Lotions🧴 for athletes, do they really work?

In general, I’m a big fan of “lotion” that you can rub on for performance gains, recovery, and pain relief.

Why am I a fan of Lotions? because they deliver products directly through your skin and bypass your stomach and digestive system — which means they can be better absorbed and can be highly targetted to where you want them to work.

Here are the top lotions at The Feed that every serious athlete should have at home and ready to go:

1) High Performance. Lotions for performance are focused on different ways to reduce lactate acid build-up or at least mask the feeling of lactate acid build-up in your muscles. The original player is Amp Human PR which uses sodium bicarbonate that’s absorbed through your skin to adjust the PH levels in your muscles. This creates a lactate acid buffering effect. Amp has a slick new bottle design that just arrived.

The new player in the performance lotion space at The Feed is called LactiGo. It’s different than Amp and doesn’t use sodium bicarbonate. Instead, it combines menthol, carnosine, and magnesium into a formula that’s a clear gel. It’s non-greasy, quick-drying, and powerful. Athletes are showing significant improvements in high-intensity efforts in the range of ~4% across independent studies. This is a hot product right now with endurance athletes and one you should definitely try out.

2) Recovery. Post-workout, applying a lotion is a great way to recover. While you can use Amp HP and LactiGo in this capacity, my favorite for post-workout is The Feel Good Lab Sport Recovery Lotion. It feels great, doesn’t have much of a smell, and is packed with every amazing botanical ingredient (28 in total) that you can think of to soothe recovery.

3) Injury / Inflammation. If you’re suffering from an injury, there are two lotion paths you can take. My preferred path is a CBD lotion. Feedback from athletes at all levels and sports on CBD for discomfort and soreness is fantastic, I’ve personally enjoyed CBD pain-relieving benefits many times on my sore knees and back. My top 2 go-to-choices for CBD topicals are Floyd’s of Leadville Transdermal Sports Cream and the new TheraOne CBD Revive Body Balm (from the makers of Theragun).

If CBD isn’t your thing, then The Feel Good Labs also has a separate formula for pain that has arnica and turmeric, plus 28 additional botanicals and it’s fantastic.

Note: When it comes to using lotions for injury, it’s fair to say that you are more so masking the pain than actually solving your injury. For sure, you’ll get some reduced inflammation which is helpful to repair. It’s not that masking is bad, as it can help you keep training while your body is repairing your injury. However, if you’re actively looking for help repairing your injury, check out the SwissRX Athlete Repair Protocol to help repair soft tissue injuries. This is what I used to help heal my knee post-surgery and it’s the best thing outside of surgery in my opinion.

Conclusion — With the onset of new topical delivery technologies, lotions are quickly becoming their own performance category and can help with everything from boosting performance and vitamin D to relieving pain and easing recovery. What makes lotions so unique is their ability to bypass the digestive system, which means they can be better absorbed, more effective, and cause zero stomach issues. Try one today and see the difference for yourself.

P.S. Remember — for actual injury repair, the best solution I’ve found to speed healing and get a full recovery is SwissRX Athlete Repair Protocol. It’s a pharmaceutical-grade protocol that helped me finally heal my knee even after years of trying everything else.