Intra could be a different story. If you have had your Pre-workout meal an hour ago or some, you still have protein breaking down into Amino Acids and this has to be beneficial since BCAAs will help prolong your protein synthesis.
I hope it made sense
Untrue
If you had a meal an hour before its still digesting and will be going into the post-workout period. You won't need a BCAA product if you are meeting protein intake in the 24 hour period.
1. Research commonly cited that demonstrates muscle-related benefits of BCAA supplementation was done with subjects that didn’t eat enough protein.
For example, this study is one of the poster boys for selling BCAAs.
It examined the effects of BCAA supplementation on a group of wrestlers in a calorie deficit. After three weeks, the supplement group, who ingested an additional 52 grams of BCAAs per day preserved more muscle and lost a bit more fat than the control group (who didn’t supplement at all).
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Sounds pretty cool, right?
Well, what you won’t hear is that subjects, whose average weight was about 150 pounds, were eating a paltry ~80 grams of protein per day. If we look at research on the protein needs of athletes in a calorie restriction, we learn that they should have been eating double that amount of protein to preserve lean mass.
Other studies that demonstrate various muscle-related benefits of BCAA supplementation have promising abstracts,
but are almost always hampered by lack of dietary control and/or low protein intake, and in almost all cases, subjects are training fasted, which is a very important point we’ll talk more about in a minute
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What such research tells us is that acutely raising BCAA levels (and leucine in particular) before and after exercise helps us build more muscle.
There is no evidence that doing it through the ingestion of a BCAA supplement is more effective than food, however.
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While BCAAs are good for preserving muscle, they have two significant drawbacks:
1. You’re paying for three amino acids but leucine is the only one of the trio that effectively suppresses muscle protein breakdown.
You could save money and achieve the same results by buying pure leucine instead (but be warned–leucine tastes really, really bad).
2. Most BCAA supplements are comprised of 2 to 3 parts leucine and 1 part isoleucine and valine, which means you need to take quite a bit (about 10 grams) every time
You need 3 to 5 grams of leucine to effectively counteract the muscle loss that results from fasted exercise, which means you burn through bottles of BCAAs fairly quickly if you’re training fasted 5 to 7 days per week.
From Alan Aragon:
Hey everyone, a frequently recurring topic is BCAA supplementation. A lot of folks are simply unaware of the actual data, so they needlessly waste their hard-earned cash on BCAA supps. This might not be music to the ears of folks locked in a routine of taking their favorite supp, but my hope is that it gives some of you food for thought, and ultimately helps you zap an unnecessary (and potentially detrimental) item from your supplement shopping list.
The high-quality proteins in our diets are comprised of appx 18-26% BCAA as it is. Supplementing with extra BCAA on top of that can range from adding extra unnecessary calories (and metabolic burden), to actually inhibiting optimal use of ingested amino acids [1].
Let me also add that whey protein has a stronger anabolic/anticatabolic effect than its equivalent in supplemental EAA or BCAA [2]. It's no surprise that supplemental BCAA has an equivocal track record in the research [3,4].
For those concerned about "going catabolic" doing fasted cardio without AA supplementation, my colleagues and I found no difference in body comp effects between fed vs fasted cardio when total protein is sufficient (both groups retained their LBM) [5]. As for the ability of BCAA to inhibit muscle soreness, note that this is always compared to a non-protein placebo.
It's LOL to supp with BCAA to begin with (instead of an intact, high-quality protein such as whey, which provides the rest of the EAAs as well as other co-factors for anabolism --
but it's all moot if you're getting enough total daily protein anyway). Here’s a salient quote from a recent review [6]:
"Thus, as we speculated, consumption of crystalline BCAA resulted in competitive antagonism for uptake from the gut and into the muscle and was actually not as effective as leucine alone in stimulating MPS.
Despite the popularity of BCAA supplements we find shockingly little evidence for their efficacy in promoting MPS or lean mass gains and would advise the use of intact proteins as opposed to a purified combination of BCAA that appear to antagonize each other in terms of transport both into circulation and likely in to the muscle.”
T
he only people who are not wasting time & money on supplemental BCAA are those who must maintain a low-protein diet, or a diet with restricted amounts of high-quality protein. With that all said, if your total daily protein is optimized, and you don't mind consuming the functional equivalent of really expensive flavored water [7,8,9], then be my guest. 
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