Pre-workout powder has been the standard for years, and it does its job. It also comes with a tub, a scoop, a shaker that needs washing, and a flavor that’s a long way from anything you’d choose to eat. We built Swole Bar because we wanted the same core ingredients in something we’d actually look forward to.

What’s in the bar

Each 60 g Swole Bar has 8 g of creatine, 400 mg of caffeine and 800 mg of L-theanine, blended into real chocolate. That’s the whole idea: the ingredients people take before training, in a bar instead of a drink.

Dark Knight is the dark chocolate version, and it’s dairy-free. Max Milk is the milk chocolate version, made with grass-fed whey, so it contains milk. Both are sweetened with organic coconut sugar and organic monk fruit extract, and both start with organic cacao.

How to eat it

Two squares is the starting point. That’s about 100 mg of caffeine, roughly a cup of coffee, with the creatine and L-theanine that go with it. Eat two squares, wait 20 to 30 minutes, train. If you want more, work up from there, but keep it to one bar a day. A whole bar is 400 mg of caffeine, which is the daily amount the FDA cites for healthy adults, so count your coffee and anything else you drink.

Swole Bar isn’t for kids, for anyone who’s pregnant or nursing, or for anyone sensitive to caffeine.

Why chocolate works for this

Chocolate is a good carrier. It melts at body temperature, it holds the ingredients evenly through the bar, and the cacao flavor stands up to them. Creatine on its own has almost no taste. Caffeine is bitter, and dark chocolate is already a little bitter, so they get along. Nothing has to be masked with artificial flavors.

It also fits in a pocket. No tub in the gym bag, no shaker, no sticky scoop. Break off what you need, put the rest back in the wrapper.

The honest comparison

A scoop of powder lets you dial the dose to the gram, and if you want 20 g of creatine on a loading day, powder is still the tool. A bar is for the ordinary training day: a set dose, a real food, and something you’ll enjoy at 6 a.m. when a chalky drink is the last thing you want.

That’s the gap we built Swole Bar for. Two squares, 30 minutes, go.

Shop Dark Knight and Max Milk →

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.