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Rapamycin weekly dosing and wound healing, anyone running heavy mileage notice slower recovery

Posted by student748 in Longevity & Anti-Aging - 3 points, 4 comments.

For what it is worth i've been reading heaps about low dose pulsed rapamycin for longevity and the mTOR inhibition / autophagy angle makes sense to me on paper. The thing that keeps nagging at me is the impaired wound healing side effect. I run pretty high mileage, like 100km+ weeks when building for an event, and i get micro-tears and niggles constantly. Nothing major but my body is always repairing something.

If rapamycin slows down wound healing at therapeutic doses, does that also mean slower recovery from training stress at the 3-6mg once weekly range? Or is that more of a high dose transplant-level concern? I know mTOR is involved in muscle protein synthesis too so i'm wondering if you're basically blunting the very pathway you need for adaptation after hard sessions.

Has anyone here who trains hard actually noticed a difference in recovery time since starting rapamycin? Like slower bounce back from long runs or strength sessions. Or is the weekly pulse short enough that it doesn't really interfere with day to day repair. Keen to hear from anyone who's been on it a while and also trains seriously, not just the longevity theory side of things.

Comments

  • fasted_scientist: The mTOR concern is spot on, that's the bit that doesn't get talked about enough in the longevity crowd. You're literally suppressing the pathway that drives muscle adaptation to training. Most of the wound healing data comes from transplant-level daily dosing though, and the weekly pulse model is meant to give mTOR a window to recover between hits. Whether that window is actually long enough at 3-6mg is another question entirely. I've not run rapamycin myself so I can't speak to the recovery s
  • sleep_coastal: Anecdotally I ran 5mg rapamycin once a week for two months while hitting 80‑90km weeks. My legs felt a bit heavier after hard sessions and DOMS lingered about a day longer than usual. Nothing that stopped me training but I’d love to see hard data on weekly pulse effects.
  • labrat_vik: Yeah, the weekly pulse idea is to let mTOR bounce back, but at 3-6 mg once a week I wonder if the dip is still deep enough to blunt the repair signal from those micro-tears.
  • student748: Here's a thought: I've been experimenting with 4mg once weekly for about 8 weeks now, and honestly? My recovery feels about the same as before, maybe a tiny bit slower on the really heavy weeks, but nothing I'd attribute solely to the rapa, could just be the mileage stacking. I've had a couple of niggles that lingered 3-4 days instead of my usual 2, but I'm also hitting 100km weeks pretty consistently so maybe that's just the territory. I'm tracking HRV and resting heart rate each morning, and t

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