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Skip the expensive recovery supplements with vitamin C or tart cherry. If you want vitamin C, eat an orange — you'll get fiber and... Focus recovery dollars on what actually matters: a protein shake post-workout if you're not eating a meal soon, a good mattress for sleep quality,... If you're sore and struggling to recover, look at your training volume first. Are you doing too much, too often? Recovery happens through smart...

Vitamin C and Tart Cherry for Recovery? The Research Says Save Your Money

Walk into any supplement store and you'll find recovery products loaded with vitamin C and tart cherry extract. The pitch sounds good: reduce inflammation, speed up recovery, get back in the gym faster. But when researchers actually tested these supplements in controlled trials, the results were... disappointing.

Bottom line: These popular recovery supplements don't deliver on their promises — save your money for things that actually work.

What the Research Actually Found

For vitamin C, scientists pooled 12 randomized controlled trials (the gold standard of research) and found essentially nothing. No effect on IL-6 inflammation (the result was literally 0.00 — a perfect null). No meaningful reduction in oxidative stress. One marker, CRP, showed a small drop, but that was based on only 52 people total across two studies — hardly convincing. The researchers themselves rated the evidence quality as 'very low,' meaning we shouldn't trust these findings much at all.

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