The Basics
Derived from the essential amino acid leucine, HMB (β-Hydroxy β-Methylbutyrate) is a powerful compound naturally produced by your body. Supplementing with just 3g of high-quality Calcium HMB daily is scientifically proven to reduce muscle damage, accelerate recovery, and enhance muscle protein production, allowing you to train harder, more frequently, and with significantly less downtime.
Trusted by athletes across all disciplines, HMB boasts an extensive, decades-old research portfolio and an exceptional safety record. Blonyx HMB Sport and Blonyx HMB+ Creatine deliver pure, additive-free Calcium HMB, rigorously tested for banned substances, to provide tangible benefits for strength, power, endurance, and long-term athletic health.
How does HMB work?
Beyond simply 'recovering,' HMB actively optimizes your body's response to training.
It works through multiple pathways to enhance muscle adaptation and resilience:
- Minimizes Muscle Breakdown: HMB actively inhibits the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway, your body's primary mechanism for muscle protein breakdown. This significantly reduces muscle loss caused by intense training or periods of inactivity.
- Boosts Muscle Protein Synthesis: By activating the critical mTOR pathway, HMB signals your body to rapidly produce new muscle proteins, accelerating adaptation and growth.
- Fortifies Muscle Cells: HMB plays a vital role in strengthening and stabilizing muscle cell membranes, providing crucial protection against exercise-induced muscle damage during high-intensity and high-volume workouts.
- Accelerates Recovery: Through its dual action of reducing breakdown and boosting synthesis, HMB shortens recovery time and reduces post-workout soreness, getting you back to training faster.
While your body produces HMB naturally, the most effective and bioavailable form for supplementation is Calcium HMB. This form, used in Blonyx products, is quickly absorbed and utilized by your muscles.
What will HMB do for your athletic performance?
Regardless of your sport or training style, HMB provides a unique advantage, enabling faster recovery, enhanced adaptation, and sustained performance.
Here’s how it supports different types of athletes:
- Strength and Power Athletes: For strength training, powerlifting, and bodybuilding, HMB is a game-changer. It not only amplifies progress in strength and lean muscle mass development but also significantly reduces post-lift soreness, making training feel easier and allowing for more consistent, high-quality sessions while lowering injury risk and preserving strength during downtime.
- Endurance Athletes: Runners, cyclists, rowers, and triathletes will experience accelerated adaptations like improved muscular efficiency and sustained endurance, especially during demanding training blocks and long-duration events. Expect less leg soreness, reduced injury risk, and faster recovery, allowing for harder and longer training sessions.
- Hybrid, Functional, and Team Sport Athletes: Athletes in functional fitness, CrossFit, HYROX, and team sports face varied and intense demands. HMB excels here by minimizing indicators of muscle damage (like creatine kinase levels) and vastly improving recovery capacity, keeping you ready to play harder, perform at a higher level for longer, and recover more quickly, especially in contact sports.
- Masters and Aging Athletes: For masters and aging athletes, HMB is crucial for maintaining muscle mass and strength, combating age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia). It significantly aids recovery, allowing you to train effectively and extend your athletic career into the long term.
Beyond athletic performance, emerging research also connects HMB to broader health benefits, including potential improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol levels. This makes HMB a rare supplement that supports both your athletic pursuits and overall well-being.
Where does your body get HMB?
While your body naturally produces HMB (approximately 1g daily from the breakdown of leucine), small amounts can be found in certain foods (around 0.5g per day) like:
- Meat, fish, and dairy
- Alfalfa
- Grapefruit and other citrus fruits
However, for athletes to experience the profound performance benefits demonstrated in scientific studies—including enhanced strength, recovery, and endurance—a daily intake of 3g of HMB is consistently recommended.
This optimal dose is virtually impossible to achieve through diet alone, making high-quality HMB supplementation essential for athletes.
What to Expect When Supplementing With HMB
HMB doesn't work overnight, but consistent daily use yields progressive and tangible benefits. Here's a typical timeline of what athletes experience:

1–4 Weeks: Less Soreness and Easier Recovery
You'll notice a significant reduction in post-workout muscle soreness and a general feeling of being less "beat up." This early phase allows you to increase training intensity and volume with less fatigue and faster recovery between sessions.

4–6 Weeks: Enhanced Adaptability to Training
Your body will develop a greater capacity to handle a higher intensity and volume of training. Crucially, if you experience periods of inactivity due to injury, travel, or something else, HMB helps preserve muscle mass and strength. Inactive individuals may also experience less muscle mass or strength loss.

6+ Weeks: Tangible, Long-Term Performance Improvements
By this stage, the cumulative benefits of HMB will be evident in your training quality and results. Depending on your sport, expect to see measurable improvements in strength, increased speed, enhanced VO2 max, and overall progress. This is where your consistent efforts truly pay off, leading to a steeper progression rate.
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What Our Athletes Are Saying
Dive Deeper: HMB Resources from Blonyx
What the Research Shows
HMB increases strength when combined with resistance training
HMB helps build muscle and strength when paired with resistance training. HMB helps protect and preserve muscles, making it easier to recover from training sessions, enabling more frequent training at a higher intensity and greater gains in muscle size and strength.
HMB improves endurance performance in runners, cyclists and triathletes
HMB has been shown to improve endurance performance by reducing muscle damage during prolonged or intense exercise like running or cycling where the muscles undergo stress. HMB works by supporting the muscle's ability to recover from this stress more efficiently, thus maintaining muscle function and delaying the onset of fatigue. This process allows athletes to sustain higher levels of activity for longer periods, enhancing overall endurance performance.
HMB increases muscle development with strength training
HMB, when combined with strength training, can accelerate muscle mass gains. Although results can vary, taking HMB for a few weeks can help athletes see quicker improvements in their physical performance and muscle development compared to training without it.
HMB reduces recovery times by protecting against exercise-induced muscle damage
HMB helps reduce recovery times by protecting against exercise-induced muscle damage (EIMD). By decreasing markers of muscle damage such as creatine kinase and lactate dehydrogenase, HMB minimizes inflammation and oxidative stress in the muscles. This protection allows for faster recovery and less soreness after training, making it easier for athletes to maintain their training schedule without extended downtime.
HMB is shown to reduce blood pressure and cholesterol, among other health benefits
HMB supplementation has been associated with reductions in blood pressure and improvements in cholesterol levels, contributing to overall cardiovascular health. These benefits are particularly significant as they suggest that HMB can help mitigate risk factors associated with heart disease, among other things. here.
Calcium HMB is the form absorbed and used most effectively
HMB supplementation has been shown to provide greater bioavailability in its calcium salt form (HMB-Ca) compared to the free acid form (HMB-FA), meaning the body absorbs and utilizes it more efficiently. This advantage is especially clear when HMB-Ca is dissolved in water, which results in faster absorption without altering how the compound is processed or eliminated by the body.
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