Hydrogen Water and Muscle Soreness: What the DOMS Research Shows

Q: What have trials reported on hydrogen water and muscle soreness after exercise?

Two randomized crossover trials measured it. Botek's 2022 trial in 12 trained men reported soreness at 26 ± 11 mm versus 41 ± 20 mm on a visual analog scale at 24 hours (p = 0.002), and Sládečková's 2024 trial in 12 elite fin swimmers reported 34 ± 12 mm versus 42 ± 12 mm at 12 hours (p = 0.045) alongside lower creatine kinase and better countermovement jump height. Both are small crossover trials in trained athletes, reported as measured, and neither has been replicated in a larger sample.

Q: How does the hydrogen water research compare with percussion massage research for DOMS?

They are aimed at different parts of the same problem. Cullen's 2021 review of passive recovery placed percussive gun-assisted therapy among the modalities lacking convincing evidence for athlete recovery, while the hydrogen trials measured the inflammatory and oxidative side — creatine kinase, blood lactate, biological antioxidant potential, soreness scores. No published trial has tested the two in direct combination.

Q: What amounts did the hydrogen water trials use?

Trials used their own amounts — Botek's used 1,260 mL inside one session, Sládečková's spread intake across a training day — and there is no standardized schedule in the literature.

Posted on February 12, 2026

Hydrogen Water and Muscle Soreness: What the DOMS Research Shows

The soreness that shows up two days after a hard session is not the damage itself. It is the aftermath — an inflammatory and oxidative sequence that unfolds after eccentric loading tears at muscle fibers and at the connective tissue wrapped around them. Percussion massage guns, foam rollers and vibrating attachments all work on that soreness mechanically, from the outside in, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want from a recovery tool and a completely different target from the one the delayed onset muscle soreness literature keeps circling back to.

Which is where the hydrogen water muscle soreness research gets interesting. A small but unusually consistent set of randomized crossover trials has measured what happens to soreness scores, creatine kinase and blood lactate when trained athletes drink hydrogen-rich water around hard exercise. The numbers are specific. The trials are named. And they point straight at the biochemical side of DOMS rather than the mechanical one.

What Actually Produces Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness

DOMS runs on a predictable clock. Load a muscle eccentrically — lowering the weight, running downhill, decelerating hard — and the soreness arrives late, peaks somewhere in the 24-to-48-hour window, then fades on its own. Nothing about that timeline fits a simple "tight muscle" explanation, which is the first clue that the interesting action is chemical rather than purely structural.

Eccentric Loading and the Damage Behind the Delay

Musat and colleagues reviewed post-exercise musculotendinous injury in the International Journal of General Medicine in 2023 and described the sequence as mechanical disruption followed by a secondary phase in which oxidative stress is implicated in the inflammation and tissue degeneration that follow. The authors were reviewing pathogenesis, not recovery products. Their framing is useful anyway, because it puts the thing that hurts on day two downstream of the loading rather than inside it.

The Tissue That Registers the Pain

That same review made a point that rarely survives into consumer recovery content: the fascia surrounding muscle is more pain-sensitive than muscle tissue itself under eccentric load. So when a device promises to work soreness out of the muscle belly, the published account of where the pain signal actually originates does not line up neatly with the pitch.

Where Percussion Massage Lands in the Recovery Evidence

Cullen, Casazza and Davis published a narrative review of passive recovery modalities in Current Sports Medicine Reports in 2021, covering what athletes reach for between sessions. Their sorting is the part worth reading slowly. Compression garments, cold water immersion, partial-body cryotherapy and vibratory therapies came out of that review with better support than percussive gun-assisted therapy, which the authors placed among the modalities that lack convincing evidence for athlete recovery.

One review does not close a field. It does explain why the conversation keeps drifting toward biochemistry — if the mechanical approaches are contested, the inflammatory and oxidative half of DOMS becomes the obvious place to look next, and that is precisely where the hydrogen trials have been working. Our separate piece on what lactate, CRP and oxidative stress markers reveal goes deeper on the marker side of that story.

The Trial That Anchors the Hydrogen DOMS Research

Botek and colleagues published a randomized crossover trial in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in 2022. Twelve trained men, 1,260 mL of hydrogen-rich water, a demanding exercise protocol, and every participant serving as his own control on the placebo arm. Crossover designs are worth more than their sample size suggests, because each athlete's own physiology is the comparison.

Soreness at 24 Hours

The researchers reported muscle soreness on a visual analog scale at 26 ± 11 mm after the hydrogen-rich water condition versus 41 ± 20 mm after placebo at the 24-hour mark, with a p value of 0.002. That is the most directly relevant soreness result in the hydrogen literature, and it is a within-subject difference in twelve men rather than a comparison between two different groups of people.

