Rorie’s Review:
NAKED Nutrition Naked WHEY
Naked Whey is 100% premium grass-fed whey offering 25g of protein and 5.9g of BCAA’s per serving. Naked Nutrition pride themselves on offering ‘clean protein’, sourced from small farms and free from artificial and synthetic additives along with being gluten, soy and GMO free.
Protein plays an important role in an ultra runners recovery protocol, one which many runners can struggle to meet on a daily basis. Depending on your training volume, we should be aiming for between 1.2 – 1.6g protein per kilo of bodyweight. If like me you find that you’re falling short on protein intake, having a protein powder to top up your numbers can really help you stay on top of your macros and recover for the next session.
Naked Nutrition offer a non-denatured whey, which they claim is easier for the body to absorb, helping deliver amino acids more efficiently for energy, recovery and muscle growth.
Taste
The vanilla flavour is quite subtle on its own, and if you’re not a fan of strong flavours then it can be used as a base to add in your own ingredients — frozen berries, bananas and peanut butter make for a great protein smoothie!
As an unapologetic chocoholic, I love to add in a scoop of Nesquik to the mix, not only for the chocolate flavour but also to boost the carbohydrate content to help with recovery.
Whilst Naked Whey offers 25g of protein per serving, it’s very low on carbs (only 2.4g per serving). If you were looking to gain lean muscle mass then this may suit, but as endurance athletes it’s also important to replace the carbohydrates post-exercise. I find using either semi-skimmed or whole milk helps to boost these numbers further, allowing you to reduce the amount of Naked Whey and stretch out your servings.
Consistency
While Naked Nutrition suggest mixing two scoops into either milk or water, I would suggest using milk (or non-dairy alternative) as this gives the best consistency. When mixed with water it frothed and left a harsh aftertaste which wasn’t present when mixed with milk.
I’ve found that Naked Whey doesn’t mix as easily as some protein powders, it will need a good shake for a minute and then left for a few minutes with a few extra shakes to get rid of any lumps. If mixed in a blender to make smoothies then this isn’t a problem; make sure you have a good protein shaker for this one – don’t try to mix it in a pint glass with a spoon unless you like lumpy recovery drinks!
Value
The 2.2kg tub offers 61 servings, which at £1.31 per serving is good value compared to some other protein powers on the market. I’ve been testing this for a few weeks now, having one almost daily and there’s still more than half the tub left. Nutrition can be costly so it’s nice to have a great quality product that isn’t breaking the bank.
Naked Whey has become part of my daily recovery; after workouts, strength sessions, long runs and especially on recovery days to hit my protein numbers. With it’s subtle taste and smooth texture once mixed, it’s easy to drink and doesn’t cause any GI distress.
Naked Nutrition Naked Collagen
The Naked Collagen boasts a single ingredient: bovine hide collagen peptides from happy, healthy pasture-raised cows 🙂
What are the benefits of taking Collagen? It’s claimed to help improve your hair & nails, support healthy skin and boost joint health. It’s getting a lot of attention at present, being hyped by many on social media, though research is limited.
Collagen is one of the most abundant proteins found in our body, but we produce less as we age. This could be a worthwhile supplement for the aging athlete looking to retain bone and joint health, alongside strength training and an adequate daily protein intake.
Myself and my partner have been using this daily, and whilst I can’t comment on any noticeable benefits as yet, we can both say that the the claims of it being odourless, tasteless and ready to mix are accurate. A scoop added to black coffee dissolves easily without any after-taste or residue on the palette, and adds a nice crema to the coffee.
Though I haven’t tried mixing the collagen in with plain water, I usually add it in with my protein powder – just one scoop offers 9g’s of protein.
Whilst benefits can be seen after 4 – 6 weeks, it’s generally understood that you’ll see the long-term affects after 3 – 6 months. This is something we’ll continue to take and check back in on a long-term test.
Siobhan’s Review
Naked Nutrition Naked Whey
In a supplement market bloated with proprietary blends, flashy labels, and ingredient lists that read like a chemistry dissertation, Naked Nutrition has built its entire brand on trying to do the opposite. One ingredient. Full stop. The Grass Fed Whey Protein Powder contains nothing but whey protein concentrate sourced from small, non-intensive dairy farms, according to the site and ingredients list. No artificial sweeteners, no emulsifiers, no ‘performance matrix.’ Just protein. For ultrarunners who’ve spent years learning to distrust anything they can’t pronounce on a label, that’s a genuinely compelling proposition. As a menopausal runner, I keep hearing about the need for protein and I struggle with my targeted needs on a day to day basis. So this seems a viable option for the time pressed.
I’ve been testing this over several months of serious training, with mileage weeks that are mixed between running, hiking and indoor cycling.
