MOTS-c is a peptide your own mitochondria make when you exercise — and 202 people in our log inject it from a vial instead. That is the whole file in one sentence. Every other data series on this site set a community against a missing or failed trial. This one sets it against the body: the only MOTS-c ever measured in a human is MOTS-c that human already made.
This page is a census of behaviour beside the evidence. It recommends nothing.
You already make it
MOTS-c is a 16-amino-acid microprotein encoded in a short open reading frame inside the mitochondrial genome, in the 12S rRNA region2. In humans it behaves like a tide. Volunteers who exercised had muscle biopsies taken, and MOTS-c in skeletal muscle had risen 11.9-fold; in the blood it rose 1.6-fold during exercise and 1.5-fold after, and after four hours of rest the levels were heading back to baseline1. The body makes it on demand and clears it.
The mice really did run further (mice)
The famous results are real and published — and they are animal results. In the same paper, ten days of injected MOTS-c gave mice superior running capacity and power output; seven days did not. Young, middle-aged and old mice all improved. On a high-fat diet, treated mice kept their skeletal-muscle insulin sensitivity1. The dose was milligrams per kilogram of mouse. We do not convert it into a human figure, on screen or here: a model bridge that holds in a lab rig is not a road.
Measured, never given
Every human study in the 207 papers we hold measures MOTS-c the body produced: higher after exercise14, lower in people with obstructive sleep apnoea5, lower in some thyroid and cardiac conditions. Associations, read from blood. There is no trial in which a person was given MOTS-c. The most recent review states the "lack of human clinical trials to characterize safety, dosing, and adverse events"3.
Where the community data comes from
Our pipeline indexes public discussion. For MOTS-c the corpus is YouTube only: 2,539 passages — comments under 244 videos and the transcripts of 93. From those the pipeline extracted 379 usage records of every provenance, including people describing mouse studies, clinician protocols and hearsay. Keep only records where a human describes their own use and the log is:
294 reports · 237 sources · 202 people.
A report is one usage claim; a source is one comment or transcript; a person is a person. Every count below uses that filter. *Correction:* the first version of this page (14 Aug) counted all provenance — 449 reports from 248 people — and has been replaced by the filtered figures.
The number came out of the bottle
Of the 294 reports, 290 state milligrams.
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Median per shot | 2 mg |
| Middle half (IQR) | 1 → 3.35 mg |
| Exactly 1 mg | 100 of 290 |
| On a simple fraction of a 10 mg vial (0.5 / 1 / 2 / 2.5 / 5 / 10) | 241 of 290 |
| Full range | 0.1 → 150 mg (the 150 is a "cycle" total quoted as one figure) |
The peptide is sold as 10 mg in a vial. One milligram is one square of a bar scored into ten. You can watch the arithmetic in the comments — *"If Mots-c is a 10mg vial, you can reconstitute it with 1ml of bac water. If you do that, then 10 units of an insulin syringe is 1mg."* The number lives in the container, not in a trial.
Three schedules, no agreement
Of the 132 reports that state a pace, 51 describe daily use, 61 three to six times a week (Monday/Wednesday/Friday is the signature), 20 once or twice a week. The per-shot medians move in the opposite direction to frequency — daily 1 mg, three-to-six times 3 mg, once or twice 5 mg — which tempted us to write that weekly totals "converge". Our own check killed the sentence: within each group the computed weekly totals run 1.4–70 mg, 0.9–45 mg and 1–10 mg. The medians line up; the people do not.
The same lamp, twice
"Energy" is the most-written word in the corpus — 365 of 2,539 passages. It is also the complaint: of 32 adverse reports (from 24 people), ten are about sleep — *"I took about .5mg first, then second day I went to 1mg and I was up all night with lots of energy."* Nine describe injection-site welts or itching, four a crash or tiredness, two dizziness or low blood sugar. Counts, not rates; four of the 32 also recorded a win.
Most of the cards are blank
| Stated outcome | Reports |
|---|---|
| None | 172 (169 with no outcome text at all) |
| Positive | 102 |
| Negative | 17 |
| Mixed | 3 |
This is the loudest log we hold — 35% of reports positive, against 19% for SS-31. It is still a show of hands in a room where most people stayed quiet: "none" means nothing was said, not that nothing happened, and the people who felt nothing rarely write.
Two paint cans
Seventy-six of the 202 people also describe another compound: retatrutide 37, SS-31 20, NAD+ 8, cagrilintide 5, tirzepatide 4. The most-liked win in the log — *"1.5 mg Mots-c 3 times a week, 1.5 mg Retatrutide once a week … Down 20 lbs in 5 weeks"* — pairs it with a GLP-1 drug whose own trials removed about a fifth of body weight. Once the colours are in the tray they do not come back out. The stack even circulates with two opposite instructions, each called "the standard": SS-31 before MOTS-c, and MOTS-c before SS-31.
The cycle is the box
Sixty reports (53 people) say how long they ran it: median five weeks, 37 at six weeks or less, the longest 30. The length is set by the packaging — *"you need 8 vials of 10mg to do the 8 weeks"* — because there is no trial duration to copy. And the box cannot tell you what the log cannot: nobody's vial was tested, nothing was weighed, 172 of 294 never said whether it worked, and the human trial that would settle any of it was never run.
The whole file in three lines: your body makes this when you move and clears it within hours; mice ran further on it and no person has been given it in a trial; and a log full of people are doing arithmetic on a 10 mg bottle.
ZyraTrack is a research and education tool. We never sell or source compounds, never recommend doses, and refuse sourcing questions. If you use anything discussed here, that is between you and a clinician; our job is only to make the numbers around it honest.