Best Recovery Supplement

Many of us know the feeling that sets in a day or so after a hard workout. Muscles so achy you start to wonder if it’s the flu instead of just soreness. Legs so wobbly you need to hold the railing with both hands to stop yourself from falling down the stairs. The saying goes: “No pain, no gain.” But if you’re in so much pain you can barely move, your gains are liable to slow down.

Recovery supplements aim to reduce the intensity and duration of delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), injury, fatigue, and dehydration.1 There are workout recovery supplements aimed at each of these goals, and our guide will take you through the most effective of them, with recommendations you can use to maximize your performance along the way.

For those of you in a hurry, here’s a quick look at our top recommendations:

At Innerbody Research, we thoroughly test everything we review so we can bring you, our readers, unique and unbiased perspectives on a wide range of products and services, including recovery supplements. Our team has collectively tried dozens of these products over the years, focusing recently on a handful that made the cut for this guide.

On top of our hands-on research, we pored over more than 100 scholarly articles pertaining to the science of recovery and the specific potential of the ingredients found in our top recovery supplements. Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this guide was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

To evaluate recovery supplements, we applied several criteria we felt would mean the most to anyone struggling to decide among countless options: effectiveness, safety, cost, convenience, and taste.

The best thing about the collection of supplements in this guide is that none is mutually exclusive of another. You could use all of them together to create an ultimate recovery stack if you found it to be necessary. And while that combination would undoubtedly win a competition for efficacy, we still wanted to pick a winner there.

Effectiveness

Winner: Naked Nutrition Naked Mass Vegan Weight Gainer

No two people’s recovery process is quite the same. Differences in genetic makeup, frequency and intensity of exercise, diet, sleep, and even mood can play a role in how quickly you can recover from exertion. So selecting a winner for effectiveness is tricky.

That said, our review of the scientific literature reveals a pattern that we can’t deny: that a specific combination of macronutrients delivered at specific times after a workout can yield the most positive results for the most people. For that, we recommend Naked Nutrition’s Naked Mass Vegan Weight Gainer.

Weight gainer supplements are designed to deliver a balance of macronutrients and an abundance of calories to help you reach the caloric goals needed to build significant amounts of muscle. For most people, weight gainers deliver more calories than they likely need to balance against their exercise routine. You don’t need an extra 1,200 calories to support 20 minutes on the treadmill followed by 20 minutes of free-weight work. But it turns out the macronutrient quantities in Naked Nutrition’s Naked Mass Vegan Weight Gainer line up very well with those shown to be effective in multiple studies.

After exercise, your muscles need to recover glycogen (a kind of sugar-based fuel), and a certain regimen of post-workout carbohydrates is ideal: starting as quickly as you can once your workout concludes, consume 1.2g of carbs per kg of body weight every hour for 2-4 hours.2 So, if you weigh around 200lb, you’d need about 100g of carbs each hour after a strenuous workout. It’s also possible to significantly increase glycogen resynthesis by adding protein to the picture at a carb-to-protein ratio of ~4:1. So you’ll want about 25g of protein per hour, as well.

Unflavored Naked Mass delivers 62g of carbs and 12.5g of protein per 308-calorie scoop. That’s about as close to the ~4:1 ratio as we’ve found in a high-quality supplement. Also, each scoop includes just 1g of fat. You can spread out Naked’s 4-scoop serving size over 2-4 hours after an intense workout to maximize its effects.

Much of the research we’ve encountered views “prolonged strenuous exercise” as at least 1-2 hours of “exhaustive cycling.” If your workouts are lighter or shorter, you might not need as much supplement for recovery, maybe 1-2 scoops enjoyed over a couple of hours. If they’re significantly intense, and you’re either burning large amounts of calories or trying to bulk up, you could take the full four-scoop serving and divide it up over four hours.

Safety

Winner: Transparent Labs Hydrate

While none of the supplements we’ve included in this guide is inherently dangerous, certain things could make one safer than another, depending on the individual. For example, Micro Ingredients’ Fish Oil capsules might be an allergy risk for those sensitive to anchovies and sardines, and the carbohydrate and sugar content in Naked Mass likely isn’t ideal for diabetics.

