The 1988 and 1992 Olympic silver medalist Winthrop Graham began using colostrum after a knee injury in the 1996 Olympics.

“It was a rather serious injury and doctors wanted to perform surgery, but I opted for a rehabilitation program,” says Graham.

Two years passed. But he was still having trouble recovering after running the hurdles. His knee would become stiff and prevent him from training consistently.

“However, within two months after I began taking 12 colostrum a day, I could run the hurdles with no stiffness at all,” he says. “That was amazing to me and I became a believer.”

Meanwhile, for Jeff Spreng, colostrum helped him to realize his body building dreams. “I always wanted to be a body builder, so I tried everything natural to gain weight and build muscle but nothing had any significant effect until I found colostrum,” Spreng told a reporter. He began taking a half-teaspoon twice a day. “Right away I noticed how good I felt.” He increased his workouts to six hours per day. Thanks to his enhanced recovery, he was able to train seven days a week. He became “ripped.” He lost twenty-five pounds but added lead muscle. Nowadays, he says, “People stop me on the street and say, ‘I don’t mean to embarrass you but you have the most incredible body.’ No one ever said that kind of thing to me before. Now it happens all the time. My friends who knew me can’t believe I’ve lost weight because they can see I’m bigger. It’s so amazing!”

These days, Jeff uses two to three heaping teaspoons of colostrum powder, four times per day and is devoted fulltime to body building.

Colostrum is nature’s super food—and for all of us could well prove to be as indispensable to optimal health as our daily multiple vitamin and mineral supplement. But, for anyone interested in staying in shape, colostrum appears to be even more important. A growing body of evidence suggests that colostrum is great for weight training, running, power sports and for anyone interested in getting in shape, maintaining exercise intensity and a regular training schedule, and promoting healthy muscle gain.

Colostrum for Tissue Repair and Recovery

For athletes interested in enhanced physical performance, the scientific evidence supporting use of colostrum is noteworthy. But, hold on, what is colostrum? What interests researchers in the connection between colostrum and fitness?

Colostrum is the specific first diet of mammalian newborns. It is secreted before breast milk. It is rich in immunoglobulins, antimicrobial peptides, and growth factors.

Its high content of bioactive growth factors is generating interest among sports doctors. Growth factors are broad-spectrum small proteins (polypeptides) that play key regulatory roles in cell growth, replication, and differentiation. Growth factors support complex feedback loops between the immune, nervous and hormonal systems that maintain healthy homeostasis under normal circumstances.

One particularly important growth factor, insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), acts as a second messenger for growth hormone, carrying out growth hormone effects. Human Growth Hormone (hGH) is responsible for many effects on growth, physical development, immunity, and metabolism. Produced and secreted by the anterior pituitary gland in the brain, hGH is normally released in pulses in response from signals from the hypothalamus, usually during sleep. It exerts anabolic effects throughout the body favoring the tissues, bones and muscles.

Studies show that an aging person exhibits lower levels of growth hormone than a younger one. Over time this decreased hGH level has significant negative effects on fat deposition, immunity and overall energy.

Both hGH and its mediator, IGF-I may actually help treat the blueprint of aging, keeping the cells in as healthy a state as possible. The cells’ ability to function depends on the genetic codes for all the proteins, hormones, and enzymes that make the cell run.

Antioxidant supplements such as vitamin C and E help limit the damage to the DNA and bolster immunity. But, hGH and IGF-I go further, doing what antioxidants cannot.

Both hGH and IGF-I help feed the DNA. While hGH initiates transport of amino acids and nucleic acids into cells, IGF-I takes the work of hGH one step further and facilitates the transport of nucleic acids into the actual nucleus of the cell where the DNA resides, giving it the raw materials needed to repair damage to the DNA and initiate cell division.