Does it actually work?

What the controlled trials found

Four trials exist. Three report a benefit, one reports nothing at all, and only two were run by people with no stake in the product. The best of them, Beaven et al. 2025, is the one worth your time: triple-blind, crossover, seven world-class rugby sevens players, and a placebo that was ultrasound gel spiked with 1.25% menthol so both bottles tingled identically.

• Peak power across 12 × 6-second maximal efforts: 8–12% higher on the gel.
• Mean power, heart rate, perceived exertion: no change.
• Four of seven athletes finished believing the placebo day was their better one.
• One of the four trials, on trained cyclists, found no effect on anything it measured.

That is a narrow finding and it is worth stating narrowly. The gel moved the top end of repeated efforts. It did not move the average, and it did not make anything feel easier.

What twelve people reported outside the lab

These are coaches, grapplers and weekend athletes who tested it and wrote back. Not blinded, not controlled, and every one of them knew what they were putting on. What makes them worth publishing is that each entry carries a protocol and, where the person tracked one, a number.

The full set, with each person’s words unedited, is on the results page.

Three things that repeat across the reports

• More work at the same cost. Extra sets, extra minutes, an extra game — described as capacity rather than as feeling better. Skye E. is the only one who put a strain number against it, and 1.1% more strain for 16.7% more fast running is the shape of the whole pattern.
• Less next-day soreness. Named by almost everyone, usually after the session they expected to pay for.
• Sleep, unprompted. Two people raised it without being asked. No trial has measured it and there is no mechanism on offer, so treat it as an observation, not a claim.

Notice what is missing. Nobody reported lifting more weight on the first set, and neither did the trials. Grant B. said it plainly — he did not feel able to lift much more than normal, he just kept going far longer than usual.

How much weight to give the field reports

Not one person in that group reported nothing. On a real sample that would be impossible. It tells you exactly what the group is: people who chose to test it and then chose to write in. Everyone who tried it, felt nothing and said nothing is invisible here, and there is no way to know how many that is.

The reason to keep reading the field reports anyway is that they are specific in a way marketing copy is not, and they point at an effect the trials never tested for: total work over a weekend, not peak power over 30 seconds.

The protocol every good report shares

• Apply it early. 45 minutes between the gel and the first hard effort — the timing every trial that found anything used, and the one Grant B. waited out deliberately.
• Use enough. Around ten pumps per large muscle group. The people reporting nothing much tend to be the people applying a smear.
• Reapply across long days. Joe E. went every two hours through a tournament weekend; Brendon reapplied across four days of games.
• Test it the way Skye E. did. Repeat a session you have already done, same exercises, same order, one week apart. It is not blinded, but it beats a feeling.

So does it work?

For repeated maximal efforts, in a blinded trial, against a placebo that tingled the same: yes, at the top end, by 8–12%, with nothing else moving. For training capacity across a hard week: consistently reported, never controlled, and worth one honest month of your own before you believe it.

What it is not is a painkiller or a treatment for anything. Reports that framed it that way were left off the results page on purpose. It is a gel for training, and the claim it can defend is a narrow one.