It’s been three days and recovery is going so slowly. I’m finally walking reasonably well again but there’s no way I can attempt the stairs again for another few days. If that continues I will never get where I need to be to tackle Mt Whitney. So how can I help my body recover faster and progress faster…

The wonderful world of suppliments

Well, this is something I’ve never before gotten into. I took a multivitamin for a while once, but never even finished the bottle. And there is so much hype and mysticism in this space that just drown everything else with noise. So my first stop was an LLM (Gemini specifically). We had a nice conversation where I repeatedly asked for peer reviewed medical literature to support the things it was saying. We eventually settled on a pretty minimal regimine of 5mg of creatine monohydrate per day along with some extra protein since I really don’t eat all that much meat.

Apparently the creatine does a whole bunch of cool things like making more ATP available, help repair micro-tears in muscle, draws water into the muscle cells which somehow helps prevent muscle breakdown. There are even studies that have shown that it might help brain function in people over 60 which is pretty wild.

Protein is all the rage, but there is lots of data that show that it can enhance muscle growth caused by exercise when taken in 20-40 gram servings at a time.

I can’t really find anything else that is (near) universally recommended, so I’m going to try this and see how it goes. The creatine builds up in the muscles so I’m going to give things a week and see how I’m feeling. Fingers crossed.