It has been claimed that Ibuprofen can stop your gains dead in their tracks, but is that the truth? I break it down in this video.
Hey guys i’m back with another bio lane video vlog and in this one i want to talk about ibuprofen and its effects on muscle mass now i’ve been coaching people for about 12 years now and by the way before online coaching was actually a thing and one of the questions i started getting i would say almost 10 years ago was hey does ibuprofen have an effect on muscle
Mass there was a study that came out of about 10 years ago that showed that ibuprofen could actually inhibit muscle protein synthesis now what happens with muscle protein synthesis is it necessarily always indicative of muscle growth but it’s usually a relatively good indicator over the years there’s been a few studies on on ibuprofen and other non-steroidal
Anti-inflammatories called nsaids and and their effects on muscle growth and muscle protein synthesis and the results have been kind of contradictory but first let’s talk about how insides work in particular ibuprofen so ibuprofen is what’s called a cox-2 inhibitor which is cyclooxygenase – and cyclooxygenase – is involved in prostaglandin production it takes
Certain fatty acids arachidonic acid being one of them and the reserves reactions and in this particular reaction which is a rate limiting reaction converts them to prostaglandins and prostaglandins are then involved in the inflammatory process now keep in mind the inflammatory process is part of the normal repair that your body goes through when you go through
A workout in fact many people have postulated that if you impede that inflammatory process that could it could actually be negative to hypertrophy further there’s actually supplements out there now that try to promote themselves as hypertrophy aids because with the idea that they’re going to increase inflammation they’re going to increase + – gland production but
The studies are really contradictory on this there’s a there was a few studies that showed it can inhibit muscle protein synthesis but when they looked at it long-term there was no difference in muscle mass didn’t seem to negatively impact muscle mass and actually there was a there was a study than the elderly people where they showed a high dose of ibuprofen 1200
Milligrams a day actually positively influenced muscle mass so this led to people kind of being really confused about this and this is kind of where you get people say no you know i don’t trust studies because one study says one thing another study says another thing when you break it down a lot comes down to study design i think a new study that was highlighted
In mass my favorite publication really shows how study design can really critically impact what the outcome is so in a new study that was covered by mass they took young active adults about 27 years of age and had them take 1200 milligrams of ibuprofen a day and they combined this with resistance training and they they had them resisted trained with or without
Ibuprofen for eight weeks now the control group took a very low dose of aspirin 75 milligrams a day as a kind of in said control and and they looked at what the results were on muscle volume power strength and what they found was very interesting the ibuprofen group gained significantly less muscle and strength and power than the control group and they also had
A lower mrna expression of a cytokine called interleukin 6 or ilo 6 and i all six is actually involved in satellite cell proliferation or fusion not to get too far into it but satellite cells essentially are one of the biggest drivers if not the biggest driver of hypertrophic potential okay muscle cells are the only cells that are what are called multinucleated
And so for most cells they only have one nuclei muscle can have multi nuclei and the reason they believe this happens is because each nuclei is responsible for a certain kind of domain it’s called domain theory a certain domain of that muscle cell and they control muscle protein synthesis within that domain and so if you want to produce more muscle volume you’re
Going to be limited by the number of my own nuclei that confuse to that muscle cell now satellite cells when they fuse obviously if you have let’s say just for the sake of argument you have 100 satellite cells fused and forming my nuclei compared to 20 yoga even if each domain each nuclei controls a rate of muscle protein synthesis that’s the same you’re going
To have greater hypertrophy on the cell that has more my own nuclei because the overall area is greater so hopefully i’ve done a good job of explaining that now i want to be clear to my knowledge they didn’t actually look at satellite cell proliferation they just looked at this marker il-6 but based on what we know about inflammation and prostaglandins and the
Proliferation of satellite cells it’s relatively reasonable to assume that high doses of ibuprofen may have a negative impact on hypertrophy and that may be why you’re seeing a this longer term study show a decrease in muscle volume and strength compared to the control group one because it may be negatively impacting muscle protein synthesis about two because it
Also may be negatively impacting satellite cell proliferation now what’s interesting is why this study why did this study in particular show negative effects of ibuprofen compared to previous studies which showed no effect or if that in the one study showed an improvement well in the older studies they were only using 400 milligrams of ibuprofen a day or less so
One it’s probably a dose-dependent to where you have to get to a certain level of inhibition of inflammation before it negatively impacts muscle mass – in the study where they gave 1200 milligrams of ibuprofen a day and they showed that it actually improved muscle mass that was performed in elderly people and elderly people have a higher innate level of inflammation
