Collagen for Runners: Does It Actually Work? What the New Science Says.
Updated: Oct 28
Written by Andy Hood · Ultra runner, cancer survivor and Runna ambassador
Updated October 2026 | Originally published July 2026
Disclosure: I bought the U Perform collagen with my own money and have no commercial relationship with them
Four-month update: I’m still taking it. Read my collagen for runners verdict →
Quick answer: does collagen work for runners?
Modestly, for some things. Hydrolysed collagen is absorbed, but it doesn’t go straight to your knee. Instead, it appears to nudge your body into making more of its own. The best evidence is for easing activity-related joint pain, using 5g a day of a tested ingredient such as FORTIGEL for 12 weeks. For tendons, studies use 15 to 30g with vitamin C about an hour before training, but that evidence is still early. Collagen won’t build muscle, and there’s little evidence it speeds recovery.
My experience: after four months at 5g a day, my knees, hips and ankles feel more fluid when I run, although I changed my training at the same time. Here’s the full four-month update.
Earlier this year I raised my eyebrows at my wife. Now I’m standing in the kitchen at stupid o’clock, stirring collagen into a small glass of fresh orange juice and downing it with a smile. This is the story of how that happened, what the science actually says, and whether collagen for runners is worth the money or just clever marketing.
Just please, whatever you do, don’t tell my wife.
Key takeaways
Your collagen is declining, and it's not in your head. Skin studies, where the decline has been measured best, put the loss at roughly 1% a year from your 20s onwards. Tendon and cartilage are harder to measure, but they age too, and for runners that can show up as tighter tendons and achier joints.
"The body can't absorb it" is out of date. Hydrolysed collagen peptides are absorbed into the bloodstream. What you can't do is aim a swallowed molecule at a specific tendon. Instead, the peptides act as building blocks and, in lab studies at least, as a signal that nudges collagen-making cells into action.
Timing and dose are the bits the adverts skip. For the tendon-building effect, the studies use 15 to 30g of collagen with around 50mg of vitamin C, taken about an hour before a run or gym session. The exercise is the trigger. The collagen is there to support it, not replace it.
It's an adjunct, not a magic bullet. The evidence is best for easing activity-related joint pain and, at higher doses alongside heavy strength training, for building slightly thicker tendons. It's a poor choice for building muscle, the evidence that it speeds recovery is thin, and the skin claims are contested.
I'm a runner, not a doctor. This is my experience and the published research, not medical advice. Persistent pain belongs in front of a physio or GP, not a blog article.
Collagen for runners at a glance
The question | The answer |
Does the body absorb collagen? | Yes, hydrolysed peptides reach the blood within about an hour. But you can't direct them to a specific body part |
So how does it work? | Probably two ways: as raw building blocks, and (shown so far mainly in lab studies) as a signal that nudges your own cells to make more collagen |
When should a runner take it? | For the tendon protocol, about an hour before a run or gym session, with around 50mg of vitamin C. For joint-comfort peptides, any time, daily |
How much? | 15 to 30g of collagen peptides or gelatin in the tendon studies. 5g a day of FORTIGEL in the joint-pain trials. 40mg a day of UC-II |
What's it actually good for? | Easing activity-related joint pain. Modest gains in tendon thickness alongside heavy strength training. Skin benefits are contested |
What won't it do? | Replace whey for building muscle, fix an injury on its own or, on current evidence, speed up recovery |
How long until I notice? | Give it 8 to 12 weeks. The joint-pain trials ran for 12 |
Which type? | Most powders, including the cartilage-targeted FORTIGEL, are made from Type I collagen. UC-II is the true Type II product. Buy on the studied ingredient and dose, not the Roman numeral |
In this Article
Why I'm writing this (blame my wife)
Six months ago my wife announced she'd ordered some collagen and was starting to take it daily. This was met with a raised eyebrow and a slightly smug little lecture from yours truly, because I'd recently listened to a BBC Sounds podcast on this exact topic, first broadcast back in 2022.
