Topical Magnesium for Muscle Recovery: Does It Work?

TLDR:

•  We know the oral magnesium can offer benefits for some athletes that suffer from cramps, poor sleep, and other ailments.

• Recently a trend of putting magnesium into creams has been popularized and touted as an effective way to reduce delayed onset muscle soreness and improve recovery.
• In our video we review a recent study in JSCR that outlines how improved recovery is unlikely for athletes when using these creams.

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Transcript:

Yo, Dr. Wells here, coming from my sauna. Yes, my sauna, because this is one of my favorite ways of recovering from exercise. I can sit in here and it helps with my muscle soreness, I feel better, I'm able to recover faster, and I'm also able to fight colds and things.

But I'm not in here to talk about saunas, I'm here to talk about a new research update. This one's on magnesium, specifically topical magnesium. So we know that magnesium has been in the research and obviously social media and very much in the forefronts of a lot of individuals' minds lately.

I talked to some of my patients, a lot of them are saying, oh, I take this magnesium, or what magnesium do you recommend? And obviously there's a lot of differences, and we're not going to talk about oral magnesium today because that's bound to so many different substrates and it has many different impacts. And there's good research around its utilization for many different reasons. Muscle complaints are also GI issues, right? But specifically for this research article published by Coates et al.

and the International Journal of Sports Nutrition, Exercise Metabolism, they focus on whether or not topical magnesium can help with muscle recovery. So we as PTs, and actually as scientists, athletic trainers, we like to sometimes work on people's muscles and use creams or ISTM, or we like to apply BioFreeze and things to help reduce pain. Well, these authors were trying to build off some research from 2012 in the journal Strength and Conditioning Research by Gulick that found no significant improvement with flexibility or endurance with magnesium.

Well, that's one factor. What about recovery, right? After exercise, magnesium applied topically, could it help? Well, I was immediately skeptical because going back to my chemistry days, I knew that magnesium is a very large molecule for it to permeate through the cellular membrane of the skin and down to the muscles and things. It just seemed very implausible, but these authors actually put it to the test.

35 subjects, what they did is they had a cream that they use, 5 milliliters of this cream. That dosage was at 0.5 milligrams per milliliter of solution. So about 2.5 milligrams applied to the thighs.

These individuals then, they did it. They applied the cream 10 minutes before exercise and then immediately following exercise. And the exercise they completed was a 40 minute downhill run.

So what these authors found was there was no significant difference in muscle soreness, no significant difference in pain, no significant difference in muscle damage or inflammation. So what does that mean? That means that my hunch is right. The magnesium didn't go through the skin, didn't go into the muscle, and most likely had very little impact on their overall recovery.

So if you're an athletic trainer, you're a PT strength coach, and you want to try to give your athletes that extra advantage, you think that magnesium, topical magnesium is going to help.