the one you cannot take in fight week
Four to 6 grams a day for at least 2 to 4 weeks. That timeline decides everything about how it fits a camp, and it is the reason most fighters take it uselessly.
Hydration
Glycerol: banned for 8 years, then not
Prohibited in 2010 as a masking agent, removed in 2018. It holds fluid in the body, which is backwards for a weight cut and interesting after one.
Nitric oxide
Beetroot and nitrate: read who was in the studies
Handgrip strength up 8.4%, throws up 2.4%, heart rate down almost eight beats. In adolescent recreational judokas.
Weight gain
Mass gainers: the arithmetic nobody does
One serving carries several times the daily surplus a trained athlete should run. What happens to the rest, and what to use instead.
Protein
Protein powder: what you are actually buying
Not superiority over food. Calorie efficiency, which is a different thing and the only argument that matters when a fighter is in a deficit.
Supplements
Creatine and making weight: the real number
Body mass up 0.89 kg. Fat-free mass up 1.39 kg. The lean tissue rose by more than the scale did, in a 2025 combat sports review.
Stimulants
Caffeine: the dose works, the timing is the problem
3 to 6 mg per kilogram an hour out is well supported. Then remember main events start at 11 at night.
Contamination
Can a supplement fail you a drug test?
How contaminated products cause failed tests, which categories carry the most risk, and what certification does and does not prove.
Stacking, and what is actually known about it
Stacking is the question everybody asks and almost no position stand answers. The one on bicarbonate is an exception, and the short version is that some combinations look additive while others have simply not been studied.
The detail is in sodium bicarbonate.
Which is a more honest answer than any pre-workout label will give you, and worth holding onto: two things that work do not automatically work better together, and nobody has tested most of the combinations sold as blends.
The part about placebo, said out loud
The same position stand notes that a portion of the ergogenic effect of sodium bicarbonate seems to be placebo-driven.
I find that useful rather than deflating. A fighter who believes in his preparation performs better, and that is a real effect rather than a fake one. It just means the honest framing is that some of what you get from a supplement is the supplement, and some of it is the belief, and the second part is free.
What I do not use, and why
Anything with a proprietary blend. If the label will not tell you the dose, the dose is probably below what the research used.
And an undisclosed ingredient list is an unmanageable contamination risk in a tested athlete.
Fat burners. The category most associated with undeclared stimulants, sold to exactly the population most likely to be tested.
Anything bought in fight week. Nothing new in the last 7 days, ever. Not a gel, not a drink, not a capsule handed to you at the venue.
Anything without third-party certification, at any point in the year. Informed Sport or NSF Certified for Sport. Under strict liability, the contents of the tub are your responsibility whatever the label said.
Where this leaves you
Four supplements, all permitted, all with evidence. Two of them need loading and therefore belong in camp rather than in fight week. One of them is a sodium load at the worst possible moment.
One of them keeps you awake on the night sleep matters most.
None of that makes them wrong. It makes them decisions with a cost attached, and the cost is what nobody puts on the label.
Common questions
What supplements actually work for fighters?
The list with position stands or equivalent evidence behind it is short: creatine monohydrate, caffeine, beta-alanine, sodium bicarbonate and dietary nitrate. Three of the five have been tested in combat sports specifically. Everything else in a fighter's cupboard sits below that standard of evidence.
Which supplements need loading?
Creatine monohydrate builds over weeks and beta-alanine over two to four. Caffeine and sodium bicarbonate work acutely with no loading period, and dietary nitrate works either acutely or across about 3 days.
Do supplement recommendations change during a weight cut?
They have to. The position stands behind these products were written for sports where the athlete arrives fed and hydrated, and a fighter deliberately removing water and sodium is not that athlete. What each product does to a depleted body is the part almost nobody writes down.
Are supplements safe from an anti-doping standpoint?
Not automatically. Contamination is a real route to a positive test, and batch certification lowers the risk without removing it. Under anti-doping rules the athlete remains responsible for what is in their body regardless of what the label said.
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