Considering all of this, we chose Transparent Labs Hydrate as our top safety pick because it’s designed to tackle one of the most critical aspects of exercise recovery: hydration. Dehydration during and after exercise can have numerous negative effects, including heat exhaustion, reduced blood flow to the brain, and even systemic inflammation conditions.3

So, while there are other supplements with greater efficacy for overall exercise recovery, hydration may be the most important from a safety standpoint. It’s important to note, however, that Transparent Labs Hydrate uses coconut water powder as one of its hydrating ingredients, which can trigger tree nut allergies.

Cost

Winner: Micro Ingredients Triple Strength Omega 3 Fish Oil

If you’re looking to increase your recovery while spending as little money as possible, Micro Ingredients Triple Strength Omega 3 Fish Oil offers both the lowest one-time purchase price and the lowest cost per dose of the supplements in our guide.

Here’s a quick breakdown of key cost components. (We based the serving size for Naked Mass on a two-scoop post-workout regimen rather than the four scoops listed on the bottle, as this will apply to an average workout, whereas only the most intense exercise would call for all four scoops.)

As you can see, Micro Ingredients Triple Strength Omega 3 Fish Oil costs about half as much per dose as the next cheapest option, Transparent Labs Hydrate. You could also combine those two supplements for a per-dose cost of $1.13 and still spend less per dose than you’d get with Transparent Labs Creatine HMB.

Convenience

Winner: Transparent Labs

Our convenience measure takes into account things like website design, shipping logistics, and actual dosing of the product. All of the companies in our guide have easy-to-navigate sites and offer fast shipping, but Transparent Labs had the fastest delivery time in testing, with our products arriving in just two days.

Actually using the products presents some stark differences. While swallowing a few pills with a glass of water would technically be more convenient than mixing a drink powder, the capsules in Swolverine’s ZMT and Micro Ingredients’ Fish Oil are on the large side. You also have to take six of them for ZMT and three for Micro Ingredients, and that can be very inconvenient.

Transparent Labs Creatine HMB and Hydrate powders are a little easier to manage than Naked Mass, mainly because you need so much less powder to make the drinks. Also, Naked’s product comes in an 8lb tub that’s a pain to store, whereas the two Transparent Labs products come in relatively small containers.

Taste

Winner: Transparent Labs Hydrate

Transparent Labs Hydrate, a drink mix, is our winner in the taste category. It comes in five flavors:

• Raspberry Lemonade
• Tropical Punch
• Peach Mango
• Blue Raspberry
• Lemon Lime

Our team tested the Raspberry Lemonade flavor and preferred it to the Transparent Labs creatine drink mix we’ve also included in this guide. It's likely due to its smaller quantity of natural flavoring and slightly larger combination of citric and malic acids that Hydrate was the preferred flavor among our testers. However, both Transparent Labs products use 300mg of stevia as a sweetener, so you might not enjoy either of them if you don't like stevia.

Naked Mass, the third drink mix in our guide, tastes fine for a chocolate protein powder, but it makes for a heavy beverage. Plus, it requires a good blender and a lot of liquid to make something you can really enjoy, at least for the chocolate flavor we tried.

The taste category is admittedly unfair to the other two products in our guide, both of which are capsules, not drinks. That said, Micro Ingredients Triple Strength Omega 3 Fish Oil does have a slightly detectable fishiness that lingers in your mouth before you swallow, which we didn't like. Fortunately, we didn’t experience the fish burps associated with other fish oil supplements.

Workout recovery supplements are intended to reduce the amount of time you spend between workouts by replenishing your muscles with fuel, rehydrating your body, ameliorating soreness, and more. They come in numerous forms, with drink mixes and capsules being among the most common (and making up the recommendations in our guide).

There’s a lot of confusing and sometimes conflicting science out there when it comes to workout recovery, and the likelihood is that a supplement that works for one person might not necessarily work for you. As we explore what makes a recovery supplement effective, you’ll want to consider your diet, workout routine, and levels of fatigue or soreness after exercise when considering which one (or ones) would serve you best.

To kick things off, we should discuss what happens to the body during and after exercise.

