When action is called, a Hollywood stuntman and their team show no hesitation in putting their bodies on the line. You can’t fear a thing in these high risk jobs or you’ve already lost.
On a biochemical level there’s no argument that you’re ever short on adrenaline, but are you giving your muscles and ligaments the sports nutrition supplements that they need?
You’ve fallen over so many times that mentally, it’s nothing to you now. Physically however, Hollywood stuntmen need the security that their bodies are always ready to go. When you hit that executed-to-perfection stunt car driver sequence, the car should be the only wreck left afterwards.
So how are you taking care of yourself? Which pre-workouts are getting the best results for a Hollywood stuntman like you? How are you simultaneously getting the most out of yourself while protecting your body (and therefore, career) as a priority?
Is a liquid collagen shot on your call sheet?
We think it should be. Here’s why.
Speedrunning the Liquid Collagen basics
Let’s give you the 30-second brief on collagen before we really get into why every Hollywood stuntman and woman should never be too far from a solid supply of it.
- Collagen is the most plentiful protein in your body. Between 30-40% of the body’s protein is collagen. Muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments, organs, blood vessels, skin, intestinal lining, and other connective tissues rely on collagen for their structure.
- The body can - and is - creating collagen to build and maintain muscle all the time. However, natural production begins to dwindle as early as your twenties. Very active individuals may be using their natural supply faster than their non-active counterparts.
- It can be hard to get enough collagen protein from diet alone, especially considering that modern diets contain less gristle and organ meat than previous generations. Supplementing collagen is a simple and fast way to get enough.
- Hydrolyzed collagen is smaller in size and gets absorbed better by the body. Nano-hydrolyzed collagen like Frog Fuel is even smaller still for maximum efficiency.
- Collagen is traditionally considered as a wellness product for skin protection, but it’s much much more than that. From helping with injury prevention and joint health to building lean muscle mass, the list of fitness and wellbeing boosts from taking collagen is LONG.
A Collagen Previs
Proteins are strong thanks to their ingredients.
Collagen isn’t an element in itself, it’s a bound matrix of essential and non-essential amino acids. Depending on how mineralized collagen is, it provides structural density to bone, muscles and a great list of other things: from your corneas to your intervertebral discs. Important stuff.
Amino acids are linked together by covalent bonds (using Vitamin C as a cofactor - so make sure that it too is in your diet) to make polypeptide chains. In themselves, they’re pretty strong, but when you weave three of them together like a hair plait, they get even stronger.
Imagine skipping with a rope compared to just a piece of string. That’s the strong formation collagen provides. In the areas your body needs strength and structure, you find collagen.
Now the previs is in place it’s time to focus on the specific benefits of liquid collagen for a hollywood stuntman or woman: from stunt car drivers to the classic cowboy stuntman.
Collagen Offers Your Body Padding and Protection
Hollywood stuntmen are constantly padding and protecting their falls and hits.
Motorcycle stuntmen are crashing onto padded landing sites and stunt car drivers have their rides lined with protection for any impact. When the movie rolls, the audience may see a raw bar fight, but what they don’t know is that those surfaces are fully covered to give Hollywood stuntmen or women the protection they need.
Consider collagen as padding on the inside of your body, installed in all the places you’ll need it the most. It’s the central structural component of extracellular connective tissue which provides elastic qualities while providing structure. This lets you bend and flex different parts of your body - without breaking.
But collagen also supports the blood-pumping aspect of stunts too. A quick example: collagen protein lines the outside of blood vessels all over your body.
A Hollywood stuntman’s blood pressure is always running high, so your heart is pumping blood around your body aggressively. The layer of collagen protein around artery walls means that blood vessels won’t burst at high pressure.
If you have the option to lay insulite on the surfaces where you’re shooting a high-impact fight scene, then why wouldn’t you do the same for what’s happening on the inside of your body?
Collagen Provides Superior Tensile Strength
Rope is strong and concrete is strong. But they’re not strong in the same way.
The rope structure that collagen is arranged in gives it a special kind of strength called tensile strength. Tensile strength is the maximum load that a material can support without fracture when being stretched. When the stresses less than the tensile strength are removed, the structure can return completely or partially to its original shape and size.
