Does collagen help DOMS?

The instrument panel: the five dials a DOMS trial reads, why they do not move together, and what that means for any positive result

Does collagen help DOMS is a question that the trials appear to answer in both directions, with one quoted for yes and another for no by readers who have read only the headlines, and the honest page resolves it by reading the instrument panel instead, because a muscle soreness trial does not measure one thing called DOMS, it reads five dials, and the dials do not move together. The first dial is perceived soreness: the participant marks a line or picks a number when the muscle is pressed, stretched or used, at intervals over the days after the session, which is what a lifter means by DOMS and the dial every trial reports. The second is pressure pain threshold: an algometer, a spring-loaded probe, is pressed into the muscle until the participant says it hurts, and the force at that point is recorded, a more objective version of the first dial that still measures the tissue's sensitivity rather than its damage. The third is creatine kinase in the blood, an enzyme that lives inside muscle fibres and leaks into the circulation when their membranes are damaged, so that its rise over the days after a session marks how much fibre damage the session did; it is the dial closest to damage itself and the one that varies most wildly between people, with some participants rising tenfold and others barely at all after the same exercise. The fourth is strength loss, the drop in maximal force the muscle can produce immediately after the session and its recovery toward baseline over the following days, which is the dial that says when the muscle is working again. The fifth is function, usually countermovement jump height for the legs, how far performance fell and how fast it returned, the dial that says when the athlete is working again. The measurement literature has compared these dials across hundreds of trials and found that they correlate poorly with one another: soreness tracks the inflammatory sensitisation of the connective tissue and nerve endings around the fibres more than the damage to the fibres themselves, so that a muscle can be very sore with little damage and quite damaged with little soreness; creatine kinase tells a different story from soreness in the same participant; and function can recover while soreness persists, or soreness can fade while strength is still down. That poor correlation has a consequence for every positive result in the supplement literature, and the honest page states it: a supplement can move one dial while the other four sit still, a trial that reports a benefit has usually moved one or two dials and not the panel, and the dial most often moved by anything, from fish oil to tart cherry to collagen, is perceived soreness, which is the dial most open to expectation and the one least tied to the damage the lifter is trying to recover from, which is the missing half of the story on the fish oil and DOMS page. Reading a DOMS trial therefore means asking which dials moved, by how much, in how many people, and against what, and that is how the collagen trials are read next.

What the collagen trials moved on the panel, what moves every dial at once, what a lifter does with soreness, and the worked example

The collagen soreness trials are a handful, and the honest page reads them across the panel rather than by their abstracts, with the trials reconstructed one by one on the collagen and muscle pain page. Their design is shared: a dozen or two participants, usually recreationally active men, given 15 to 20g of collagen peptides a day or a placebo for a week or more before and after a bout of unaccustomed, eccentric-heavy exercise designed to produce soreness, drop jumps or downhill running or heavy eccentric leg work, with the five dials read over the following days. In the best known of them, the collagen group recovered countermovement jump height faster than placebo over the forty-eight hours after the bout, which is the fifth dial moving, while perceived soreness, the first dial, did not differ reliably, and creatine kinase, the third, did not differ; in another, perceived soreness was lower in the collagen group at one time point, the first dial moving, while function did not differ; in others, no dial moved; and across the handful creatine kinase, the dial closest to damage, did not move consistently anywhere, so that whatever the collagen did, it did not reduce the fibre damage the session caused. Read across the panel that is one and a half dials out of five, moved in different trials by different measures with no consistency between them, in sample sizes too small to separate a real small effect from noise, which is why the reviews describe the collagen soreness literature as mixed with no consistent benefit established and why no recovery or soreness claim has been authorised. Set against that panel is the one intervention that moves every dial at once, and the honest page gives it the credit the shelf withholds: the repeated-bout effect. A single bout of unaccustomed, eccentric-heavy exercise produces marked soreness, a large rise in creatine kinase, a large drop in strength and a slow recovery of function, and a repeat of the same exercise within a few weeks produces far less of all five, less soreness, a higher pressure pain threshold, a fraction of the creatine kinase rise, less strength loss and faster function recovery, a protective adaptation that lasts for months and costs nothing, and that is so strong the soreness trials have to use exercise their participants are unaccustomed to in order to produce soreness worth treating, which is the clearest statement there is of what actually helps DOMS. What a lifter does with soreness follows from the panel: train the same movements regularly so that the repeated-bout effect keeps every dial low, change the programme gradually rather than all at once, move lightly on sore days since movement eases the first dial as much as anything does, sleep and eat complete protein for the fourth and fifth dials, and treat soreness as a sensation that fades on its own curve by a week rather than as damage to be medicated; the forty-eight hours between sessions drawn as a timeline, with collagen's one slot at the far end of it for a different tissue, are on the recovery between sessions page. The worked example is the adjunct for a different tissue than the sore one, stated on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C at 15% of its reference value plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, below the 15 to 20g doses of the soreness trials by an order of magnitude, carrying vitamin C's collagen formation sentence for cartilage and bones and no recovery or soreness claim, since none is authorised and the panel says none should be. Does collagen help DOMS: on one or two dials, inconsistently, in trials too small to be sure, and the thing that helps DOMS on all five dials is doing the exercise again.

What to check on the label