Whether you’re sprinting on a treadmill or benching 360lb, your body will use adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to fuel that action at the cellular level. The only problem is that intramuscular ATP stores are deplorably small. According to at least one study, your body’s ATP reserve would last under two seconds if it were the only source of ATP.4 Aerobic and anaerobic energy pathways then kick in, causing carbohydrate oxidation by utilizing muscle glycogen, blood glucose, and fatty acids to provide ATP.5 That process depletes what many recovery supplements hope to replenish.

But intense exercise has other effects beyond glycogen depletion, including dehydration and delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS). Hydration is the easier of the two to understand: Your body loses water and electrolytes as you perspire and breathe heavily during exercise. You need water and electrolytes to restore lost elements.

DOMS is a little trickier, especially the delayed portion of it. To illustrate, suppose you bang your shin on a corner of your coffee table. The pain would be immediate, but it would subside quickly, assuming the injury is no more serious than a mild bruise. The bruise would take a few hours to show up, and it would be sensitive to touch for a few days, but it wouldn’t be especially bothersome.

Conversely, you might feel a little weakness in your muscles immediately after a rigorous leg day, but you wouldn’t feel pain at first. A few hours later, you might notice some mild soreness, and you’d likely fall asleep without thinking about it. The next day, you might barely be able to walk for the pain and weakness in your legs.

That’s because, in addition to the acute cellular damage intentionally caused in our muscles through resistance training, there’s a lingering process of damage that continues long after we finish lifting. This is thanks to an increase in free radical activity and inflammation lasting up to 10 days post-exercise (in the absence of replenishing food or supplementation).6

So, in one rigorous session, you’ve depleted essential nutrients your muscles need to function, removed critical water and electrolytes your body relies on for nearly everything, and instigated a protracted process of inflammation and recurrent muscular damage that could last over a week.

Fortunately, research into various recovery aids shows that we have some say in how this process ultimately affects us.

The variety of workout recovery supplements on the market is staggering. It’s such a diverse field that we don’t have two of the same kind of supplement in this guide; each of them takes a unique approach to recovery. And we excluded more than a dozen other recovery supplement subcategories in the process, as the ones included here boast the best research support.

So, when we apply our newfound understanding of the impact of rigorous exercise to the selection process, we see that our top recommended supplements all support recovery the way different pillars might support an architectural structure. These are the pillars of recovery.

The pillars of recovery

Our understanding of the research leads us to designate five critical pillars of recovery. Addressing the pillars should provide you with the fastest, most comprehensive recovery from one workout to the next:

• Muscle glycogen resynthesis
• Muscle protein synthesis
• Inflammation
• Hydration
• Sleep

Let’s quickly examine each pillar and the ways that you can reinforce them:

Anyone who wants to increase their time in the gym without jeopardizing their physical capacity for exercise may want to consider taking a workout recovery supplement. That applies to casual fitness enthusiasts as much as it does to professional athletes.

However, you'll want to avoid workout recovery supplements if you aren't going to use all of the nutrients they provide. For example, mass gainers as a category might be marketed to convince people they can put on copious amounts of muscle without also increasing the intensity of their workouts. And if you aren’t working hard enough in the gym to turn those extra calories into muscle, you could end up adding unwanted fat.

The best thing you can do to find the right balance of exercise and nutrition is to talk to your doctor or a more specialized professional, like a trainer or nutritionist. Discuss your goals and current lifestyle to evaluate where you are now and how to get where you want to go.

Due to their variety, it’s impossible to say that workout recovery supplements are safe for everyone. Even the relatively safe options in our guide might not be completely safe for certain people. Let’s take a closer look at some of the ingredients in these products that could pose a danger:

Multiple systematic reviews of other ingredients in these supplements, like creatine, taurine, and beta-hydroxy beta-methylbutyrate, all reveal few adverse effects beyond some potential GI upset.18 19 20

Of course, there are always risks involved when introducing new supplements to your regimen, so it’s best to go over any such plans with your doctor first.

Best for building muscle and shortening recovery time

Naked Nutrition specializes in simplified supplements. Many of the company's products contain just a single ingredient, with labels getting a little more complex if you want to add flavor to the mix. For its Vegan Weight Gainer, Naked uses a base of three ingredients: organic tapioca maltodextrin, organic pea protein, and organic rice protein. Flavored options may add things like organic coconut sugar, cocoa powder, or natural flavors.

