Hyaluronic Acid for Athletes?

May 22, 2026

TL;DR Innovation often comes from borrowing ideas across fields. Oral hyaluronic acid is usually discussed for skin hydration and wrinkles, but because skin, fascia, tendons, ligaments and joints are all connective tissues, its potential relevance to athletes, recovery and tissue resilience is worth exploring.

Over my career I worked across multiple sports.

Tennis. BMX. MTB. MotoX. Football codes.

One thing I noticed:

Cross pollination looks like Innovation.

Or maybe,

Cross pollination IS Innovation.

I had to learn bench press mechanics when I was training an elite powerlifter.

Later, those lessons underpinned how I coached upper body strength in skinny tennis players.

Concussion and TBI research made me think differently about creatine long before most performance coaches started discussing “brain energy.”

Then gut health research started influencing how I thought about recovery, illness resilience and athlete availability.

Recently I’ve been reading research on ingesting hyaluronic acid (HA).

(Context: It’s a key ingredient in our Collagen Beauty Boost and, yes, supplementing with HA has been shown to “inhibits skin wrinkles and improves skin condition.”)

Not from sports science journals.

Beauty research.

Most people hear “hyaluronic acid” and think:

skin care
wrinkles
cosmetic clinics

But as you know, skin, fascia, tendons, ligaments and joint surfaces are all connective tissues.

And in high performance sport, connective tissue quality matters.

So the question is, if oral hyaluronic acid improves skin hydration and tissue quality… Could there also be implications for:

tendon resilience?
joint tolerance?
fascia quality?
load absorption?
recovery capacity?

To be clear, I’m not I saying “oral HA prevents injuries.”

I’m saying this is how cross pollination starts.

In most cases (an ideal world?) it would be:

Curiosity
Research
Application.

But at the pointier ends of human performance it’s:

Curiosity
Application
(…. and years later) Research.

There is growing evidence that injectable HA may help in certain tendinous conditions including:

That does not automatically mean oral HA does the same thing.

But it may be enough to justify curiosity.

Particularly when thinking about:

older athletes with years of accumulated loading
athletes transitioning surfaces (e.g. from clay court to hard court)
high tendon-load environments (e.g. volleyball or basketball)
connective tissue recovery during dense competition blocks

Maybe the next useful performance idea is hiding in another industry entirely.

And maybe we should get our Collagen Beauty Boost HASTA certified?

About the Author

Grant Jenkins is the founder of Propel Health Australia and a high-performance coach and physiologist with over 25 years’ experience working with elite and developing athletes. He formulates evidence-based supplements designed to support both performance and long-term health.