I realize this sounds overcomplicated, but it’s a great way of getting a big-picture view of an entire body of research: (Photo: International Journal of Sport Nutrition & Exercise Metabolism)Īgain, this was the data for strength recovery, which had the most positive effect of all outcome variables in the meta-analysis. The studies at the top focus on “metabolic” exercise like endurance cycling the studies at the bottom focus on “mechanical” exercise like lifting heavy weights. The wider the horizontal line, the bigger the error bar. Lines or diamonds to the left of the vertical line indicate that cherry juice helped strength recovery after damaging exercise lines or diamonds to the right indicate the opposite. This is called a “forest plot,” with each individual study outcome represented by a horizontal line, and the overall average shown by a diamond. It doesn’t fill me with a ton of confidence. But if you wade into the results of the individual studies, you find a lot of results clustering around zero and a few outliers-generally the ones with the biggest error bars-skewing strongly positive. They found evidence of a “small beneficial effect” on muscle soreness, a “moderate beneficial effect” on recovery of muscle strength, and mixed effects on blood markers of muscle damage and inflammation. Hill’s team combined the results of 14 studies with a total of 303 subjects, looking at recovery from strenuous exercise. The best place to start is a meta-analysis published last year in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition & Exercise Metabolism by Jessica Hill of St. Interestingly, the gist of some of these recent papers is less “Does cherry juice work?” and more “We know cherry juice works, so why aren’t more athletes using it?” With that in mind, I’m going to try to sum up the current state of research, then offer a few thoughts about why athletes might-and perhaps should-remain hesitant. And more generally, my approach to supplement research is to assume that (a) nothing works, and (b) if something actually does work in any meaningful way, you won’t have to go digging for evidence because everybody will be talking about it.Ĭherry juice still hasn’t reached the “everyone is talking about it” stage, at least in my circles, but the studies keep on coming, including a couple of recent reviews and meta-analyses. The studies keep showing up in my dragnet of potentially interesting research, suggesting that tart cherries accelerate post-exercise recovery, funded more often than not by the Cherry Marketing Institute. I’ve been ignoring cherry juice for well over a decade now.
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