But how does a weight gainer work as a recovery supplement? Well, Naked Mass just happens to have a ratio of carbohydrates to protein that’s consistent with what we’ve seen to succeed in numerous research papers. And it provides enough carbs and protein per a four-scoop serving to accommodate various individuals and their goals, from cardio enthusiasts training for a half-marathon to gym buffs trying to add pounds of muscle.

Naked also makes a whey-based version of the same product, but we need to see more definitive research exploring whey protein’s role in muscle tissue inflammation. Many whey studies report decreases in the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) as a marker of anti-inflammatory potential.21 However, IL-6 also acts as a potentially pro-inflammatory myokine in muscle tissue, so its reduction after strenuous exercise may be more complicated than these studies have found.

Among Naked’s vegan options, you’ll find an unflavored powder and four flavor options:

• Chocolate
• Vanilla
• Chocolate Peanut Butter
• Double Chocolate

All of these options deliver the macronutrient balance and quantity needed in an effective recovery supplement, but we recommend you split up the serving size and consume around one scoop per hour for 2-4 hours immediately post-workout, depending on your goals.

The addition of things like coconut sugar, cacao, and peanut flour in flavored options creates slightly different macronutrient balances per flavor. Here’s how they break down per scoop:

Naked Mass Vegan Weight Gainer pricing

A one-time purchase of Naked Mass costs $65. Naked Nutrition provides subscription savings that start at 20% for your first order and drop to 10% after that. We’ve included a handy chart to show you how those costs compare, along with a per-scoop breakdown, as the four-scoop serving size is likely more than you’ll use for recovery:

Shipping from Naked Nutrition is only free on orders over $99, so you’ll pay an added $7 for shipping each order, with or without a subscription. This is comparable to all of the companies in this guide, most of which employ the same $99 free-shipping threshold.

Naked Nutrition doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee, and you only have 14 days to return an unopened product if you change your mind. By comparison, Transparent Labs, Micro Ingredients, and Swolverine have 30-day policies that also only apply to unopened items.

Our Naked Mass testing experience

Our testers consumed two scoops of Naked Mass in the Double Chocolate flavor, spread out over two hours immediately after workouts consisting of cycling and free-weight work. We found that the product was too thick to stir into a drink with a fork or mix with a standard shaker bottle. Instead, we used a high-powered blender and mixed the powder in either water or unsweetened almond milk.

We found the flavor to be robust, though not unpleasant. The texture was thick, which made it tough to get through the last of our second scoop toward the end of hour number two. Drinking twice as much over the course of four hours might take some commitment.

Interestingly, our testers did report a decrease in the intensity and duration of their typical DOMS, and energy levels recovered as quickly as usual, if not more so. One tester also tried this regimen after a late-night game of ice hockey and reported less physical and mental fatigue than usual the following morning. However, it’s worth noting that this tester also consumed Hydrate from Transparent Labs throughout the game.

Best for combating muscle soreness and best for hydration

Transparent Labs offers a wide variety of fitness supplements, including products that compete with the likes of Naked Nutrition. However, its two most potent products for workout recovery remain its Creatine HMB and Hydrate drink mixes.

These are the only two products in our guide to be Informed Choice certified. Informed Choice is a certification bestowed on products that meet rigorous testing criteria from LGC Assure, originally a manufacturer of scientific instruments that has expanded to recognize achievements in the supplement space. Certification requires manufacturing inspections, batch testing, and more to ensure the product for sale is of a high quality.

Let’s take a quick look at each offering in more detail.

Creatine HMB

This product combines two ingredients with a fair amount of research behind them to support both muscle protein synthesis and improvements in recovery time related to DOMS and inflammation. Creatine, in particular, has been through dozens of studies looking at its role in exercise performance and recovery.

Recent analysis of creatine’s effect on endurance has shown that it awarded no benefit to a trained population, but other research into its effect on muscle mass and body composition bore positive results.22 23 Many of these studies use creatine doses between 3g and 20g daily. Transparent Labs’ dose comes in at a slightly conservative 5g.

