Ibuprofen after a hard session: does it cost you muscle? An 8-week MRI trial, three placebo-controlled studies and a 2025 trial that points the other way show what over-the-counter anti-inflammatories do to soreness, recovery and growth.

L-carnitine is sold for fat burning and recovery. The muscle does not absorb it from a capsule, the fat-loss effect is about a kilogram, and the recovery signal comes from 79 people in seven trials - most from one lab. The numbers, and who paid for them.

Fish oil is the anti-inflammatory everyone takes and few can measure. The pooled trials show soreness drops by less than a point on a 10-point scale, performance does not change, and the newest position stand is more confident than its data.

Glutamine was the recovery supplement of the 1990s. A 25-trial meta-analysis found no effect on aerobic performance, lean mass or immune cells - and a small weight loss nobody asked for. Here is what a decade of trials actually measured.

Colostrum is sold as an immune shield and a muscle builder. The trials say the first claim has some support in hard-training athletes and the second mostly does not. Here is the evidence, with the numbers.

Vitamin C reliably blunts the oxidative-stress and IL-6 response to a hard session. It does not reduce soreness or protect strength, and the fear that it cancels training adaptations is not supported by the pooled trials. Here are the numbers.

Branched-chain amino acids reduce post-exercise soreness and creatine kinase in pooled trials, especially when taken for days beforehand at high doses. They do not reduce perceived fatigue, and they are not a muscle-building supplement. Here is the evidence, with numbers.

Water lowers impact and heart-rate ceilings, and in 32 trials aquatic exercise beat doing nothing on pain and function and edged land-based exercise on pain alone. Here is what training in water does and does not do, and which people gain most from it.

Easy movement between sets clears lactate and, in trained lifters, cuts within-set power loss from roughly 18 to 13 percent - without adding reps. Here is what active recovery does, what it does not, and how to use it.

Histamine is not just an allergy molecule - it is one of the signals that turns a workout into an adaptation. Blocking H1 and H2 receptors during a training block impaired the microvascular and mitochondrial gains from interval training. Here is what that means for athletes on antihistamines.

Second-generation antipsychotics drive weight gain by increasing appetite, lowering resting metabolism and reducing activity all at once. Exercise cannot fully reverse the weight, but it markedly improves symptoms - and people stick with it as well as with usual care. Here is the evidence.

In 1,228 collegiate athletes, light exercise started within two days of a concussion nearly doubled the odds of recovery and cut it by about three days, while waiting more than a week did the opposite. Here is what that means for the athlete - and what still belongs with a clinician.

Above 40 degrees core with a confused brain, the clock is running: getting the body below about 39 degrees within an hour is what separates survival from organ failure. Here is the mechanism, the recognition, the ice-bath rule, and the road back.

Cramps in athletes come from more than one mechanism - salt loss with plain-water drinking in some, fatigued spinal reflexes in others - which is why no remedy works for everyone. Here is the honest evidence on stretching, salt, pickle juice and conditioning.

Overtraining syndrome is a months-long performance collapse with no single test for it. What the reviews say about causes, the markers that shift, and why the fix is monitoring rather than a blood panel.

Lose sleep and you lose about 0.4% of performance per hour awake. Cut sleep while dieting and more of what you lose is muscle. The numbers from a 69-study meta-analysis and the crossover trial that started the conversation.