Magnesium And Muscle Soreness: Does It Help
Magnesium is an essential nutrient in our diet, it’s a mineral involved in many things including energy production, nervous system function, muscle contraction and calcium metabolism. Those in the fitness world often take magnesium to help with their recovery, but does it actually have an impact? Well a recent study carried out a systematic review to look at just that. Here we’ll dive into what they found and if it’s worth you supplementing with magnesium.
What Is Magnesium?
As mentioned at the top magnesium is an essential mineral, the word essential means we must get it from our diet as we do not produce it in our body and so must obtain it from food. As we know it has several functions, and deficiencies in magnesium can lead to issues such as muscle spasms and weakness, high bloodpressure, irregular heartbeat, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
It’s found in our diet in green leafy vegetables along with in nuts, seeds, legumes, whole grains, chicken, beef, salmon, and some fruits. Often certain foods, such as cereals and plant based milks, are fortified with magnesium. The daily recommended intake is 300mg/day for males and 270mg/day for females
Why Did This Study Investigate Magnesium?
The study in question is titled “Effects of magnesium supplementation on muscle soreness in different type of physical activities: a systematic review”. They claim that a deficiency in magnesium may affect physical performance and more specifically may worsen recovery and muscle soreness. Thus they carried out a systematic review to see if supplementing with magnesium would improve delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). Training is thought to deplete the bodies supplies of magnesium due to the role it plays in muscle contraction, thus active individuals may require a little more magnesium than the RDA and so supplementation may be of use.
Previous studies have investigated the impact magnesium has on performance in strength training. They have also investigated recovery, this review essentially seeks to consolidate some of the evidence on muscle soreness and magnesium.
What Did They Do?
This study was what’s known as a systematic review , a type of literature review that lays out a clear and logical method of the review itself and includes specific studies based on a number of eligibility criteria.
This review ended up including 4 studies, the inclusion criteria for these were as follows:
Included physically active individuals
Written in the English language
Included male and female participants
Included magnesium supplementation
Published in the last 23 years
Any studies carried out on animals, cells or non healthy individuals were excluded.
In the 4 studies that were included, the outcomes they were investigating included subjective measures of muscle soreness, serum magnesium levels, biomarkers of muscle damage including creatinine, urea, creatine kinase and more. The dosages used across these studies ranged from 350mg to 500mg of different forms of magnesium (glycinate, lactate, and oxide).
How Did Magnesium Affect Muscle Soreness?
The studies included in the review showed that supplementation with magnesium reduced muscle soreness, improved performance, recovery and had a protective effect on muscle damage.
The conclusions that the authors took were that magnesium supplementation is beneficial for recovery and reduction of muscle soreness and that those who train, may require a 10-20% higher intake of magnesium than sedentary people.
Key Takeaways
If you are an active individual then it could be worth supplementing with magnesium to improve muscle recovery! The present study recommended that you should supplement 2 hours prior to training, however there’s likely a benefit from simply increasing levels of magnesium and so I believe that supplementation should occur whenever you are most likely to remember to do it.
Some forms of magnesium are used for laxative purposes, so be wary of the type of magnesium that you are using. You also need to be wary of dosages of magnesium and how this relates to absorption. Different sources of magnesium are absorbed at different rates. Magnesium citrate is the most commonly used form in supplements as it has a relatively high bioavailability, as does magnesium lactate. On the flipside magnesium oxide and magnesium carbonate have poor levels of bioavailability and won’t necessarily be useful in increasing magnesium levels