The product’s β-hydroxy β-methylbutyrate comes in a 1.5g dose, whereas a 3g dose is associated with recovery in a recent review.24 But combining that HMB with creatine might create an effective one-two punch.

Creatine HMB is available in 11 flavors and as an unflavored drink. The flavors are:

Hydrate

There’s a reason sports drinks exist and that you rarely see professional athletes drinking plain water on the sidelines. When you exercise, you lose water through sweating and breathing, but you also lose critical electrolytes, namely sodium and potassium.25 A delicate balance between these two minerals influences nearly every bodily process, as they regulate signaling pathways that convey messages of pain and control nutrient utilization.26

You could reach for a traditional sports drink, but the boost you feel from that has a lot to do with its sugar content and less to do with its electrolytes. A standard bottle of original Gatorade provides 270mg of sodium and only 75mg of potassium. In contrast, Transparent Labs Hydrate provides 500mg of sodium and 250mg of potassium. That’s a significant difference. Take Hydrate’s other ingredients into account, like taurine, coconut water, and SenActiv, and the advantages are pretty clear.

To be fair, the science supporting certain of these ingredients has less to do with recovery or hydration and more to do with athletic performance, as is the case with taurine, but utilizing Hydrate to both boost performance and restore fluid and electrolytes might be a smart move for a lot of athletes and gym goers.27

You can get Hydrate in five flavors:

• Raspberry Lemonade
• Tropical Punch
• Peach Mango
• Blue Raspberry
• Lemon Lime

Transparent Labs pricing

Hydrate is only available in a 40-serving tub, but Creatine HMB is available in 30- and 60-serving tubs. Both can be had as one-time purchases or on a subscription basis, which saves you 10%. Here’s how the pricing breaks down:

At as little as $0.90 per serving, Hydrate also is a much lower-cost alternative to traditional sports drinks.

Like many of its close competitors, Transparent Labs charges for shipping on orders under $100. Its shipping cost is a flat rate of $8, which is $1 more than Naked’s. And like most of its competitors, Transparent Labs only accepts returns on unopened merchandise, though it gives you 16 more days to ask for a return than Naked Nutrition does.

Our Transparent Labs testing experience

Our testers didn’t notice a big difference in performance from either Transparent Labs product, but they reported that a feeling of strength returned more quickly with Creatine HMB than without. And Hydrate had similar effects on thirst and recovery as other sports drinks we’ve tried.

One tester, who typically makes his own “homemade Gatorade” to drink during hockey games, replaced his usual drink with Hydrate for one late-night game. He reported feeling better hydrated and more energized the next day. However, as we noted in the Naked section above, this small portion of the experiment coincided with his drinking Naked’s Vegan Weight Gainer after the game, as well.

On the taste side, opinions were split, though we didn’t compare like flavors head-to-head. Instead we tried the Raspberry Lemonade Hydrate and the Tropical Punch Creatine HMB. Both also mixed relatively well into plain water, but Hydrate dissolved more completely, without any sediment.

Best for sleep

There’s little overstating the importance of sleep, not just for exercise recovery but for overall health. But sleep doesn’t always come easily, and deep sleep may be elusive even to those who get to bed early. While it’s a complicated issue to address, certain supplemental ingredients have been shown to help people get to sleep more reliably and attain deeper, more restorative sleep once there.

Melatonin is probably the best-known sleep aid, a naturally occurring hormone we can take exogenously to increase its levels in our blood and influence sleep patterns. A review of its safety illustrated a low risk for doses under 10mg, with a study into its efficacy recommending a range of 0.5-10mg.28 29 Swolverine’s 3mg dose should be enough for most people, especially when combined with its other ingredients.