Greg Foot covered collagen on Sliced Bread, the show that puts so-called wonder products under the microscope, and he did it properly, with a panel of experts. The verdict, in the show's own words, was marketing BS. The headline reason was the one everybody repeats: the body doesn't absorb the collagen you take. You eat a protein, your gut breaks it into its component parts, and the idea that swallowing collagen magically tops up the collagen in your skin or your knees is, well, wishful thinking dressed up in nice packaging.
So I felt fairly pleased with myself. Case closed. Save your money.
Which makes it a little surprising that I now find myself with a bag of collagen, adding it to a little water and a dash of fresh OJ, and drinking it every day. What on earth happened?
Two things happened, almost identical in effect and completely unrelated.
The first was my wife. She's a runner too, and she's long suffered with painful knees. A few months into taking collagen daily, she started telling me her knees felt a lot better. Not cured, not miraculous, but noticeably better. She also reckoned her skin, hair and nails were stronger and brighter. Now, I'm a sceptic by nature, and the placebo effect is real and powerful. But my wife is not one for supplement fads, and she was quietly, consistently convinced.
The second was, of all things, another episode of Sliced Bread. I was driving along when Greg revisited the subject in [Collagen (2026 update)], the opener of the spring 2026 series, with dermatologist Dr Emma Wedgeworth and Professor Jayne Tierney of University College London.
And that update genuinely piqued my interest, because it wasn't the same story as before.
I'm in my 50s. As you'll see in a moment, my collagen production is on the slide, exactly as the biology predicts. Could that be affecting my running? Quite possibly. As an ultra and endurance runner I ask an enormous amount of my body, and after cancer in 2021 and emergency surgery this year, I ask even more of it than I used to. Any legitimate help I can give it is welcome.
Here's the part that got my attention. Greg and his experts explained that it does still seem to be true that your body isn't taking the collagen from your pills, gummies or drinks and slotting it straight into your tendons. But, and this is the bit that made me turn the radio up, the trials are increasingly showing that the collagen you take gives your body a kick to increase its own production.
That's a meaningfully different claim. And it's enough of a shift that I've stopped being smug and started paying attention.
So here I am, a month in, writing this for anyone else who's wondering whether to bother. I'll update you again after three months to tell you honestly whether I've noticed anything. And I'd be grateful if this stayed between us, because if my wife finds out I've quietly started taking the thing I mocked her for, the ridicule will be more than I can bear.
What collagen actually is, and what it does for a runner
Let's do the biology quickly and painlessly, because you can't judge the supplement without understanding the substance.
Collagen is the most abundant protein in your body, roughly a third of your total protein. It's the structural scaffolding of your skin, your bones, your tendons, your ligaments and your cartilage. If your muscles are the engine, collagen is a lot of the chassis.
It's built mostly from three amino acids, glycine, proline and hydroxyproline, and it's manufactured by cells called fibroblasts. Think of them as little collagen factories dotted throughout your connective tissue. In your tendons specifically, the equivalent cells are called tenocytes, but the principle is the same: cells that build and maintain the scaffolding.
Crucially, those factories need more than just raw material. They need tools, and the most important tool is vitamin C. This isn't a marketing add-on to justify a higher price. Vitamin C is genuinely essential for building collagen. The clue is in scurvy, the old sailors' disease caused by vitamin C deficiency. At its core, scurvy is a collagen-building failure: joints deteriorate, tendons weaken, connective tissue falls apart. That's how central vitamin C is to the whole process. Two other minerals, copper and zinc, play supporting roles in cross-linking and keeping the factories running.
Keep that factory metaphor in your head, because it's the key to understanding why swallowing collagen isn't as daft as I first thought, and also why it's not as simple as the labels suggest. A factory needs raw materials, working tools, and a reason to ramp up production. Hold that thought for section five.
When your collagen starts to decline, and why your 50s matter
Here's the uncomfortable bit for those of us with a few decades on the clock.
The best-measured evidence comes from skin, because skin is easy to sample.
Those studies show collagen content peaking in your 20s and then falling by roughly 1% a year for the rest of adult life. It's cumulative, and at first it's completely invisible.
Run that forward and the sums look like this:
By your mid-30s, you're around 10% down on your peak.
