Beyond simply 'recovering,' HMB actively optimizes your body's response to training.

It works through multiple pathways to enhance muscle adaptation and resilience:

• Minimizes Muscle Breakdown: HMB actively inhibits the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway, your body's primary mechanism for muscle protein breakdown. This significantly reduces muscle loss caused by intense training or periods of inactivity.
• Boosts Muscle Protein Synthesis: By activating the critical mTOR pathway, HMB signals your body to rapidly produce new muscle proteins, accelerating adaptation and growth.
• Fortifies Muscle Cells: HMB plays a vital role in strengthening and stabilizing muscle cell membranes, providing crucial protection against exercise-induced muscle damage during high-intensity and high-volume workouts.
• Accelerates Recovery: Through its dual action of reducing breakdown and boosting synthesis, HMB shortens recovery time and reduces post-workout soreness, getting you back to training faster.

While your body produces HMB naturally, the most effective and bioavailable form for supplementation is Calcium HMB. This form, used in Blonyx products, is quickly absorbed and utilized by your muscles.

Regardless of your sport or training style, HMB provides a unique advantage, enabling faster recovery, enhanced adaptation, and sustained performance.

Here’s how it supports different types of athletes:

• Strength and Power Athletes: For strength training, powerlifting, and bodybuilding, HMB is a game-changer. It not only amplifies progress in strength and lean muscle mass development but also significantly reduces post-lift soreness, making training feel easier and allowing for more consistent, high-quality sessions while lowering injury risk and preserving strength during downtime.
• Endurance Athletes: Runners, cyclists, rowers, and triathletes will experience accelerated adaptations like improved muscular efficiency and sustained endurance, especially during demanding training blocks and long-duration events. Expect less leg soreness, reduced injury risk, and faster recovery, allowing for harder and longer training sessions.
• Hybrid, Functional, and Team Sport Athletes: Athletes in functional fitness, CrossFit, HYROX, and team sports face varied and intense demands. HMB excels here by minimizing indicators of muscle damage (like creatine kinase levels) and vastly improving recovery capacity, keeping you ready to play harder, perform at a higher level for longer, and recover more quickly, especially in contact sports.
• Masters and Aging Athletes: For masters and aging athletes, HMB is crucial for maintaining muscle mass and strength, combating age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia). It significantly aids recovery, allowing you to train effectively and extend your athletic career into the long term.

Beyond athletic performance, emerging research also connects HMB to broader health benefits, including potential improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol levels. This makes HMB a rare supplement that supports both your athletic pursuits and overall well-being.

While your body naturally produces HMB (approximately 1g daily from the breakdown of leucine), small amounts can be found in certain foods (around 0.5g per day) like:

• Meat, fish, and dairy
• Alfalfa
• Grapefruit and other citrus fruits

However, for athletes to experience the profound performance benefits demonstrated in scientific studies—including enhanced strength, recovery, and endurance—a daily intake of 3g of HMB is consistently recommended.

This optimal dose is virtually impossible to achieve through diet alone, making high-quality HMB supplementation essential for athletes.

HMB supplementation can significantly reduce markers of muscle damage such as creatine kinase (CK) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) after intense training. By lowering muscle protein breakdown and supporting faster repair, HMB reduces delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) and improves recovery timelines. These effects are seen in both trained and untrained individuals, with the greatest benefits when HMB is taken daily for at least two weeks before a heavy training phase. This makes it especially valuable for athletes increasing training volume, starting a new program, or returning from a break.

The ISSN notes that ~3 g/day of HMB (about 38 mg/kg body weight) can increase muscle size, strength, and power output, with benefits linked to its dual role in reducing protein breakdown and stimulating protein synthesis. While trained athletes still benefit—particularly during high-intensity blocks—novice or recreational athletes may see greater improvements, as their adaptation potential is higher. The improvements are measurable across various performance metrics, from 1RM strength to explosive power, when combined with a structured resistance training program.

Sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss) can start as early as the fourth decade of life and accelerates with inactivity. The ISSN reports that HMB supplementation can preserve lean body mass, strength, and functional mobility in older adults, even without a structured training program. When combined with resistance training, the muscle-preserving effects are amplified. This makes HMB a simple, low-risk nutritional strategy for extending physical independence and reducing fall/injury risk later in life.

Bed rest, injury, or illness can rapidly lead to muscle atrophy and declines in strength. HMB has been shown to slow these losses by inhibiting proteolysis (muscle protein breakdown) and helping maintain mitochondrial function, which supports muscle energy metabolism. This protective effect means athletes can retain more strength and muscle mass during rehab phases, making their return to sport faster and easier.

With over 25 years of published research, HMB has been repeatedly shown to be safe when consumed in the standard 3 g/day dosage. Clinical trials in both young athletes and older adults report no adverse effects on kidney, liver, or cardiovascular health, even with extended use. Its safety profile, combined with its broad applicability across training levels and ages, makes HMB one of the most reliable supplements for supporting muscle health and performance.

HMB helps build muscle and strength when paired with resistance training. HMB helps protect and preserve muscles, making it easier to recover from training sessions, enabling more frequent training at a higher intensity and greater gains in muscle size and strength.

HMB has been shown to improve endurance performance by reducing muscle damage during prolonged or intense exercise like running or cycling where the muscles undergo stress. HMB works by supporting the muscle's ability to recover from this stress more efficiently, thus maintaining muscle function and delaying the onset of fatigue. This process allows athletes to sustain higher levels of activity for longer periods, enhancing overall endurance performance.

HMB helps reduce recovery times by protecting against exercise-induced muscle damage (EIMD). By decreasing markers of muscle damage such as creatine kinase and lactate dehydrogenase, HMB minimizes inflammation and oxidative stress in the muscles. This protection allows for faster recovery and less soreness after training, making it easier for athletes to maintain their training schedule without extended downtime.

HMB supplementation has been associated with reductions in blood pressure and improvements in cholesterol levels, contributing to overall cardiovascular health. These benefits are particularly significant as they suggest that HMB can help mitigate risk factors associated with heart disease, among other things. here.

HMB supplementation has been shown to provide greater bioavailability in its calcium salt form (HMB-Ca) compared to the free acid form (HMB-FA), meaning the body absorbs and utilizes it more efficiently. This advantage is especially clear when HMB-Ca is dissolved in water, which results in faster absorption without altering how the compound is processed or eliminated by the body.