Combine that with long workdays and a brain that is generally too tired to think about working out my protein intake, macros and suchlike…so this seemed a positive option.
TASTE & PALATABILITY
Unflavoured protein powders are a gamble. At worst they taste of chalk, old milk, or nothing at all — and nothing at all can be its own kind of grim when you’re forcing down nutrition at 5am before a long run. Naked Nutrition Whey sits in pleasantly surprising territory. There’s a faint, creamy undertone — the closest comparison I can find is a very mild custard — that gives it just enough character to be drinkable without being cloying. It won’t replace your post-run coffee as a treat, but it won’t make you dread the morning scoop either. For athletes who rotate through large quantities of the same product week after week, that quiet inoffensiveness is more valuable than it sounds.
As someone with more a savoury tooth, that hint of custard did prove tricky to drink at times, I will not lie.
MIXABILITY
This is where I’ll be straight with you: cold water and a shaker bottle is not this product’s friend. It clumps, it settles, and the texture in water alone is gritty enough to notice. If that’s your only option, a blender bottle with the wire whisk ball helps, but it’s still not ideal. However — and this matters — blended with milk, stirred into warm porridge, added to a recovery smoothie with a banana and some oats, or mixed into yoghurt, it becomes completely seamless. No texture, no aftertaste, just protein quietly doing its job. The lesson is to treat this as a cooking and blending ingredient rather than a grab-and-shake convenience product, and it rewards you accordingly.
For checkpoint nutrition during multi-day events, a pre-portioned bag stirred into warm full-fat milk at a bothy or support station is a genuinely solid recovery option — easy to prepare, easy on the stomach, and nutritionally purposeful.
SATIETY & APPETITE MANAGEMENT
This is where Naked Whey has most impressed me, and it’s something that doesn’t get discussed enough in ultrarunning nutrition circles. Managing appetite during peak training blocks is its own discipline. High-mileage weeks create a caloric demand that can tip easily into underfuelling if you’re not intentional — or into chaotic grazing if you are. Throw menopausal hormonal disarray and there is scope for carnage in the fridge and cupboards.
A serving of this, taken with breakfast or as a mid-morning addition to porridge, reliably keeps hunger suppressed for three to four hours. I’ve noticed a meaningful reduction in reaching for snacks between meals on days I use it versus days I don’t. For athletes managing body composition during a training block, or simply trying to maintain consistent energy without blood sugar spikes, that sustained satiety is a real functional benefit.
MACROS & PERFORMANCE RELEVANCE
25g protein per 30g serving. 1.2g sugar. 2.4g carbohydrates. 120 kcal. The numbers are clean and the protein-to-calorie ratio is excellent for a concentrate. Whey concentrate — as opposed to isolate or hydrolysate — retains more of the naturally occurring fats and lactose from the original milk, which contributes to the slightly creamier taste profile but does mean it’s not suitable for those with lactose intolerance. It also digests slightly more slowly than isolate, which may be a consideration for athletes with sensitive GI systems, particularly during taper or race week when gut function tends to become more temperamental. This information was provided to me by my gym obsessed 18 year old, who was so impressed he also did a mini review.
For training recovery, especially in the 30–60 minute post-session window, the protein quality is excellent. Whey is a complete protein with a full essential amino acid profile and a high leucine content — the amino acid most directly associated with triggering muscle protein synthesis. For multi-day events where muscle preservation between stages matters as much as fuelling during them, getting adequate leucine into a checkpoint meal is genuinely worth prioritising.
VERDICT
Naked Nutrition Grass Fed Whey won’t suit everyone. If you need a grab-and-go shaker that mixes in seconds with cold water, look elsewhere. If you want flavours, variety, or something that feels like a treat, this isn’t it.
But if you’re an athlete who cares about what’s actually in your nutrition, who builds meals deliberately, and who wants a high-quality protein source that does exactly one thing and does it well — this earns its place in your kitchen without question. Clean, effective, honest. In a crowded market, that’s rarer than it should be.
Tested over a full training block for Oslo to Bergen 500kms race in 2027.
Naked Nutrition Naked Creatine
Rating: 5/5
I’ll admit I came to creatine late. It always felt like a gym supplement — something for people doing bicep curls, not 100-mile sufferfests. My gym and muscle mad teenager jumped on it some months before I did, I must confess. Then I actually read the evidence, and quietly added it to my routine. I have read a lot about it and tried to unpick the noise out there and referenced papers that might be useful. Otherwise, just scroll to the punchlines!
Naked Creatine is as minimal as supplements get: one ingredient, creatine monohydrate, nothing else. No sweeteners, no flavourings, no padding. The powder is finely milled and dissolves cleanly in water — genuinely the best I’ve tried for mixability. No grit, no residue, no aftertaste. It disappears into a glass of water or a shake without protest, which sounds like a low bar but apparently isn’t. It is amazingly easy to have in a cup of tea, which is this ultrarunners staple drink of choice.