By your mid-40s, around 20%. This is roughly where people start to notice: skin takes longer to snap back and, more relevantly for us, knees feel a bit crunchier after a hard session.
By your mid-50s, somewhere between a quarter and a third.
One caveat. That 1% figure is a skin measurement. Nobody has taken yearly samples from runners' Achilles tendons, for obvious reasons, so there's no equivalent number for tendon or cartilage. The working assumption is that they follow the same downward trend, even if the exact rate is unknown.
Two things are thought to be happening at once, which is why it's sometimes called a double hit. The cells that make collagen become fewer and less active, so less comes in. At the same time, the enzymes that break collagen down become more active, so more goes out. Less in, more out, year after year.
There's a hormonal driver too. For women, oestrogen supports collagen production, which is why loss accelerates sharply around menopause, with some research suggesting up to 30% of skin collagen can be lost in the first five years. For us blokes, the decline is more of a steady slide, but it's just as real.
I've written before about the seven ways a man's body changes when he runs into his 50s, covering testosterone, muscle loss, bone density and slower recovery. Collagen decline sits neatly alongside all of them. It's part of the same story: the raw materials and the machinery of your connective tissue quietly becoming less efficient. And just like those other changes, the interesting question isn't whether it's happening, but how much you can influence it.
What less collagen means when you run
This is where it stops being a skincare conversation and becomes a running one.
Your tendons feel tighter and take longer to warm up. Tendon is predominantly Type I collagen, and it's slow to renew itself. If you've read my stuff before, you'll know my Achilles greet me every morning as though they've run a hundred miles in the night without telling me. Age-related change in the tissue is likely part of that.
Recovery slows down. Tendon has a notoriously poor blood supply at the best of times, and it turns over slowly, which is why tendon injuries are so frustratingly stubborn and can drag on for a year or more. Less efficient collagen synthesis doesn't help the situation.
Your joints feel it. Cartilage, the shock absorber in your knees and hips, is mostly Type II collagen. Thinner, more brittle cartilage is part of the crunchy-knee experience that turns up with age and mileage. This is exactly the area my wife noticed a change in.
Your bones rely on it too. Bone isn't just a lump of mineral. It's a collagen scaffold reinforced with calcium, which is why the collagen story links straight back to bone density, a genuine issue for runners as we age.
And your injury margin shrinks. More than half of all sports injuries are soft-tissue problems: sprains, strains, and tendon and ligament trouble. Anything that legitimately improves collagen synthesis and tendon stiffness could, in theory, widen the gap between the load you put through a tendon and the load it can handle. For an ultra runner who spends the year hammering that margin, that's an appealing idea.
Now, the caveat, because I'm not in the business of scaring you into buying powder. Most running aches are multi-factorial. Training load, footwear, strength work, sleep and fuelling all feed in. Collagen is one possible lever, not the lever. Anyone telling you a supplement is the answer to your knee pain is selling something.
"But the body doesn't absorb it" — the myth, the update, and what changed my mind
Right. This is the heart of it, and it's where I have to eat a little humble pie.
The claim that convinced me collagen was nonsense goes like this: "You can't absorb collagen, so eating it does nothing. Your gut just digests it like any other protein." It sounds authoritative, it's repeated everywhere, and it has a grain of truth in it.
Here's the more complete picture, which is the bit the first version of the story missed.
Native, intact collagen really is hard to absorb. It's a long, tightly wound triple helix, and your gut can't take it on board whole. So far, so sceptical.
But supplements don't use intact collagen. They use hydrolysed collagen, also called collagen peptides or collagen hydrolysate. The protein has been broken down using heat, water and enzymes into much smaller fragments. And those fragments are absorbed. Small peptides, including distinctive ones containing hydroxyproline, show up in the bloodstream within about an hour of taking them, reaching peak levels well above baseline within a couple of hours. This is measured, not marketed.
So what do they do once they're in there? Two things, and the second is the interesting one.
They act as building blocks. They raise the pool of glycine, proline and hydroxyproline that your body draws on to make new collagen. More raw material for the factories.