Lactate and Lunge Speed

Botek's group also reported lower blood lactate at the mid-exercise and post-exercise measurements — 5.3 and 5.1 mmol·L⁻¹ on hydrogen-rich water against 6.5 and 6.3 mmol·L⁻¹ on placebo, at p ≤ 0.008 — and that the athletes performed their lunges faster in the hydrogen condition (p < 0.001). Three measures, one direction.

Two Strenuous Sessions in One Day

Sládečková and colleagues took the same question to elite fin swimmers in Frontiers in Physiology in 2024: twelve athletes, two strenuous training sessions on the same day, crossover design, registered as NCT05799911. Same-day doubles are where recovery either holds up or falls apart, which makes the design a harder test than a single bout.

Creatine Kinase, Soreness and Jump Height at 12 Hours

At the 12-hour measurement the researchers reported creatine kinase at 156 ± 63 U·L⁻¹ on hydrogen-rich water versus 190 ± 64 U·L⁻¹ on placebo (p = 0.043), soreness at 34 ± 12 mm versus 42 ± 12 mm (p = 0.045), and countermovement jump height at 30.7 cm versus 29.8 cm (p = 0.014). A blood marker of muscle damage, a subjective soreness score and a mechanical performance test all shifted the same way inside one trial — the kind of internal consistency that makes a twelve-athlete study worth citing by name.

What the Pooled Analyses Report

Single trials with a dozen participants are how a research field starts. Pooled analyses are how it gets taken seriously.

Perceived Exertion and Blood Lactate

Zhou K and colleagues pooled 19 studies covering 402 participants for Frontiers in Nutrition in 2023. Across that set they reported a standardized mean difference of −0.38 for rating of perceived exertion (95% CI −0.65 to −0.11, p = 0.006) and −0.42 for blood lactate (95% CI −0.72 to −0.12, p = 0.006). Those two outcomes are where the pooled signal in that analysis sits, and both moved in the same direction: lower perceived exertion and lower blood lactate on hydrogen.

Antioxidant Potential

Li Y and colleagues ran a second systematic review and meta-analysis for Frontiers in Nutrition in 2024, pre-registered as CRD42022364123, covering six studies and seven experiments across 76 participants. They reported a standardized mean difference of 0.29 for biological antioxidant potential (95% CI 0.04 to 0.54, p = 0.03), with a larger pooled effect of 0.52 in the intermittent-exercise subgroup — which is a description of team-sport and interval training, the settings where soreness complaints cluster.

The Lactate Thread Runs Back to 2012

Aoki and colleagues published a double-blind crossover pilot study in Medical Gas Research in 2012 with ten male soccer players. The researchers reported that the rise in blood lactate seen on the placebo arm did not occur on the hydrogen-rich water arm, and that peak torque did not fall off early the way it did on placebo. Their oxidative-damage and antioxidant-potential measures (d-ROMs and BAP) and creatine kinase showed no significant change. A pilot study with ten athletes, fourteen years ago — and the lactate finding is the one the later pooled analyses still echo.

Output, Reps and Torque

Zhou K's group also ran an eight-day trial in Frontiers in Physiology in 2024 with 18 trained men. The researchers reported total power of 50,866.7 W in the hydrogen-rich water condition against 46,431.0 W on placebo (p = 0.032), and total repetitions of 78.2 versus 70.3 (p = 0.019). Performance measures moved in that trial; the soreness and recovery-questionnaire measures did not separate significantly, which is exactly why the soreness case above rests on Botek and Sládečková instead of on this one.

Ogannisyan, Slivin, LeBaron and colleagues reported in the Journal of Lifestyle Medicine in 2025 on 22 female elite athletes in a randomized trial: reduced total creatine kinase, increased torque after intensive exercise, and higher IL-10, all at p < 0.05. Their participants received hydrogen in tablet form, which tells you the researchers were testing the molecule itself — not endorsing a delivery format anyone should go shopping for.

Why Researchers Describe Hydrogen as Selective

Ohsawa and colleagues put the mechanism on the table in Nature Medicine in 2007. They reported that molecular hydrogen reduced the hydroxyl radical and did not react with reactive oxygen species that carry physiological roles in the body. Nineteen years on, that selectivity proposal is still an active line of investigation rather than a settled conclusion — and it is the reason the DOMS question is being asked with hydrogen at all rather than with a vitamin, since a broad antioxidant that mops up everything also mops up the very signals that drive training adaptation.

Zhou Q and colleagues reviewed the exercise side of this in Metabolites in 2024, surveying hydrogen-rich water across endurance, strength, sprint, lunge, countermovement jump and time-to-exhaustion protocols. The mechanisms they discuss are scavenging of the hydroxyl radical and peroxynitrite, regulation of antioxidant enzymes, and modulation of lipid peroxidation and inflammation. Their review is the most convenient single map of the field for anyone who wants to read past the headlines.

Hydrogen holds FDA GRAS status as a food ingredient, and the exercise trials above have not reported adverse effects. That is the extent of what the safety record in this literature says.

Frequently Asked Questions About Hydrogen Water and Muscle Soreness

What have trials reported on hydrogen water and muscle soreness after exercise?