Here’s a quick look at how some of the other ingredients in ZMT may perform:

While these ingredients form the heart of ZMT, there are 14 in total:

• Vitamin B6: 25mg
• Magnesium: 422mg
• Zinc citrate: 50mg
• L-Taurine: 1,000mg
• L-Theanine: 500mg
• L-Tryptophan: 500mg
• Ashwagandha root extract: 300mg
• GABA: 100mg
• Valerian root extract: 100mg
• Tongkat ali root extract: 50mg
• Rhodiola rosea root extract: 50mg
• DIM (3,3’-Diindolylmethane): 50mg
• BioPerine: 5mg
• Melatonin: 3mg

Swolverine ZMT pricing

One container of ZMT delivers 30 servings (180 total capsules) and is available as a one-time purchase or on a subscription basis:

You can also get ZMT as part of Swolverine’s Performance Series muscle-building stack, which includes a pre-workout, post-workout, and intra-workout supplement.

Our ZMT testing experience

No one on our team was thrilled at the prospect of swallowing six pills at a time, but the effects were noticeable. They can mostly be attributed to the melatonin dose, which our team felt improved their sleep. Improved sleep will have cascading positive effects throughout your days, so our small sample size was a little too minuscule to determine the effects of ZMT’s other ingredients.

Best for inflammation

A lot of the public attention on fish oil supplements and their constituent components (omega-3 fatty acids, specifically) focuses on their potential to treat things like cognitive impairment and cardiovascular disease.38 But they may also promise exercise enthusiasts and athletes a shortened recovery time, thanks mostly to anti-inflammatory properties.39

Omega-3s inhibit inflammation through several means, including the suppression of inflammatory cytokine production, activation of anti‐inflammatory transcription factor NR1C3, and other interlinked processes.40

In addition to their anti-inflammatory action, there’s some evidence that these fatty acids can suppress the activation of nociceptors — the receptors responsible for signaling our perception of pain. That means you’ll have less inflammation and less perceived soreness.38

Fish provide an abundance of omega-3 fatty acids, and fish oil supplements can concentrate that delivery even further. But not all such supplements are created equal. Many lack the potency to compare with clinical research that shows results. That’s why we chose Micro Ingredients Triple Strength Omega 3 Fish Oil from among an army of options to fill this spot.

Micro Ingredients Triple Strength provides you with 4.2g of fish oil per serving, of which 1,200mg are eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and 900mg are docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). That’s slightly below the 6g dose used in a prominent workout recovery study, but it’s above the average 3.5g dose used in successful rheumatoid arthritis studies, indicating that anti-inflammatory effects can kick in well before the 4.2g level seen in Micro Ingredients Triple Strength.40 41

Micro Ingredients Triple Strength Omega 3 pricing

Micro Ingredients sells its Triple Strength Fish Oil in two bag sizes: 120 softgels and 240 softgels. There are no subscription options on the company’s site, but you can also get it from Amazon if you want to subscribe. The only problem here is that the pricing gets rather confusing. The 120-count pack is less expensive when you buy from Micro Ingredients directly, but the 240-count bag is less expensive on Amazon.

Here’s how the prices for each size compare between the two platforms:

Clearly, subscribing to the 240-count bag through Amazon offers the best deal. Bear in mind that you can’t return these products through Amazon, but Micro Ingredients’ return policy isn’t much better. It’s far short of a guarantee, as the company will accept returns on unopened merchandise only.

Our Micro Ingredients testing experience

Central to our evaluation of fish oil products is taste. Some come in liquid forms that can be downright off-putting. Certain capsules and softgels aren’t much better, resulting in fishy burps and indigestion, which typically happens because the softgels start to break down in the acidic environment of the stomach.

Micro Ingredients puts an enteric coating on its softgels, which prevents them from breaking down in stomach acid and allows them to reach your small intestine instead. Through our testing, we can confirm that the coating prevented fishy burps.

On the workout recovery side, our testers did notice a slight reduction in perceived soreness after a workout. That’s anecdotal more than anything else, but it gives you some sense that Micro Ingredients may work for you.

Just as the catalog of supplements in our guide could all be used together, there are additional steps you can take — both physical and nutritional — to help increase your rate of recovery. Here, we take a look at some of the approaches most likely to be effective, each of which can be included in your regimen alongside any of the supplements above.

What about stretching?

Stretching feels good. It can increase your range of motion for ensuing workouts or athletic endeavors. But research is inconclusive as to its effect on recovery time and injury prevention.44 There’s too much contradictory evidence out there with too high a degree of subjectivity among study participants.

If you’re going to stretch, do so gently.