They may act as a signal. And this is the part Greg's experts were getting at. In lab studies, some of those peptides behave like little messengers that prompt collagen-making cells to up their game. Whether that happens to a meaningful degree inside a living runner's tendon is still being worked out.
So here's the reconciliation, and it's exactly what the podcast was describing. It's not that nothing gets absorbed. It's that you can't post a swallowed collagen molecule straight to your left Achilles and have it slot neatly into place. What actually happens is closer to giving your body a kick: the peptides get in, they supply materials, and they signal your own cells to build more. The "it doesn't get absorbed" shorthand was really trying to say "it doesn't go where you point it", which is true. But the newer research on the signalling effect is what turns this from a flat "no" into a cautious "actually, there might be something here."
That's what changed my mind. Not the marketing, not the influencers, and definitely not wanting to admit my wife was onto something. It was the mechanism finally making sense.
The bit that matters most for runners: timing and loading
If you take one thing from this article, take this, because it's the detail that separates a considered experiment from expensive wee.
The landmark study comes from the lab of Dr Keith Baar at the University of California, Davis, published in 2017. It was small: eight healthy men. They took 5g or 15g of vitamin C-enriched gelatin, or a placebo, an hour before six minutes of skipping. The researchers then measured a blood marker of collagen synthesis.
The result was striking. With 15g of gelatin on board, the marker was double what it was with the placebo. Blood taken from the volunteers after the gelatin also prompted lab-grown ligaments to lay down more collagen.
Three things have come out of that study and the work that followed:
The exercise is the trigger. Loading is what tells your body to build, and the collagen is support for that process, not a substitute for it.
Timing: before, not after. In these studies the collagen goes in about an hour before the session, so its amino acids are peaking in the blood as you load the tissue.
Dose matters more than I first wrote. Two 2024 studies led from Liverpool John Moores University gave hydrolysed collagen before hard resistance exercise. In young men, 30g raised the marker more than 15g, and 15g was no better than nothing. In middle-aged men, 15g did help, and 30g helped more.
Now two caveats, because I promised you balance and not sales copy.
First, that blood marker is better known as a measure of bone formation, so "it's your tendons" is an inference rather than a measurement.
Second, when researchers at Maastricht University looked at tissue directly, taking muscle samples after exercise, collagen did not increase the rate at which connective tissue protein was built, even at 30g. That was connective tissue within muscle, not tendon. A trial designed to measure tendon directly, in people having knee ligament surgery, has been registered, but I couldn't find published results at the time of writing.
So where does that leave the advice? Collagen plus vitamin C, about an hour before you run or lift, at 15g or more, is the protocol with the best support. It's a reasonable bet, not a proven one.
The different types of collagen, and which one you actually want
Walk into a health shop and you'll be hit with Roman numerals. Here's what you need to know.
In your body:
Type I is the big one. It's about 90% of the collagen in your body and it dominates skin, bone, tendons and ligaments.
Type II is the main collagen in cartilage.
Type III turns up alongside Type I in skin and other connective tissue.
In the tub, it's less tidy. The number on the label tells you what the collagen was made from, not where it ends up. What matters more is which ingredient was tested, at what dose, and for what.
Standard hydrolysed collagen peptides (Type I, or I and III, usually bovine or marine) are what the tendon research uses, taken in grams: 15 to 30g, with vitamin C, before loading.
FORTIGEL (the one in my tub) I originally described as a Type II peptide. It isn't. It's a hydrolysed collagen made from Type I collagen, bovine in my case, with a specific peptide profile that its manufacturer, Gelita, says is optimised to stimulate cartilage cells. "Type II optimised" on the label means aimed at the Type II collagen in your cartilage, not made of it. It's taken at 5g a day, the dose used in its joint-pain trials.
Undenatured Type II collagen (UC-II) is different again. This one is Type II, from chicken breastbone cartilage. It isn't hydrolysed, it's taken in milligrams (40mg a day), and it's thought to work through the immune system rather than as building material.
The practical point: don't shop by Roman numeral. Work out your goal, then look for the ingredient and dose that was studied for it.
