For how we live.
A small double-blind trial found a single 5.5 mg/kg dose lifted sprint power for hours, alongside higher noradrenaline and lower perceived effort — but it was 12 people, mostly men.
Photobiomodulation raised skin temperature by 8 °C and left mitochondrial respiration exactly where it found it. Ketone esters across an eight-day stage race did nothing for performance, cognition or sleep.
He said he thought he was done. What actually lets a 41-year-old compete at the NBA level isn't a secret supplement — it's sleep, hydrotherapy, and training loads built around recovery, not just output.
A meta-analysis of 51 studies found no effect on race time or time to exhaustion. The 2026 review of post-exercise compression for soreness rated its own evidence very low certainty.
An umbrella review of 29 systematic reviews and 863 randomised trials found most treatments resting on critically low-quality evidence. Animal work suggests soreness can arise without muscle damage at all.
Twenty-one amateur runners took vitamin D3 or a placebo before a marathon. Some muscle and oxidative-stress markers looked better in the supplement group — but most measures showed no difference.
A pooled analysis of 30 randomized trials finds cold-water immersion reduces muscle damage markers and soreness, but showed no benefit for restoring strength.
Trials measuring it are small but consistent: nasal breathing lowers peak oxygen uptake and feels harder at intensity. The interesting findings sit at submaximal effort, not maximal.
Three UK studies of 1,907 sauna users point to social identity and ritual. Meanwhile a physiology paper shows a standard vascular measurement is confounded by heating itself.
The famous Stanford basketball study had eleven players and no control group. Fifteen years on, sleep extension is still the best-supported sleep intervention in sport, and still barely studied.
In 132 Minnesota school athletes, each step up a housing-based measure of socioeconomic status predicted about 24% fewer days to return-to-play clearance. Childhood adversity did not lengthen recovery.