Read this first
This is a list of what I personally take, at my bodyweight, doing my job. It is not medical advice and it is not a recommendation for you. I am a shift worker who lifts, not a doctor, pharmacist or dietitian.
Doses that suit me may not suit you. If you take any medication, have any health condition, or are unsure about anything below, speak to a doctor or pharmacist before you add a single thing. That is not a formality. It is the actually sensible move.
Before we start, the honest headline: supplements are the last few percent. Sleep, protein and turning up account for almost everything. If those three are broken, nothing in this article will save you.
But once they are in place, shift work does create one genuine supplement problem that a normal nine-to-five never faces. Not what. When.
Caffeine: the one that will actually hurt you
I drink up to five espressos a day. The first is straight after I wake up, whatever hour that happens to be.
The rule I now follow without exception: the last coffee is six hours before I plan to sleep.
I did not always do that. I used to drink coffee later in the day, and here is why I got away with it for so long — and why I was wrong.
I fell asleep perfectly well. That was the trap. I fell asleep fine, and then I woke up less rested. It took me a long time to connect the two.
This is the thing almost nobody understands about caffeine, and I only worked it out by watching myself for months.
Falling asleep and sleeping well are two different problems. Caffeine late in the day did not stop me dropping off. It just quietly degraded the quality of the sleep I got. I would go to bed, sleep through, wake up, and feel like I had not really rested — and I would blame the shift, or my age, or the job.
It was the coffee. Six hours out from bed, every time now.
Why this is a shift work problem specifically
If you work nine to five, your bedtime is fixed. You learn one cut-off time and you never think about it again.
On a rota, the cut-off moves every week. Early shift and I am asleep by ten, so nothing after four in the afternoon. Afternoon shift and I sleep late, so the line moves too. On nights it inverts completely — caffeine at 4am when I am trying to sleep at 8am is pure self-sabotage.
You cannot run it on autopilot. Every week you have to work out where the line is: find your bedtime, count back six hours, stop.
No pre-workout powder
I use espresso. That is my pre-workout. I do not buy the powders.
Very occasionally I will add citrulline or taurine, but that is rare enough to be a curiosity rather than a habit. Coffee does the job, I know exactly what is in it, and it costs almost nothing.
Creatine: the one shift work cannot break
Five grams a day. No loading phase. That is the whole protocol.
I take it in the morning, whatever "morning" means that day, purely because that is when I remember. Timing does not matter with creatine — it builds up in the muscle over weeks, so what counts is that you take it consistently, not when.
Which makes it the one supplement a rotating rota cannot disrupt. There is nothing to disrupt.
Do I feel it working? I do not spend time thinking about it. The research on creatine is about as solid as it gets in this field, and I am not going to argue with it based on how I feel on a Tuesday. I take it and I get on with my life.
If you only ever buy one supplement, this is the one.
The rest of what I take
I work indoors. For a good part of the year I start before sunrise or finish after sunset, and I barely see daylight on a working day. That is true for most people in retail, warehouses and factories.
I had my level tested, and it came back below the normal range. I have supplemented ever since. That is the order it should happen in — test, then supplement. Not guess.
Three tablets, taken in the evening. Whether it genuinely improves my sleep or whether I have simply convinced myself that it does, I honestly cannot tell you. But I keep taking it, and I am not going to pretend to more certainty than I have.
I take it. It is one of the few things I do not overthink.
I aim for around 200 grams of protein a day. Some days I hit that from food alone, and when I do, I am pleased. When I cannot, I use whey to close the gap.
I use concentrate, not isolate, and I will be honest about the trade-off: concentrate sits a bit heavily on me. Isolate would be easier on my stomach. It is also considerably more expensive. So I put up with the heaviness and keep the money.
Protein powder is not magic. It is food in a tub, for days when the food did not happen.
What I stopped taking
I used to take amino acids. I do not any more.
I stopped because I concluded they were doing nothing for me. When you are already eating 200 grams of protein a day, the case for extra aminos on top of that gets very thin.
I am including this because supplement articles almost never tell you what the author quit, and that is genuinely more useful than another list of things to buy. Every supplement you drop is money back in your pocket and one less thing to remember.
The most valuable supplement decision I have made in two years was stopping something, not starting something.
What it costs
Nobody publishes this, so here it is.
That covers everything above: creatine, vitamin D, magnesium, omega 3 and whey. Coffee is separate, and coffee is cheap.
Fifty dollars a month is not nothing when you work a shop floor. It is a real amount of money and it is worth being deliberate about where it goes.
If you only have a little to spend
Somebody asked me what they should buy if they had about a hundred złoty — call it twenty-five dollars — and wanted to start.
My answer, in order:
- Creatine. The best evidence, the lowest price, the least complexity. Start here.
- Vitamin D. Especially if you work indoors and rarely see daylight. Ideally get tested first.
- Omega 3.
- Magnesium, maybe.
That is it. That is the whole list.
Notice what is not on it: no pre-workout, no fat burner, no test booster, no amino acids, no branded blend with a picture of a bodybuilder on the tub. None of that is where the results are.
And the thing that costs nothing
The single biggest supplement decision I ever made was moving my last coffee six hours before bed. It cost me zero złoty and it improved my sleep more than anything I have ever bought.
Before you spend money on a tub of anything, spend a week getting your caffeine cut-off right. It is free, and on a rotating rota it matters more than everything else in this article put together.
The order that actually matters
If you take one thing from this page, take the priority order:
- Sleep seven hours. Protect it like it is the training.
- Eat enough protein. Every day, whatever time your day happens to start.
- Turn up at the gym. Even a light session. Especially a light session.
- Then, and only then, think about the tubs.
Supplements cannot rescue a broken foundation. They are the last few percent, and the last few percent only exists if the first ninety are already there.
Once more, because it matters: everything above is a description of what one man takes, not a plan for you. Doses vary with body size, health, medication and blood levels. Talk to a doctor or pharmacist before adding anything, particularly if you take prescription medicine.
The foundation, not the tubs
The planner puts your sessions where they can actually survive your rota. That is worth more than anything in a jar.
Open the Shift Training Planner