Simple Post Exertional Malaise Busters?

[Cort]

Could it be this simple? Baking soda and the right supplements?

• http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...a-sam-e-catalase-no-pem-after-exercise.34446/

I needed to report this to you all because it worked so well. Today I went to the gym. I actually did 30 minutes of exercise and lifted weights afterwords. Usually the weights at the end would kill me for about a week and I would be recovering from the cardio for at least 2 days. And, usually after exercise, I get a sore throat, headache, swollen lymph nodes, bad muscle and nerve pain, chills, and the cold sweats. When I go to bed the night I exercise, I wake up the next morning drenched in sweat. I have had very little to none of that recently.

I take a lot of supplements, but I find the ones I mentioned above work the best to reduce PEM after exercise. Most effective is two baking soda pills before exercise and lots of catalase immediately after. I take 600 mg of Catalase after the exercise.

Studies apparently bear this out

(see here and here) have shown that both bicarbonate and catalase (via its scavenging of hydrogen peroxide) improve muscle recovery after exercise.

Q10 and creatine monohydrate have been shown to improve muscle endurance, and increase muscle recovery after injury respectively (see hereand here), so that makes sense.

One study found creatine monohydrate reduced blood lactate, so would further augment sodium bicarbonate's lactate-reducing activities. The study detailed here found that by inhibiting the L-system transporter, BCAA suppressed the uptake of tryptophan, thereby alleviating fatigue..... This study found citrulline reduces lactate levels produced by exercise. This study and this study found the drug dichloroacetate lowers lactate levels produced by exercise.

The possible PEM busters are:

• Sodium bicarbonate ¼ teaspoon
• Creatine monohydrate 2 grams
• Citrulline 1000 mg
• Q10 400 mg
• Catalase 600 mg (taken after exercise)
• Branched chain amino acids 5 grams

I'm definitely going to try the baking soda and then move onto the others. Anyone try any of these?

 

[Cort]

In another post HIP says

" you just need to take Q10 an hour before the exerting activity that you are about to partake in, and this I find prevents a lot of the PEM that you would normally experience when the activity is over. I use a dose of 400 mg of Q10 for this anti-PEM purpose.

I get ME/CFS PEM mainly from mental exertion (rarely from physical exertion), and for me, 3 or 4 hours of socializing with friends causes a lot of PEM the following day or two. However, if I take 400 mg of Q10 just before I begin this 3 or 4 hours of social activity, my PEM is noticeably reduced. Note that Q10 is most cheaply purchased in bulk powder form."

 

[Cort]

Another person used creatine to really good effect with some proviso's

http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/creatine-supplementation-reduces-my-pem.29061/

• I want to say upfront: I’m NOT advocating anyone using Creatine. BE VERY CAREFUL. Creatine worries me somewhat (more detail below), but I think it’s an important piece of the puzzle because supplementing with Creatine is the only thing that has ever allowed me to do moderate exercise without PEM.
  
  LONG STORY SHORT
  
  Subjectively, I would say that supplementing with Creatine for 6 weeks let me do 50-60% more intense exercise without encountering PEM. I even was able to gain some muscle mass at one point. That said, there are side effects (more details below), so do your due diligence if you want to try it. Personally, I found the side effects too much to make Creatine an everyday thing.
  
  I think a more promising avenue is to use Creatine as a way to interrupt/fix a PEM episode. I’ve had some luck with that and I plan to do more experiments toward that end.
  
  SHORT STORY LONG
  
  I have a somewhat, but not totally debilitating case of CFS. My PEM crashes take 12 hours to begin and last 3-6 days. When not experiencing PEM, I am generally pretty functional in life due to a saintly and consistent diet and light exercise regimen, but even so, CFS is a continual struggle for me that has made it a struggle to have a normal social life, have relationships, and perform the job(s) I want to perform.
  
  For the past 23 years or so, I've had an exercise ceiling that, if I hit it, would trigger an awful PEM crash lasting 3-6 days. The ceiling has always been slightly variable (and thus difficult to work around), and graded exercise therapy (GET) helped me raise it a bit, but there was a limit I couldn’t transcend with GET. The best I ever got to was light jogs, light yoga, and light hikes, but no weight lifting or pushups under any circumstances.
  