And a quick word on source, because it confuses people. Marine collagen, from fish skin and scales, is mostly Type I and gets marketed as more absorbable. Bovine hide gives you Types I and III. Type II comes from cartilage, usually chicken. A small 2024 study that compared fish, pork and beef collagen head to head found they were absorbed about equally well, so don't pay a premium for marine on that basis alone.
Powders, pills, gels and bone broth: the forms explained
Same active ingredient, very different practicality.
Hydrolysed powder is the workhorse. It dissolves in water, juice, coffee or a smoothie, and it makes hitting a proper 15g dose easy. It's what most research uses.
Capsules and tablets are convenient but usually only pack a gram or two per serving, so reaching a research dose means swallowing a fistful. Fine for topping up, impractical as your main source.
Liquid shots and gels are pre-mixed and easy on the go. Check the actual gram dose per sachet, and watch for added sugar.
Gelatin is the cooked form, the stuff that sets a jelly or a cooled bone broth. It's literally what Baar's original study used, but it has to be dissolved in something warm and it sets when cold, so it's fiddlier than peptides that stay dissolved.
Bone broth and gelatinous cuts like oxtail are the wholefood route. Real collagen, but the dose is unreliable. When Australian sports nutrition researchers analysed bone broths in 2019, the key amino acids came in below a 20g dose of collagen supplement and varied widely from one broth to the next, with shop-bought versions lower than home-made.
Worth knowing: a modern lean-meat diet, all chicken breast and no skin, bone or offal, gives you almost no dietary collagen. Our ancestors ate the whole animal. Most of us don't, which is part of why the supplements exist at all.
If you're following the tendon protocol, pair your collagen with vitamin C. A dash of orange juice won't do it, though. Orange juice carries roughly 40 to 60mg per 100ml, so you need a small glass, 100 to 150ml, to reach the 50mg the research uses.
How to take collagen as a runner: the practical protocol
Pulling the evidence together, here's the best-supported approach for the tendon and connective-tissue effects.
15g of hydrolysed collagen peptides or gelatin, as a minimum. A 2024 analysis of 19 trials concluded that 15g a day for at least 8 weeks was the pattern behind the benefits it found, and the dose studies suggest 30g does more.
Plus around 50mg of vitamin C. A small glass of orange juice, 100 to 150ml, covers it.
About an hour before your run or gym session, or before targeted rehab exercises if you're rehabbing something specific.
Alongside proper loading. The tendon gains in the trials came with resistance training, and a 2026 review found them where the loads were heavy, at 70% of maximum or more.
Consistently, for 8 to 12 weeks before you judge it. Tendon remodelling is slow.
If your goal is joint comfort, the picture is different. FORTIGEL has been tested at 5g a day for 12 weeks, and UC-II at 40mg a day. For bone, one trial gave postmenopausal women 5g a day of a specific peptide for 12 months. For all of these the pre-exercise timing is beside the point. Daily consistency is the whole game, so pick a time you'll stick to and give it three months.
What the evidence does and doesn't show
You know by now that I won't hand you a one-sided sales pitch. So here's where the research is solid and where it isn't.
Reasonably solid:
Hydrolysed collagen peptides are absorbed and do raise blood levels of collagen's amino acids. Not in doubt.
Exercise itself increases collagen synthesis, and in small studies 15 to 30g of collagen with vitamin C beforehand pushes a blood marker of it higher.
For activity-related knee pain, two placebo-controlled trials of 5g of FORTIGEL a day for 12 weeks, in 139 and 180 young active adults, found a modestly bigger drop in pain than placebo. The placebo groups improved a fair bit too.
For osteoarthritis pain and stiffness, the largest review so far, from Anglia Ruskin University in 2026 and covering 113 trials, found consistent benefit.
Promising but uncertain:
Tendon thickness. A 2024 meta-analysis found collagen plus training increased tendon cross-sectional area, but rated the certainty of that evidence as very low and found no effect on tendon stiffness. A 2026 review found stiffness gains only in the two studies using 15 to 30g a day.
Achilles tendinopathy. One small pilot study found collagen alongside calf-strengthening work helped. Its own authors said it needs repeating in a larger trial.
