Compound
Everything we've written on Growth hormone — 13 articles covering the mechanism, the evidence, comparisons, and practical considerations.
13 articles
Hormonal and endocrineThe midlife man no one talks about — the andropause analogYou know what menopause is. Everyone does — not well enough, the cultural literacy there is still far below what it should be, but the word exists, the concept has a name, and when a woman describes the experience her doctor will at minimum recognize it as a hormonal transition worth investigating. The male equivalent — the gradual multi-system hormonal shift that happens in a man's late 40s and 50s — does not have that. You don't get a word that means anything to most people. You get "midlife crisis," which is a cultural joke. You get "aging," which closes the conversation. You get told it's normal, which is technically true and practically useless, because normal in the sense of common is not the same as normal in the sense of healthy or inevitable or nothing-to-be-done.9 min readMetabolic healthFrag 176-191 in plain English — the hGH C-terminal fragment for fat metabolismWhen researchers started pulling apart human growth hormone in the 1970s and 80s, they were trying to figure out which parts of the molecule did which jobs. Human growth hormone is a 191-amino-acid protein — a single polypeptide chain folded into a specific three-dimensional shape — and it does several things at once: it stimulates IGF-1 production in the liver, which drives tissue growth and cell proliferation; it promotes lipolysis, the breakdown of stored fat; it supports protein synthesis in muscle. The question was whether these effects were separable. Whether you could take a molecule that did five things and isolate the part responsible for one of them.7 min readPeptide scienceThe GH-IGF-1 axis in plain EnglishYou've seen the phrase "GH levels" on clinic websites and in longevity content until it's become a kind of shorthand for youthfulness — the thing that goes down as you age and takes everything else with it. What that framing almost never explains is that "GH levels" is itself a misleading concept, because growth hormone doesn't really have a level in the way that testosterone or thyroid hormone does. GH is pulsatile. It's released in bursts. Most of the day, it's nearly undetectable in the bloodstream. And much of what gets attributed to GH — the tissue growth, the protein synthesis, the metabolic shifts, the cellular maintenance — isn't actually done by GH at all. It's done by a different hormone that GH triggers downstream. Understanding the actual architecture of this system is what makes every conversation about GH-related interventions either sensible or confused.9 min readSleep and recoveryGrowth hormone and the slow-wave window — why sleep depth matters more than durationYou're in your forties and you train hard. You used to recover in a day. Now it takes three, sometimes four. You haven't changed much about how you train, and nothing obvious in your life has gotten worse. The soreness just lingers longer. The energy that used to be there by Wednesday morning now shows up, if it shows up, on Thursday. You sleep seven hours. Sometimes eight. And yet something in the repair cycle has gone quiet.8 min readOrigins and discoveryGrowth hormone — the cadaver-extracted hormone, the CJD tragedy, and the recombinant breakthroughIn 1985, a neurologist in California diagnosed a 20-year-old with a disease that typically strikes people in their sixties. The patient presented with dementia and involuntary movements — the progressive and devastating deterioration of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a prion disorder with no treatment and no survival. But this patient was not in his sixties. He had received injections of human growth hormone as a child, for a growth deficiency, through a program that had been running for two decades. He was one of the first. He would not be the last.6 min readRecovery and inflammationThe masters athlete recovery wall — what changes after 40 that training won't fixYou're running the same mileage you ran at 38. The workouts are the same. The effort feels the same — if anything, more deliberate, more disciplined, more earned. But Tuesday's track session is still in your legs on Thursday, and the Thursday run leaves a tiredness that used to clear by Saturday morning and now sometimes doesn't clear at all. You add an extra rest day. You adjust the training plan. You read everything you can find about periodization and recovery windows, and you try most of it, and the plateau holds. The body that used to absorb training stress and convert it into adaptation is now absorbing training stress and accumulating it.9 min readGrowth hormone and recoveryMK-677 in plain English — how oral GH secretagogues actually workYour stomach growls before lunch. You didn't think about being hungry, didn't decide to feel it — the signal arrived, unbidden, and suddenly food was the most important thing in the room. That signal has a name: ghrelin. And ghrelin does more than make you hungry. It is one of the primary switches that tells your brain to release growth hormone. MK-677 works because it found a way to press that switch without the rest of ghrelin's biology getting in the way.8 min readSleep and recoveryMK-677 for sleep architecture — what the studies showedYou're in your mid-forties and you got eight hours last night. You know you got eight hours because the ring on your finger told you so in the morning, right before you shuffled to the coffee maker feeling like you'd slept for four. The tracker said deep sleep: 38 minutes. REM: 1 hour 12 minutes. You don't entirely trust the tracker, but you trust the feeling in your body, and the feeling says something important stopped happening somewhere in the night.8 min readGrowth hormone and recoveryThe 'more GH = better' myth — why pulsatile vs sustained mattersThe logic feels airtight. GH declines with age. The things GH supports — lean mass, fast recovery, low body fat, good sleep, resilient skin — also decline with age. Therefore, more GH should produce more of the good things and slow the decline. The athlete who tells you GH changed everything and the longevity clinic that promises restored youthfulness are both operating from this logic. It's coherent. It's also wrong in the way that most oversimplifications of endocrine biology are wrong: not in the direction of the effect but in the assumption that more is better than the right amount in the right pattern.5 min readRecovery and inflammationThe recovery wall — when the workout that built you starts breaking youYou did the same session you've done for years. Not a record. Not a special occasion. Just the Tuesday workout — the one that used to leave you sore for a day, maybe a day and a half, then functional again. Wednesday you felt it. Thursday you expected to feel better and didn't. Friday the legs were still heavy in a way that has no good description — not the sharp residual soreness of damaged muscle, but something deeper and more diffuse, like the tissue itself is waterlogged and reluctant. Saturday you trained again because that was the plan and because you've never been someone who quits the plan. Sunday was worse than Saturday. By Monday you were in the second week of a workout that was supposed to take 48 hours to clear.8 min readSleep and recoverySermorelin in plain English — what growth-hormone-peptide actually doesYou've heard the phrase "growth hormone peptide" and you've probably pictured something adjacent to performance-enhancing drugs — the territory of professional athletes and extreme biohackers, syringe-and-vial culture, people who are trying to be something they're not. The reality of what sermorelin actually is and how it works is substantially less dramatic, and substantially more interesting, than that image.8 min readSleep and recoveryThe sleep that broke in your 50s — what changed in the architectureYou used to sleep through thunderstorms. Through hotel rooms, through nights before important things, through the ordinary chaos of a life that had no shortage of stress. You'd put in seven or eight hours and come out the other side feeling like something had actually happened while you were under — muscles recovered, mind cleared, the previous day genuinely gone. That version of sleep was so reliable you stopped thinking about it. Then, somewhere around your early fifties, it changed. Not all at once. Gradually and then, one particular year, undeniably.8 min readRecovery and inflammationThe running injury that won't heal — what happens to recovery after 45The Achilles flared in February. Not dramatically — not a rupture, not an acute event that stopped you mid-run. A soreness that developed over a week, that you rested for two weeks, that improved enough that you started running again, and that has been at roughly sixty percent of baseline ever since. That was four months ago. The IT band that announced itself in March of last year has not returned to silence despite three months of PT, foam rolling that has become its own daily ritual, and two cortisone injections that each produced two weeks of quiet followed by the return. The plantar fasciitis you cleared in three weeks at thirty-eight took eleven months this time. The hip flexor that won't release no matter what you've done to it — massage, dry needling, targeted strengthening — sits there like a structural protest that has no intention of resolving.8 min read