Recovery and Injury
is the TB-500 loading phase a real thing or forum folklore
NorthernCodon951/27 Apr 2026/772 views
Every protocol I can find says the same thing: 4 to 6 weeks at around 2 to 2.5 mg twice weekly as a "loading phase", then drop to something like 2 mg every second week for maintenance. It gets repeated so uniformly across every site that I have started to suspect it all traces back to one post from about 2011 that everyone copied. Does anyone know where the loading phase idea comes from? Because the pharmacokinetic argument for it is not obvious to me. If the point is that you need to reach some tissue concentration before repair kicks in, fine, that would justify it. But I have not seen anyone make that argument, they state the schedule. My situation: 39, Cape Town, mid-portion achilles on the left and a hip flexor thing that I suspect is referred from my lower back. Running about 55 km a week when things are going well, currently about 30. Trail mostly, so lots of eccentric loading on descents which is probably half my problem. Currently doing 2.5 mg twice weekly, Monday and Thursday, subcutaneous into the belly. Week 3. Nothing dramatic yet but the hip is noticeably less angry in the mornings, which could easily be the fact that I have also cut my mileage nearly in half. Which is the other thing. Everyone here is running these alongside a training change, a load change, physio, or all three, and then attributing the result to the peptide. Including me. I am aware I am doing it and I am doing it anyway.
3 replies
27 Apr 2026
Your suspicion about the origin is roughly right as far as I can tell. The schedule is convention rather than something derived from published human dosing data, and human data on this is thin on the ground generally. The half life being long is well enough established that twice weekly makes sense as a frequency, but the specific four to six week block at a higher rate followed by a step down is a community norm. That does not automatically make it wrong. It just means you should hold it loosely. Your last paragraph is the most honest thing in this thread. Halving your mileage is a large intervention. If the hip is better at week 3, load reduction is the likelier explanation just on timing alone.
28 Apr 2026
On the hip flexor being referred from your back, worth taking seriously. I chased a "hip flexor strain" for about seven months and it was an L4 nerve root thing the entire time. No amount of anything injected anywhere was going to fix that. The tell for me was that it never hurt during the movement that supposedly caused it, only afterwards and only in a vague area I could not point at with one finger. If you cannot point at it with one finger, be suspicious.
03 May 2026
I ran the standard loading schedule for a rotator cuff issue last year and then skipped maintenance entirely because I ran out and was too broke to reorder. It stayed better. Which either means maintenance is unnecessary, or means it had healed by then and the maintenance would have been irrelevant either way, or means I got lucky. Three explanations, one data point, no way to separate them.
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