Tensile strength is what allows you to pull on a rope considerably without it coming apart. We’re sure you know how important that feature is when you’re practicing your wire work drills.
Concrete may be strong enough to build houses out of, but arrange it in a thin line and apply the same forces you stressed on the rope and it will fracture. There’s more to pure strength than meets the eye. The body of a Hollywood stuntman needs both at different places.
Because collagen is a long, fibrous structural protein, it makes it the perfect material for reinforcing tensile strength wherever it’s put to work in the body. That’s how these tough bundles of collagen called collagen fibers are a major component of the extracellular matrix that supports most tissues and gives cells their structure on the outside.
Collagen Powers your Joints, Ligaments, and Bones
Visual muscle mass often overshadows powerful ligaments when it comes to the film industry. Sure, a Hollywood stuntman with a ripped body looks great on and off the screen. But your gains may be in vain if that chiseled body can’t perform. You need to run, jump, fall, fight, and everything in between.
The sharpest camera lens won’t pick up a rippling ACL ligament, but it’s very important for pulling off the action sequence to timed perfection. Any energy your muscle musters to move your skeletal frame (and therefore you) is due to your ligaments. They’re the point of connection between muscles and bones.
So let’s talk about why Hollywood stuntmen should take collagen for joints and ligaments for a moment.
Nowhere is the aforementioned tensile strength more necessary than in our tendons and ligaments, which make up our joints. Tendons are the collagen-filled connection points between our muscles and our skeletal system. They’re vital to Hollywood stuntmen and women because without them? Well, you can’t move.
Weak or damaged tendons are often lacking collagen. So, without it, you’re unable to perform the precise movements necessary for a successful stunt. Further, weak tendons are more likely to tear from a lack of that critical tensile strength.
Put simply, Hollywood stuntmen and women should be paying just as much attention (if not more) to taking care of their tendons, the connection between muscle and bone, than their physique. Keep them strong with a liquid collagen shot of Frog Fuel as you arrive on set and you’ll be ready to go scene after scene.
Collagen Supports Lean Muscle Efficiency
As a Hollywood stuntman or woman, you’re more likely to use grip strength on set than you are to perform a stationary powerlift. Weights can be put down between takes but you may well need to dangle on the end of a rope for a bit longer than you’d like while the cinematographer tunes their shot. It happens.
We don’t need to impress upon a Hollywood stuntman or woman that strength is not just bulky mass. Strength is ligament and lean muscle efficiency.
So double-blind, placebo controlled studies that support collagen promoting grip strength or body composition improvement when partnered with resistance training should peak your interest. Sports research collagen peptides is a growing field yielding eye-opening results.
In the grip test study, where a training group without collagen and a training group taking collagen supplementation were measured, the change in hand-grip strength was significantly different. The group with supplementation induced a significantly higher increase in fat-free mass and hand-grip strength. In addition, there was a significantly higher loss in fat mass and a more pronounced increase in leg strength in the treatment group compared to the control group.
A motorcycle stuntman or a stunt car driver is wrestling the wheel of a car up a pipe-ramp, not wrestling the heavyweight champion of the world. F1 drivers don’t seek pure muscle mass for the same reason that a Hollywood stuntman shouldn’t. Lean muscle efficiency will give you more attuned precision and faster reaction times.
Collagen supplements can support lean muscle mass and decrease recovery time when combined with good exercise to help you complete the stunts you need, rather than simpler tests of bulk.
Collagen May Help Minimize Action Injuries
The last thing you want is for that connection between muscle and bone to become damaged.
All active people treat their joints as shock-absorbers to get what they need to do, done. Collagen is a large part of the material absorbing that shock - so your joints and bones don’t have to.
In high risk jobs, we want all the help we can get. Sports nutrition supplements in the form of hydrolyzed collagen may reinforce the strength of each tendon to withstand stronger impacts and movements. They give your body the materials it needs to fully supply itself in the areas that need it the most.
You probably know some of the most common sports injuries, possibly through first hand experience. Many of these are due to a breakdown or added stress on ligaments, such as getting stretched too far, or the body being forced to move in a way it wasn’t built to support.
However, a Hollywood stuntman makes their living moving in ways a normal person can’t and shouldn’t. In the world of high risk jobs like yours, the sudden falls, twists and hard impacts that often cause injuries are just a day in your life - and may all appear on the call sheet before lunch.