Does it work for ultrarunners?
The honest answer is: not in the way the marketing implies but there are encouraging reasons to say yes. The one health claim EU and UK regulators permit is that creatine improves performance in repeated bursts of short-term, high-intensity exercise. That’s a legally constrained statement, and a telling one — it doesn’t describe most of what we do. A 2025 scoping review confirmed this, concluding that creatine is most likely to benefit performance involving intermittent high-intensity efforts or end-spurts, rather than tasks determined primarily by steady-state aerobic capacity.¹
Where it earns its place is less glamorous — recovery. Evidence points to reduced muscle damage markers and faster tissue repair, which matters both across a multi-day event and in the weeks after, when getting back to training is the actual goal.¹ As we get older and especially for menopausal women, recovery is key.
The hydration question
The old myth that creatine causes cramping and dehydration has been comprehensively dismantled. A systematic review found no evidence that creatine supplementation hinders heat dissipation or an athlete’s ability to control fluid balance.² Some studies have gone further, finding slightly reduced heart rate and core temperature during exercise, alongside improved blood plasma volume in supplementing athletes.³ For a summer race in potentially warm conditions, that’s not nothing.
The brain angle
This one is underappreciated.
Cognitive function and mental resilience are a key part of multi stage races so I have added it to my drop bag for the next adventure to test it robustly. Emerging research highlights potential benefits to working memory and mental fatigue reduction.⁴ There’s a particular signal in women, where oestrogen decline appears to reduce endogenous creatine synthesis — meaning postmenopausal women may have a greater relative need and stand to gain more from supplementation.⁵ Early days, but encouraging and worth keeping an eye on emerging evidence.
The weight concern
Creatine causes 1–1.5kg of intramuscular water retention. In a weight-sensitive sport, that sounds alarming. In practice, no controlled trials have shown degraded endurance performance attributable to that mass — the water is functional fluid stored inside muscle cells, not subcutaneous weight that hurts running economy. Sustained intakes of 3–5g/day have not been associated with slower times in any controlled endurance study.⁶
Practicalities
The label recommends 3g/day; most research uses 5g. Both work — 3g just takes longer to saturate stores. Skip loading phases: 20g/day gets you saturated faster but brings GI upset most runners don’t want, and offers no long-term advantage.⁶ Also worth knowing — buffered, HCl, or ethyl ester variants offer the same effect at several times the price. Monohydrate remains the gold standard.⁶
One honest caveat: creatine works on accumulation, not acutely. If you’re not already 4–6 weeks into consistent daily use, starting the week before your race won’t move the needle.
Verdict
Not a magic bullet for ultra performance, and anyone selling it as one is overselling. But as a clean, single-ingredient supplement with a genuinely honest label, excellent mixability, and a solid evidence base for recovery, hydration resilience, and emerging brain health benefits — it’s earned a permanent spot on my shelf. The whole household quietly adopted it. That’s usually the most reliable review.
Find out more at NakedNutrition.com
About the authors:
Dr Siobhan Brennan is an ultrarunner who has been under the wise tutorship of Joe Faulkner at NAV4 who pushed her to do scary stuff. She jumped from the Manchester 10k to Lakes in a Day and embraces the freedom and empowerment that distance races give her. She has now completed many 50 milers plus the Northern Traverse and Spine Challenger North. A passionate advocate for running in the menopause and accomplished in doing distance with the slow and steady approach, always at the back of the pack chattering and often heard before she is seen.
Rorie is an ultra running coach at RUNFREE Ultra and has been competing in endurance events for over 20 years, including Ironman, 24 hour mountain bike races and many ultras in the UK and Europe. He is a gear junkie and loves to chat kit!
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References
1. Gough LA et al. Creatine Supplementation in Endurance and Mixed-Sport Contexts: A Scoping Review of Performance, Recovery, and Body Composition. Nutrients. 2025; 18(11):1677. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu18111677
2. Dalbo VJ et al. Putting to rest the myth of creatine supplementation leading to muscle cramps and dehydration. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2008; 42(7):567–573.
3. Beis LY et al. The effects of creatine and glycerol hyperhydration on running economy in well trained endurance runners. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. 2011; 8:24. https://doi.org/10.1186/1550-2783-8-24
4. Avgerinos KI et al. Effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive function of healthy individuals. Experimental Gerontology. 2018; 108:166–173.
5. Smith-Ryan AE et al. Creatine Supplementation in Women’s Health: A Lifespan Perspective. Nutrients. 2021; 13(3):877.
6. Koundourakis NE. Creatine for Runners: Evidence Review. Marathon Handbook. 2024. https://marathonhandbook.com/creatine-for-runners/
