Our Best Peptides for Muscle Growth

 

 

Our Best Peptides for Muscle Growth. Like around 30% of U.S. adults, members of our team make a point of lifting weights at least 2-3 times per week. Strength training outcomes are incremental, so we keep an eye out for any products or therapies that can push us forward along the way.

Nowadays, peptides are one such therapy among gymgoers. While they’re increasingly popular and clinicians have been prescribing them for years, therapeutic peptides have only recently entered the mainstream health discussion, leaving many curious strength trainers wondering what options they have and which treatments deserve their consideration.

That’s why we’ve written this guide to the best peptides for muscle growth: to provide scientifically supported guidance to the peptide-curious. See our summary of recommendations for a rundown. Then read further to learn about the science behind our picks.

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.

As with every guide we write, we first acclimated ourselves to the subject through the available literature. Our cumulative research hours on peptides, for muscle growth and other applications, now number in the thousands and continue to grow.

We also benefited from relationships with medical providers who prescribe muscle growth peptides and whose jobs entail keeping pace with new findings. Through them, we gained an invaluable understanding of real-world experiences from a clinical perspective.

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.

We employed a four-part rubric to identify the best peptides for muscle growth. With each one we evaluated, we asked ourselves:

• Is it accessible? What must you do to get it as a safe, medical-grade product?
• Is it effective? Does it do what it’s supposed to do, according to science?
• Is it safe? Are the risks within reasonable limits?
• What about its ease of use? How do you prepare and administer it?

Here’s how our recommendations turned out in each criterion.

Accessibility

Advantage: Collagen peptides

Accessibility — the relative availability of a peptide in a medical-grade form — formed the foundation of our recommendations. The peptide space abounds in esoteric treatments with peculiar alphanumeric names, but many are hard to find in a pharmaceutical-grade form fit for human consumption. So we focused exclusively on those that you can get from an accredited compounding pharmacy or even over-the-counter.

Collagen peptides are the most accessible option because you don’t need a prescription to get a good product. Online marketplaces, brick-and-mortar stores, and direct-to-consumer websites sell reputable brands in the $10-$60 range. Our other recommendations pose higher barriers to entry, requiring a doctor’s consultation and sometimes lab tests on top of the cost of purchase to get started. Even if you went through one of the few telehealth platforms that offer pharmaceutical-grade muscle growth peptides, you’d still have to satisfy more criteria than you’d face with over-the-counter collagen.

We want to note that “accessibility” takes on a different connotation for those whose muscle growth regimens involve drug testing. Collagen peptides are the sole option on our list that isn’t prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency, so if you’re bulking up for competitive purposes, collagen is the only peptide you can take without risking disqualification.

Effectiveness

Advantage: CJC-1295 with ipamorelin

CJC-1295 and ipamorelin are both synthetic peptides that mimic naturally occurring chemicals. CJC-1295 is an analog of growth hormone-releasing hormone, but it’s modified with a longer half-life for sustained growth hormone release. Meanwhile, ipamorelin mimics ghrelin but operates selectively so that it targets only growth hormone release, having no impact on other hormones (e.g., cortisol) that similar peptides often affect. Together, they allow your body to produce more growth hormone more often, thus facilitating muscle growth and fat loss over an extended period. Because of their complementary time-release characteristics, they’re commonly used together. And because of their combined effect on plasma growth hormone levels, the combination outperforms our other recommendations in terms of directly promoting muscle growth.

But our other recommendations are effective in their own rights. In later sections, you’ll see how useful BPC-157 and TB4 can be for healing after a strenuous workout, how tesamorelin can target abdominal fat to help you achieve a healthier musculature, and how collagen peptides offer a viable alternative for strength trainers on the competitive circuit.

Safety

Advantage: Collagen peptides and tesamorelin

The one known side effect of collagen peptides is the rare case of anaphylaxis, which occurs only in people with an allergy that affects maybe 1-4% of the population. Otherwise, researchers have seen no significant adverse events even with 15g daily doses. That’s much more than you’re likely to consume with what’s ordinarily an over-the-counter product taken in moderate quantities.

But considering that collagen peptides are most often “retail-strength” supplements, we recognize that it wouldn’t be apples-to-apples comparing them to our other recommendations, which are medical-grade treatments.

Tesamorelin, then, is our recommendation for the safest prescription muscle growth peptide. Being a prescription-only treatment already primes it for safety since the prescribing physician will consider your medical history and may subject you to biomarker testing before writing you the script. But apart from that, tesamorelin also has a lower risk profile than BPC-157 and CJC-1295, which two peptides pose a danger of immunogenicity — causing your body to mount an immune response as though they were pathogens.

With tesamorelin, there’s no reported risk of immunogenicity. Long-term administration appears to be “generally well tolerated” among research subjects, according to a 2008 study as well as one from 2010. To be clear, tesamorelin isn’t free of adverse events, and it isn’t appropriate for everyone, but its risks are few and mild compared to many prescription treatments. We cover its side effects in its dedicated section later in the guide.

Ease of use

Advantage: Collagen peptides

If you had the option, you’d probably choose not to stick yourself with a needle. That’s why we’ve distinguished collagen peptides as the easiest-to-use muscle growth peptide: they’re usually administered via tablet, capsule, or powdered drink mix, whereas our other recommendations are almost always injected.

Taken by mouth, collagen peptides are more bioavailable than most other peptides because of their small molecular size. Studies have shown that oral collagen can be absorbed at rates as high as 63%, compared to 1-2% for other oral peptides. Injectable collagen peptides are available, too, but surveys show a large proportion of the population would prefer a less invasive method.

BPC-157 is another peptide that boasts good oral bioavailability, but the same can’t be said about its frequent companion, TB4. Because we recommend BPC-157 and TB4 in combination, and because BPC-157 can be hard to find in oral form, BPC alone failed to earn our designation as the easiest-to-use peptide.