Eliminating the risk isn’t on the table here, but ligament protection is paramount
So, we have to look at strengthening those ligaments and providing extra support in any way. Pro athletes, endurance athletes, and medical professionals are already using sports nutrition supplements to do just this.
Hollywood stuntmen should definitely be on the list too.
Collagen May Relieve Existing Joint Pain
Going hand in hand (or fiber in fiber) with added protection comes existing pain relief. Soreness, sprains, and injuries are, unfortunately, part and parcel of many high risk jobs. It’s definitely a mainstay in the life of a Hollywood stuntman. But there are ways to reduce that pain without reaching for painkillers.
To stay pain-free, a Hollywood stuntman needs to make sure the sports nutrition supplements you take promote the fastest and healthiest post workout recovery.
Check out this game changing Penn State university where researchers studied the use of collagen on activity-related joint pain. A 24-week study, this placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind study showed improvement of joint pain in athletes when treated with a collagen supplement.
Subjects recorded significant reduction of pain while resting, walking, standing and lifting. Parameters that researchers studied included joint pain, mobility and inflammation: all relatable issues to the life of a Hollywood stuntman too.
We’re talking about pain relief from the source, rather than masking it with painkillers.
That might just sound like music to your ears. Of course, a box fall is always going to hurt but how handy would it be that you know your body has one more take in it - and can be ready to go the next day?
Collagen Can Heal Wounds Faster
Becoming a Hollywood stuntman or woman isn’t for the faint hearted. Although your stunt coordinator has cast and crew safety at the forefront of their minds, accidents can happen and people do get hurt.
So as well as prevention, the good news is that collagen is going to get to work right away if an injury takes place. When a performer is putting in place their treatments and consultations after an accident, collagen should be on that list. Frog Fuel isn’t just a supplement, it’s qualified as a medical food by the FDA, and it’s currently being used in over 3,000 medical facilities due to it’s proven ability to heal wounds up to two times faster. Collagen is used by doctors for skin grafts, post-surgery recovery, joint support, and more.
Collagen may help the body recover its structural strength. As well as being a component of skin tissue that helps all stages of wound healing, collagen may speed up recovery time from muscle and tendon injuries by fueling your body on a protein level.
All things a Hollywood stuntman just might need at some point in their career.
And it’s when you’re injured you need those collagen reserves most of all.
Collagen’s Role in Recovery
Let’s get into this wound healing component a bit more. Let’s consider healing from a biochemical level to better appreciate collagen’s role in the process.
We can categorize healing. It's in two ways. Firstly, the body needs to regenerate the muscle fibers that were damaged in the moment of injury. Secondly, the connective scar tissue needs to be replaced.
Collagen is the protein used in both of these processes.
In a study measuring rates of collagen protein production for three weeks after rupture of a muscle, researchers discovered collagen synthesis rates to have increased in muscle cells. Initially, type III collagen levels peaked during the first week of recovery. The reason for this is that the body is focused on reconstructing the flexibility and plasticity characteristics of cells. Type I collagen, the most common in the body, is a later focus and adds strength and structure to the muscle fibers and connective tissues at the point of injury.
The conclusion of studies like this is that they stress how important it is that the body, especially a Hollywood stuntman's body, has a constantly topped-up supply of it ready to roll.
It’s Time to Try Collagen for Yourself
Collagen can be cast in a variety of roles, and athletes turn to liquid collagen for peak performance.
Whether it’s for injury prevention, lean muscle building, joint health, pain relief, or a recovery aid, a liquid collagen shot shines as a true multi-tasker in the world of sports nutrition supplements. And we have the studies to back it up.
As former Navy Seals, the Founders of Frog Fuel wanted a supplement that could be a true superhero during endurance runs, grueling workouts, Ironman competitions, and Olympic weightlifting sets. Our nano-hydrolyzed liquid collagen shots are designed to be a convenient, easy-to-digest protein source that does just that. Which is exactly why it’s become the trusted collagen protein of both pro and amateur athletes all over the United States.
We believe collagen should be on hand for every Hollywood stuntman or woman too. And it’s available in single-serving liquid pouches for on-the-go convenience, fitting into a duffel or backpack. Try some today and start to work toward your peak performance.