Typically so it’s probably a bell curve with regards to inflammation where if your inflammation is too low it actually negatively impacts muscle mass and if your inflammation is too high it negatively impacts muscle mass so for certain people who have really low levels of inflammation it might actually be useful to take something like our academic acid or something
That’s ploy and pro-inflammatory in terms of gaining more muscle but for people who have really high levels of inflammation whereas their elderly some kind of chronic disease very stressed it may be actually reasonable to use ibuprofen to lower that inflammation i don’t think we have enough data to really say what those threshold levels are so i would caution
Against making any big lifestyle changes based on that but like i said i think probably it is a little bit of a bell curve so for most things in the human body there’s a sweet spot you get too little of it it’s bad you get too much of it it’s bad and i think that a lot of the day on inflammation shows that too much is bad too little is bad so what i really think
You’re seeing here is a moderation effect so when people who are high inflammatory status like elderly people take ibuprofen it kind of knocks them back into that sweet spot but people who are kind of already in the sweet spot if they take a large dose of ibuprofen it knocks them out of that sweet spot into a low inflammatory status that’s actually inhibitory for
Muscle growth and this is why it is so important that you be that you listen to people who actually know how to interpret studies and not just abstract warrior if you if there’s so many people who misinterpret studies or they say well i don’t trust science cuz one study says this in one study says that well if you’re just looking at the freaking conclusion of the
Study that’s probably true but if you actually read through and you examine the study design and you break down the study design you break down the results you can begin to understand why one study will say one thing one study will say another thing because it boils down to study design 99 times out of 100 so what do i actually recommend well one i recommend that you
Subscribe to websites like mine because we do this kind of stuff as well as checking out things like mass which is a publication run by mike soros erik helms and greg knuckles because they break down these studies as well so for you guys it’s gonna be able to help break down the research high level research into a digestible format that you can understand secondly
As far as ibuprofen itself what do i personally recommend i would say only use it if you really need it so if you’re injured and you really can’t you you really can’t train because you’re so injured it is more important to actually recover from that because the sooner you can recover the sooner you can get training again that’s more important than worrying about
Inhibiting inflammation plus if you’re injured you’re gonna have higher levels of inflammation anyway so if you’re injured and you’re taking ibuprofen you’re probably fine because you’re taking a high level of inflammation and maybe knocking it back in that sweet spot if you’re kind of dealing with low level chronic pain or you feel like you need to use ibuprofen
More consistently or for whatever reason you have a condition where your doctors prescribed it i would say use less than 400 milligrams per day for the simple fact that at that low of a dose it doesn’t seem to negatively impact muscle mass in healthy people further it looks like elderly people may actually benefit from a certain dose of ibuprofen i don’t feel
Comfortable telling people hey take 1200 milligrams a day because that’s a really high dose and a lot of people have gastric issues with that high of a dose but you know it looks like maybe a moderate knows maybe four to six hundred milligrams you know ask your doctor or ask your physician what they would recommend but it looks like maybe a moderate dose if you’re
In a high inflammatory state chronically from either disease or being older or or you know type 2 diabetes that sort of thing that a moderate dose might shift you back into kind of that more of that that nominal range of that optimal range finally i think a lot of people might use this this this data and say okay we’ll see if you inhibit inflammation it completely
You know it inhibits muscle mass and therefore damage and inflammation is the most important thing for increasing muscle mass um that’s likely not true if that was the case just go take a hammer and hit whatever spot of your muscle you want to grow because that will damage the muscle but it doesn’t repair itself and get bigger so just damage alone is not an impetus
For growth okay damage activate some of the same cascades that that are involved in muscle growth it looks like however that it’s damaged along with mechanical loading along with progressive overload along with metabolic stress there is a myriad of things that go into muscle growth and they’re actually very poorly understood at this time so take this and just it’s
Like the people who say well you need to get sort order to grow muscle that’s not true go out and run a marathon i promise you will be sore i don’t think you actually grew muscle so again it’s very dangerous to take isolated cases and sour isolated pathways and say this is the pathway that causes muscle growth that’s usually just not how it works out the body has
Very very redundant systems so hopefully this video has been helpful for you guys if you want more information good information out there check out my website by alene comm and also i’ll put a link for for mass here as well so if you guys are interested in subscribing to that you can check it out and i will catch you guys next time
Transcribed from video
Does Ibuprofen Stop Muscle Growth??? By biolayne
