Consensus: vitamin C?

If I get some free time today, I’d like to research leg extension surgery. As I understand it, the tibia (but not the fibula?) is broken, and some sort of splint is applied. I believe the splint anchors to bone on both sides of the break, and there’s a screw-like mechanism that is adjusted, I believe daily, to advance the distance between the two broken segments of the tibia.

This is a good example of how connective tissue (here, bone) can be grown. Since this is a medical procedure conducted and approved by MDs, one would think the process has been well studied and documented, and that it is designed to achieve “healthy” healing.

In some ways, this process may be analogous to PE (especially hanging). Establishing microtears is like fracturing the bone. Repeating a PE workout may be like advancing the “screw.”

Of course, bone is not the same as ligaments and fascia, so the analogy will only go so far.

Andrew69 pointed out an interesting part of a study regarding Vit-C and how it negates treatment of Peyronies over on the ‘Why Gains Slow’ thread.

We could do with building a list something like this:

Verapamil - - Yes Calcium Ion channel blocker
Vit E - Yes - Peyronies
Vit C - No - Strengthens collagen and inhibits collagenase
Glucosamine - No -
Condroitin - No -
Beta Blockers - No -
Zinc - Yes - Helps form collagenase
Calcium - Yes - Helps form collagenase
Bromelain -Yes - Clears trauma site of debris

Edit: Apologies for the formatting. Table format does not carry over into post.

Hi Electron,

Thanks for going through my long and evolved post. The book I referenced is a heck of a good source of information about Vitamin C and clears up a lot of misconceptions about how it is and should be used. However, it does not go through the intricate biochemistry of how tissue repair occurs. I’m afraid that information, at least what is known, is scattered among many references.

Both MM and Shiver as well as PM have done a lot of great research uncovering many of those references and a lot of work remains to pull conclusions and summarize all of that. BTW, I really like your analogy about the miniature submarine - as nanotechnology evolves, who knows, maybe some day we’ll have such a device.

One of the issues I was trying to get to in my previous post was that we need to identify baseline differences between easy gainers and hard gainers by first looking at biomarkers that are not only relatively easy to quantify, but that have a major influence. That includes blood pressure, pulse rate, and basal temperature, too. Also, these biomarkers such as hormones either trigger the processes we are interested in or they limit those processes.

And, you don’t have to throw say 30 people in a room to get the data - the people can use saliva kits and blood spot kits to get the samples and send them off to a lab but the issue is cost - sad-to-say, even saliva tests for hormones are relatively expensive. I know as I am about to take my own samples and send them off to get a set of reference numbers to help in my own health management & PE efforts.

Anyway, let’s take your massive radio set analogy with all of the knobs (BTW, that’s an excellent analogy). So, what are the big knobs at the top of the set? - and, underneath each BIG knob, is a column of smaller knobs - what might they be? There might even be section markers across the top of the set like “brain”, “heart”, “kidneys”, “liver”, “pancreas”, “penis”, and so forth.

So, if we go to the “penis” section and look at the first big knob it might be “hormones” except if we touch it a door pops open and we have a whole set of knobs and dials, each one associated with a different hormone. If you turn one of the hormone dials, they all move but at different rates and directions depending on which knob you twist (oh shit! - we’ve done it now! - rewind, rewind!). Not only that, if you move a hormone knob in the penis category the hormone displays under every other major section of our set move too! In the designer drug world that’s called “Side Effects”.

Anyway, if we somehow figure out how to set a first pass at the hormone dials, the next major set of controls we come to is “enzymes”, and if we touch it a panel pops open and we get to tinker with hundreds of enzyme buttons, dials, slide switches, and digital displays. If you happen to hit the right or wrong button or dial here, you look up and you see the hormone indicators starting to move around - that’s called feedback. Of course, if yoiu move a hormone dial up above and several enzyme indicators start to move that’s called feed-forward.

Anyway, let’s say we learn which enzymes are critical to our purposes and we select the “collegenase” enzyme. Yep - another panel pops open and we see buttons, dials, slide switches, and indicators for things like Vitamin C, vitamin E, betaglucan, glucosamine, glucose, several amino acids, vitamin K, several B vitamins … . well, you get the picture.

But, if you move the vitamin C knob and everything further down the face of the set responds with little or no feedback back up the set, then you have identified vitamin c as a major limiting factor. Actually, this is what I would expect to occur with one or more enzymes that are on the critical path here.

Another one of the big knobs might be blood type. As to genetic differences, the first step and most practical step is to look at blood type. For example, are type O’s hard gainers because their digestive processes are more efficient and they lay down collagen much more rapidly? In other words, is there something we can easily measure that lays down a clear pattern of difference based on blood type?

As to vitamin C, it is only one of many factors that are involved in healing and repair tissue formation. Is it the critical path or rate limiting factor? Maybe, but I have my doubts as the body generally has parallel and back up mechanisms at work. What generally is critical path or rate limiting and also has a direct tie-in to genetics is the enzymes. That’s what the big drug companies focus on - they know based on billions of $ of research that the enzymes are the key things to target as the enzymes under direction of hormones control the biochemical processes in the body.