Injured tendons and ligaments generally. A review published in August 2026 concluded the research here is still very thin.
Weak, contested or negative:
Recovery and soreness. The Anglia Ruskin review found no meaningful benefit for post-exercise muscle recovery or soreness.
Direct tissue building. The Maastricht studies found collagen didn't speed up the building of connective tissue in muscle after exercise.
Muscle. Collagen is an incomplete protein and loses to whey for muscle growth. If muscle is your goal, this isn't your tool.
Skin. The Anglia Ruskin review found improvements in elasticity and hydration. A 2025 analysis found those benefits disappeared when you looked only at high-quality trials, or only at trials not funded by industry. Call it contested.
A word on who pays. A lot of collagen research is funded or supplied by companies that sell it. The larger FORTIGEL trial used product provided by its manufacturer, and its authors said the results apply only to that specific ingredient. Funding doesn't make a result wrong, but that skin analysis is a reminder to keep it in mind.
On safety, collagen is a food-derived protein and appears to be well tolerated in trials, with the occasional mild stomach upset the main complaint. It comes from cattle, pigs, fish or chicken, so it's not for vegetarians, and marine versions are out if you have a fish allergy. If you've got a persistent injury or an underlying health condition, talk to a professional rather than treating a supplement as a fix.
What I'm taking, and why
For the sake of transparency, I'm taking U Perform Active Sport Collagen Powder, an unflavoured powder mixed into a small glass of fresh orange juice. I purchased the product myself to ensure a balanced review.
I landed on U Perform for a specific reason that matters more to me than it might to a casual user: their collagen is Informed Sport batch-tested.
For anyone competing, or anyone like me who takes what goes into their body seriously, that certification means every batch is screened for banned substances. As someone who's had enough medical adventures for one lifetime, that assurance is worth a lot.
Now, a clarification, because this product is not the pre-run tendon protocol I described above, and I'd rather be plain about that than gloss over it.
Active Sport Collagen Powder is a single ingredient: FORTIGEL, a hydrolysed collagen of bovine origin. It's made from Type I collagen, and the "Type II optimised" on the label refers to its target, the Type II collagen in your cartilage. The evidence for it is about activity-related joint discomfort: two trials in young, active adults with knee pain found a modest improvement over placebo after 12 weeks at 5g a day. In other words, it's aimed at exactly the thing my wife noticed in her knees, which is presumably no coincidence and a large part of why I ended up with this one.
What that means for my own experiment:
I'm testing joint comfort, not tendon building. At 5g a day I'm well short of the 15 to 30g used in the tendon studies, so I can't expect, or claim, a tendon effect from this tub.
Consistency matters more than the clock. I take mine before a run out of habit, but what the trials tested for this ingredient was simply taking it every day.
The orange juice is optional here. The powder is pure FORTIGEL with no added vitamin C, and the larger knee trial mixed it with plain water. I take mine in juice because it goes down better. If you're following the tendon protocol instead, the vitamin C is part of the recipe, and a dash won't cover it.
On cost: at the time of writing it's £24.95 for a 150g pouch, which is 30 days at 5g, or about 83p a day at full price. I purchased from Amazon.
I'm one month in as I write this. I'm not going to insult you by claiming a dramatic transformation after four weeks, because the trials behind this ingredient ran for twelve, and you'd rightly stop trusting me. What I can tell you is that it's easy to take, it goes down pleasantly, and I've folded it into my daily routine. Whether I notice anything meaningful is exactly what the three-month update is for, and I'll report back honestly, good or bad.
If you want to match your own product to the research, first work out which goal you're buying for. For tendons, that's 15g or more of collagen peptides with vitamin C before loading. For joint comfort, it's an ingredient with its own trials behind it, such as FORTIGEL at 5g or UC-II at 40mg. Then check the label states the ingredient, the dose per serving and the source, and, if you compete, look for third-party testing like Informed Sport.
FAQs: collagen for runners
Does the body actually absorb collagen?
Yes. Hydrolysed collagen peptides break down into small fragments that reach the bloodstream within about an hour. What you can't do is aim a swallowed molecule at a specific tendon. Instead the peptides supply raw materials and, in lab studies, appear to signal collagen-making cells to build more.