  A couple years ago, I tried Creatine supplementation. I was on it for about 6 weeks. I can’t remember the dose I was on, but it was a normal recommended dose, probably 10 grams/day. I did not “load” (take high doses) to start with as some sites recommend. Very soon after starting, I felt like I had more energy.
  
  · I started increasing my time and elevation on the walkers at the gym. No PEM.
  · I cautiously increased the intensity and duration of elliptical exercises. No PEM.
  · I cautiously started doing some super light leg lifts, leg presses, and bench presses. No PEM.
  · I increased the intensity of the leg lifts and leg presses, and still no PEM.
  
  Eventually, I found a limit to where PEM started to happen, but unlike most of my other PEM episodes, it was not a “binary” situation where I crashed from “normal” to zero, but in this case I crashed from “normal” to maybe 5 or 6 and stayed generally functional.
  
  It was all very encouraging. I felt like Superman, able to actually push a weight in the gym without a brutal crash! That said, there were side effects.
  
  SIDE EFFECTS
  
  The side effects of Creatine for me are not insignificant, and they make me wary of it until I can understand what’s happening so I can understand the risks.
  
  · Stomach upset (this is a common Creatine symptom that everyone gets.. the rest aren’t)
  · Light headedness
  · A lot of difficulty sleeping
  
  · Something like anxiety, but it felt more like everything went faster.. my mind was racing, but combined with the difficulty sleeping, I spent most of my days “tired but wired”
  
  Due to the side effects, I don’t make it a regular practice to take Creatine. It’s really uncomfortable being so “tired but wired” all the time. For that reason, the experiments I’m engaging in now are to see if I can reverse the course of a PEM episode with “spot” doses of Creatine (rather than taking Creatine all the time). I have some results on that front, but I’ll post that separately.

You can probably reduce the stomach upset "by taking it on an empty stomach, away from meals, with a ¼ to ½ a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), to neutralize stomach acids."

 

[SandraHeretic]

I began a Mito Cocktail of supplements that included CoQ10 but not Creatinine a year ago. I found that I couldn't tolerate the standard dose for more than a couple days--extreme heartburn, reflux, nausea--but before i could manipulate the dosages or anything, I did a cardiac nuclear stress test that made me crash so hard, I am only now 11mo later returning to where I was before the test. And that was already a pretty bad place. I've been mostly bedridden, definitely housebound, since 2011.

I am beginning the Mito Cocktail and some endocrine balancing/lymph drainage supplements but oh.so.slowly. Normal dose is something like 3-4 pills of the cocktail, 3-4 times a day. I'm taking only one pill a day and rotating the supplements. It's been two weeks and I get each combo supplement 1-3 times a week. I've noticed that my energy envelope seems a bit bigger and my end-of-day crash is milder. It's too early still to say what long term effects will be.

I hadn't read about the baking soda. Makes sense, I suppose, since our bodies are so highly acidic and we manufacture lactic acid at something like 20x the rate of a healthy person. I will add that to my protocol.

 

[Abrin]

In another post HIP says

" you just need to take Q10 an hour before the exerting activity that you are about to partake in, and this I find prevents a lot of the PEM that you would normally experience when the activity is over. I use a dose of 400 mg of Q10 for this anti-PEM purpose.

I get ME/CFS PEM mainly from mental exertion (rarely from physical exertion), and for me, 3 or 4 hours of socializing with friends causes a lot of PEM the following day or two. However, if I take 400 mg of Q10 just before I begin this 3 or 4 hours of social activity, my PEM is noticeably reduced. Note that Q10 is most cheaply purchased in bulk powder form."

Thanks so much for the tip!

 

[Who Me?]

400 mgs coq10 would make me sick as a dog.

 

[Who Me?]

You can probably reduce the stomach upset "by taking it on an empty stomach, away from meals, with a ¼ to ½ a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), to neutralize stomach acids."

Alka Seltzer Gold is also good for this. And it helps with MCS. Drink either during or before an exposure and it really helps lessen or stop a reaction.

@Cort there are some people on PR who have used BCAA mary is one. She liked it a lot. It's been on my list of things but it can be expensive