Two randomized crossover trials measured it. Botek's 2022 trial in 12 trained men reported soreness at 26 ± 11 mm versus 41 ± 20 mm on a visual analog scale at 24 hours (p = 0.002), and Sládečková's 2024 trial in 12 elite fin swimmers reported 34 ± 12 mm versus 42 ± 12 mm at 12 hours (p = 0.045) alongside lower creatine kinase and better countermovement jump height. Both are small crossover trials in trained athletes, reported as measured, and neither has been replicated in a larger sample.

How does the hydrogen water research compare with percussion massage research for DOMS?

They are aimed at different parts of the same problem. Cullen's 2021 review of passive recovery placed percussive gun-assisted therapy among the modalities lacking convincing evidence for athlete recovery, while the hydrogen trials measured the inflammatory and oxidative side — creatine kinase, blood lactate, biological antioxidant potential, soreness scores. No published trial has tested the two in direct combination.

What amounts did the hydrogen water trials use?

Trials used their own amounts — Botek's used 1,260 mL inside one session, Sládečková's spread intake across a training day — and there is no standardized schedule in the literature.

References

[1] Botek M, Krejčí J, McKune A, Valenta M, Sládečková B. "Hydrogen Rich Water Consumption Positively Affects Muscle Performance, Lactate Response, and Alleviates Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness After Resistance Training." Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2022;36(10):2792-2799. PMID: 33555824. DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000003979

[2] Sládečková B, Botek M, Krejčí J, Valenta M, McKune A, Neuls F, Klimešová I. "Hydrogen-rich water supplementation promotes muscle recovery after two strenuous training sessions performed on the same day in elite fin swimmers: randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover trial." Frontiers in Physiology. 2024;15:1321160. PMID: 38681143. PMC11046232. DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2024.1321160

[3] Aoki K, Nakao A, Adachi T, Matsui Y, Miyakawa S. "Pilot study: Effects of drinking hydrogen-rich water on muscle fatigue caused by acute exercise in elite athletes." Medical Gas Research. 2012;2:12. PMID: 22520831. PMC3395574. DOI: 10.1186/2045-9912-2-12

[4] Ogannisyan M, Slivin A, LeBaron TW, et al. "Hydrogen-Rich Water Decreases Muscle Damage and Improves Power Endurance in Elite Athletes: A Randomized, Double-Blinded, Placebo-Controlled Trial." Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. 2025;15(1):8-17. PMID: 40376695. PMC12076047. DOI: 10.15280/jlm.2025.15.1.8

[5] Zhou K, Yuan C, Shang Z, Jiao W, Wang Y. "Effects of 8 days intake of hydrogen-rich water on muscular endurance performance and fatigue recovery during resistance training." Frontiers in Physiology. 2024;15:1458882. PMID: 39434721. PMC11491356. DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2024.1458882

[6] Zhou K, Liu M, Wang Y, et al. "Effects of molecular hydrogen supplementation on fatigue and aerobic capacity in healthy adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis" (19 studies, 402 participants). Frontiers in Nutrition. 2023;10:1094767. PMID: 36819697. PMC9934906. DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2023.1094767

[7] Li Y, Bing R, Liu M, et al. "Can molecular hydrogen supplementation reduce exercise-induced oxidative stress in healthy adults? A systematic review and meta-analysis" (6 studies, 7 experiments, 76 participants; CRD42022364123). Frontiers in Nutrition. 2024;11:1328705. PMID: 38590828. PMC10999621. DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2024.1328705

[8] Zhou Q, Li H, Zhang Y, Zhao Y, Wang C, Liu C. "Hydrogen-Rich Water to Enhance Exercise Performance: A Review of Effects and Mechanisms" (review). Metabolites. 2024;14(10):537. PMID: 39452918. PMC11509640. DOI: 10.3390/metabo14100537

[9] Ohsawa I, Ishikawa M, Takahashi K, et al. "Hydrogen acts as a therapeutic antioxidant by selectively reducing cytotoxic oxygen radicals." Nature Medicine. 2007;13(6):688-694. PMID: 17486089. DOI: 10.1038/nm1577

[10] Cullen MFL, Casazza GA, Davis BA. "Passive Recovery Strategies after Exercise: A Narrative Literature Review of the Current Evidence" (narrative review). Current Sports Medicine Reports. 2021;20(7):351-358. PMID: 34234090. DOI: 10.1249/JSR.0000000000000859

[11] Musat CL, Niculet E, Craescu M, et al. "Pathogenesis of Musculotendinous and Fascial Injuries After Physical Exercise — Short Review" (review). International Journal of General Medicine. 2023;16:5247-5254. PMID: 38021047. PMC10655743. DOI: 10.2147/IJGM.S432749

This article is provided for educational and general wellness purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before beginning any new wellness practice, especially if you have a medical condition, are pregnant or nursing, or take prescription medications.

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