Is collagen just marketing BS?
It's a fair question, and a few years ago the honest answer leaned towards yes. The updated science is more nuanced. There's decent evidence for easing joint pain, early and uncertain evidence for tendons when it's paired with heavy training, and not much for recovery. The marketing still runs well ahead of all of it.
When should a runner take collagen?
It depends what you're taking it for. For the tendon protocol, about an hour before a run or gym session, with around 50mg of vitamin C. For joint-comfort products like FORTIGEL or UC-II, any time of day, as long as it's every day.
How much collagen should I take?
It depends on the product and the goal. The tendon studies use 15 to 30g of collagen peptides or gelatin, and the higher end did more in the dose studies. FORTIGEL's joint-pain trials used 5g a day. UC-II is taken at 40mg. Match the dose to the research behind your product.
Marine or bovine collagen, which is better for runners?
There's little in it. Both are mostly Type I, and a small 2024 head-to-head study found fish, pork and beef collagen were absorbed about equally well. Pick on ingredient, dose and price, not the source hype.
Do I really need the vitamin C with collagen?
Vitamin C is essential for building collagen, and the tendon studies pair the two, using around 50mg. Nobody has yet tested collagen with vitamin C against collagen alone in a training study, so think of it as copying the protocol rather than a proven requirement. If you use orange juice, you need a small glass, not a dash.
How long before I notice anything?
Give it 8 to 12 weeks. The joint-pain trials ran for 12, and tendon remodelling is slow. Anyone promising results in days is overselling.
Can I just drink bone broth instead?
In theory. In practice the collagen content of bone broth is lower than a supplement dose and varies a lot from one broth to the next, so you can't rely on it.
Will collagen build muscle?
Not well. It's an incomplete protein and loses to whey for muscle growth. It's a connective-tissue play, not a muscle one.
Can collagen help my runner's knee or Achilles?
For activity-related knee pain, there are two decent trials showing a modest benefit from 5g of FORTIGEL a day. For Achilles tendinopathy, the evidence is one small pilot study in which collagen was added to calf-strengthening work. Either way it's an adjunct to good rehab, not a replacement for it. Persistent pain should be seen by a physio.
The bottom line
I started this journey as a smug sceptic armed with a podcast, ready to save everyone their money. I'm ending it, for now, as a cautious convert who's interested in where the evidence goes next.
Here's where I've landed. The old dismissal, that collagen is pointless because you can't absorb it, was based on an incomplete picture. The peptides do get in. There's decent evidence they can ease activity-related joint pain, and early, uncertain evidence that at higher doses, taken before heavy loading, they help tendons adapt. It's not a miracle, the marketing oversells it, and it works best as one small, sensible part of a bigger picture that still runs on training, strength work, sleep and decent food. But for a runner in his 50s who asks a great deal of his body, an evidence-informed nudge to the knees at about 83p a day is worth a proper try.
So I'm giving it three months, taking it every day, and I'll come back and tell you the truth about whether it made a blind bit of difference.
If you've been going back and forth on this yourself, I hope this has helped you make an informed decision rather than an influencer-led one. And will I still be taking it through my London Marathon build? I'll update you on that one too.
Drop me a comment or a message and let me know if you're trying it too.
Lace up and enjoy your miles.
And remember, not a word to my wife.
This article shares my personal experience and publicly available research. It is not medical advice. I'm a runner, not a doctor. If you're experiencing pain or symptoms that concern you, please speak to a physio or your GP.
About the author: Andy Hood
Andy Hood is an ultra and endurance runner, cancer survivor, and unapologetic advocate for men's health. After a diagnosis tried to take his running shoes off, he laced them back up and turned the experience into a mission: designing bold, attention-grabbing ultras each year to raise awareness and funds, particularly around testicular cancer. That mission includes his cheeky-but-serious menswear brand, Check Ya Balls, kit with a message that quite literally saves lives. Follow his runs, read his race reports, and grab a pair of Check Ya Balls at runningwestwardho.co.uk.
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