One Supplement You Need to Know About for Body Composition
Apr 28, 2026
Welcome back to the 2nd Part of our 4 Part Series on our One Supplement You Need to Know About. Today, our focus is on collagen and its effects on body composition.
Bottom-line:
The Synergy Secret:Research highlights that collagen is not a "magic pill" for muscle growth; its modest benefits for body composition are only truly unlocked when paired with consistent resistance training.
Rehab vs. Hypertrophy: While studies show significant gains in fat-free mass for sarcopenic or rehab patients, collagen remains a secondary option for general bulking and may be less effective than whey protein for certain populations.
Evidence-Based Practice: To help navigate these nuances, we’ve launched a new Supplement Guide for Rehab Professionals as part of our Nutritional Physical Therapy course—complete with clinical handouts and research summaries.
- Advanced nutritional strategies to support physical therapy for patients with metabolic disorders
- Case studies demonstrating successful integration of nutrition into physical therapy care plans
Each physical therapy ceu course emphasizes practical, evidence-based learning, ensuring that participants can immediately apply the skills to their clinical practice. Sign up today and save:
Transcript:
Dr. Wells here from St. Augustine Beach. We've got our second part here on the supplement that every PT and rehab professional needs to know more about, and that's collagen. So our first part, we talked a little bit about muscle recovery, particularly after heavy resistance training, how it can help improve not only biochemical factors, but it also can help with improving countermovement jump.
[00:23-00:44]
Today, we're going to look at an awesome systematic review by Khatri, that's K-H-A-T-R-I, at all from 20 21. It's a little bit older study, but it's a systematic review. So it looks at like kind of all the evidence for collagen. And what I'm going to say is if you're only have time to read one article, this would be the article to read. It doesn't include some of the more recent studies, but really gives us some insight.
[00:44-01:06]
And particularly today, we're going to look at bodies, body composition. There are individuals, personal trainers and strength coaches that tell their patients and their athletes, hey, you really need to be taking collagen to improve your lean muscle mass, to bulk up. And a lot of times I wonder how much of that is actually true, right? Because we know collagen is a polypeptide, right?
[01:06-01:39]
It has amino acids, particularly glycine and things. So there is some probably anabolic effect, right? So just thinking out loud in my own practice I have not recommended the use of collagen to gain muscle mass and I'm interested to hear from you all if any of you PTs or strength coaches have utilized it in your practice because I just haven't seen the effects in that way particularly a lot of my recommendations for these individuals for the collagen, usually those individuals are already doing resistance training, so it's kind of hard to tell, right?
[01:40-02:00]
But according to Carty et al, they looked at several studies, right? And so with that, they typically look at a systematic review, as many studies as they can, and they found 4 or 5 really good studies. And what they found, there's a modest changes and really, To optimize any really changes in body composition, you really have to pair it with resistance training. And that makes sense.
[02:00-02:19]
It's kind of like what we see with protein supplementation, like just taking protein alone, protein alone doesn't always make significant changes for body composition. But when you partner with the resistance training, it's like adding fuel to the fire, right? So what they found is overall, it's kind of similar to supplementing with whey protein.
[02:19-02:36]
You see some benefits, particularly if you're sarcopenic, particularly if you're needing like physical therapy. So again, for in a rehab world, typically what they've seen when one study was about 15 grams for 12 weeks, they saw an increase in fat free mass by about 4.2 kilograms. That's a pretty significant amount.
[02:36-03:08]
But again, they partnered that collagen intake with resistance training. So with physical therapy, with exercise. So if you're obese, particularly in this study, they said if you're obese, and particularly if you're a female that's obese, you might actually need It actually might be better for you in terms of taking collagen, but Or sorry, excuse me, the whey might be better for you than taking the collagen. But The big thing at the end of the day, I think the summary that we need to see is collagen is probably not your go-to if you're trying to change a person's body composition.
[03:09-03:38]
If you are going to see body composition changes, it's going to be with resistance training, and it's probably going to be with other dietary changes. With that in mind, take a look at our courses. We have a 3part certified nutritional physical therapy course. We just added a bonus add-on. which is our supplement guide for rehab professionals. It goes over some nice research around supplements. It's evidence-based, and it has some nice handouts, so you can stick it in your binder or snapshot it and put it in your phone or your wallet.
[03:38-03:43]
So, anyhow, like, subscribe, and stay tuned for part 3 coming up soon.
