This review will take you through the experience of taking a first dose of GNC’s pre-workout supplement, Ravage.
- The Bottle
It looks stupid. Not as shiny and flashy as NO-Xplode, and not as simple and science-y looking as Jack3d. But looks aren’t important, results are, and the result of naming this thing “RAVAGE" means that it will command respect when you display it prominently in your kitchen. - Ingredients
GNC decided to take BSN’s approach here and stuff their pre-workout with as many fucking ingredients as possible. 3 of them work (Caffeine, Creatine, and L-Arginine), 87 of them will RAVAGE your asshole.
Luckily, they keep all the effective ingredient dosages hidden in their mysterious proprietary blend, so you don’t know if you are actually getting enough of any ingredient to do anything.
The rest of the diarrhea-inducing ingredients are all a bunch of plant extracts that may, or may not, do anything other than confuse your digestive system. Fenugreek, Wild Yam, and Cinnamon Extracts round out my skepticism nicely. More bro-science that actual science behind some of these ingredients, but hey, if you put ALL OF THEM in one supplement, one of them is bound to do something right? Right? - Smell
Open that tub up and take a whiff. Your nostrils will sting a little. They will be confused, perplexed, then they will tell you, “Don’t do it. Something doesn’t smell right." But you don’t care, you are trying to get huge. So you take a scoop and start stirring. Fuck!… It smells even worse now. - Scoop
Normally the scoop wouldn’t get its own category, but RAVAGE’s scoop is so fucking big I got confused and thought they put the wrong size plastic scoop in my tub, then I checked the label. The serving size is 1 scoop. 1 scoop is 26 grams. That is over 5 times bigger than Jack3d’s serving size of 5.5g. 2.5x bigger than HyperFX’s serving size. RAVAGE’s serving size is the same as my whey protein. That is fucking insane.
Hypothetically, what happens if the heavier ingredients settle to the bottom of the bottle during transit and just caffeine is left on top, and you don’t think to stir it up, and you accidentally scoop yourself 20 grams of Anhydrous Caffeine? 10 grams is fatal for fucks sake. You would have the most hardcore workout ever. - Taste
No surprises here. It smells like shit, tastes like shit. But whatever, taste isn’t the end goal here, hugeness is. - Energy & Pump
Naturally, I took two (giant fucking) scoops of this shit to get a good buzz going. It worked.How I Felt After Taking RAVAGE:
RAVAGE certainly has enough caffeine to fuck up my workout. 200mg per serving, so two scoops had me buzzin’ like that weird German guy in Blow. I had to jump rope in between sets to keep people from noticing that I was shaking uncontrollably.
Pump wasn’t anything spectacular, but it almost doesn’t matter when YOU CAN LIFT FOR 4 HOURS STRAIGHT.
Strength saw good improvements in endurance. I didn’t notice myself hitting any new PR’s, but I was lifting heavier weights for longer. Normally you start to fatigue after hitting your big compound lifts early in your workout, but it felt like 18 sets of Incline, Flat, and Decline bench were just a good warmup for my tricep isolation lifts. Fuck yeah. - Hangover
After your incredibly energized workout, you leave hyper-exhausted and become useless to the fucking world. I found this out the hard way. I tried working out over my lunch hour. My 45 minute lift turned into an hour and 45 minute lift, and by the time I got back to my desk I was basically asleep. You know what they say, “Work hard. Workout even harder. Then don’t work at all." - Price
SRP for RAVAGE is $39.99. There are 20 servings in a bottle. If you can do math, and I know many Two Scoopers can’t, that is $2 a serving. $2 a serving for a pre-workout is insanely retarded. Energy drinks at CVS are cheaper than that shit. By comparison, NO-Xplode is $1.34 per serving if you are stupid enough to buy it at SRP of $66.99. If you bargain hunt for NO-Xplode, and I can fucking bargain hunt, you can get it down to $0.51 a serving. Therefore, vis-à-vis, to summarize, in conclusion, RAVAGE is over-fucking-priced.
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Final Verdict: Definitely worth a shot, but not for the money, and you’ll probably move on after 1 tub anyway.
-Tony “Two Scoops" Muscoli