Bottom line - as important as vitamin c is and you picked it with good justification, I think you have to look for (or rule out) differences in hormones (messenger molecules) and enzyme activity (catalysts) first because they control the processes we are interested in in PE.

What’s such a horrendous challenge is that any one of the kobs on your set could have a major PE impact for one or more of us and we’d miss it because we don’t measure properly nor often enough.

Great Thread, Electron - thanks,

MrTiPS

Vitamin C is available in topical form. It apparently works great for the skin. I wonder what happens when you rub this stuff into your dick!

http://www.derm adoctor.com/der … 50829D7A75B0%7D

This clearly says that Vitamin C stimulates fibroblasts to put out collagen and elastin. Interesting …

Okay, so let’s just simplify this. All we can really look at is:

(1) Whether “depleting” vit. C a little before doing damage will help do a little more damage, thereby increasing gains later.

(2) How it affects the healing process after a rest, how can we use that to our advantage?

As soon as you ask question number (2) above, some other issues come right along with it, to my mind at least; mostly related to the timing of vit. C dosage and healing “results”. How does it heal on a daily basis? What generally happens when, say, you take lots of vitamin C, but are re-breaking the connections on a daily basis? What would happen if you didn’t use vitamin C during sessions, and let it heal for two day breaks? What about longer breaks, say a guy rested for a week, or a month? There’s a whole “spectrum” or myriad of questions that could be asked here, relating to rest breaks, their timing and frequency, under different dosage effects of vitamin C, or not using it at all for brief periods. And as beenthere and others have pointed out, that may not even hold true, if you are taking some other vitamin that affects everything.

And that’s about as far as we can go with this right now, correct? Maybe people could post their experiences, things they have noticed that they think are important. I know ther are little bits and pieces posted all over the place, it’s just hard to pull it all together and try to spot some general trends or anything. Maybe this could be a poll, Modesto Man. What have people noticed, if anything, about vitamin C intake and rest periods, length of break periods, cementing gains versus just causing fibrosis. If it could be worded right or whatever and “cover as many bases as possible.”

What do you think? Should we talk about enzymes? Are enzymes more important that probiotics?

I’ve been reading some “historical” posts from Bigger, trying to get some insight into his way of thinking. Bigger gained over 4 1/2” of length over the course of his PE career.

Bigger (Bib) talks about the role of Vitamin C, which he considers detrimental to gains:

Bib - Question for BIB

Then we can have scurvy and lose our teeth while at the same time have humongous wangs. :chuckle:

So Bib was talking about ligs, what about girth gains? Is vitamin C also detrimental to girth gains would you say?

Bigger’s point, if I understand it correctly, is that gains can be more easily achieved if the effect of each workout can be augmented by those of the next workout. He was saying that gains will slow or stall if one is allowed to recover completely from each workout.

Think about it. Each workout inflicts some injury. The body’s natural response is to repair the injury to produce tissue that is stronger than the original tissue. Think of a broken bone. The healed bone is always stronger. If this happened after every workout, one would never be able to gain, because the tissues would continually strengthen to resist further extension.

Vitamin C, which speeds the recovery of connective tissue generally (including ligs, tunica, and fascia), may cause tissues to repair too quickly to allow one to benefit from the cumulative effects of different workouts.

Bigger’s stupendous length gains were not just lig gains. They were also tunica and fascia gains. They have to have been. There’s just not that much ligament to pull out.

So, to answer your question, I think in Bib’s opinion, an excess of Vitamin C would tend to hinder girth gains, for the same reasons it tends to hinder length gains.

Whether this is true or not is another matter. But I wouldn’t discount it lightly.

BTW, there is another strain of thought, which is also very credible, that says that penile growth is not so much about micro-tears and recovery as it is about tissue remodeling under stress. Apply a stretching force to connective tissue for a long period of time (especially with heat), and the tissue gradually remodels itself to be longer.

Vitamin C might actually help with this process, by promoting faster remodeling. So, who knows ???

MM,

It may then be the case that if one was to use some type of stretching device for long periods, Vitamin C may be of benefit, while those of us who do shorter, higher intensity work outs should steer clear of Vitamin C.

A 24hour stretching device has to be the holy grail of PE as it would effect remodelling in the most natural way without these complications, but as yet nobody has come up with a way of doing that without constricting blood flow. I have some ideas though (for another thread sometime).

Congratulations on the fish oil! I take it too. It’s so (BLEECH!) good for you. My dad died a couple years ago, at 79. His mom died at 84. I remember her telling me that she took a tablespoon of cod liver oil every day, an she wished that her children would do the same. But they didn’t, they hated the taste of it and all that. I don’t know why grandmother would mention something like that to me when I was a little boy, but she did.

I do know this: She lived five years longer. They died five years younger. I take my fish oil. :)

Iwouldn’t say totally deprive vitamin C, but we could think along the lines of minimizing it, during workout periods. Then use more of it during breaks. What would happen using RDA levels as opposed to larger doses, during a break period?

LOL

Why is it that many “conclusions” we come to on this forum are in too opposite directions, it’s the best and worst thing you can do. ;)