CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin Dosage: What Studies Used vs What Clinics Sell

Search "CJC-1295 ipamorelin dosage" and you will get the same confident protocol from page after page: 100 micrograms of each, injected subcutaneously before bed, often five nights a week, for eight to twelve weeks. Nearly every page giving you those numbers is written by a company selling the vials. So here is the fact they all omit, stated first: no published human trial has ever tested the 100 mcg + 100 mcg protocol. The human studies that do exist used different doses — larger by one to two orders of magnitude — different routes, different schedules, and, in CJC-1295's case, a different version of the molecule from the one most vendors ship. There is no validated dosing regimen for this stack, and that absence is the finding, not a gap this article will paper over.

What follows is descriptive, not prescriptive: what the published studies actually administered, where the clinic numbers really come from, and the arithmetic that is genuinely checkable. Both peptides are unapproved drugs and this is not medical advice — any decision that involves injecting a growth-hormone secretagogue belongs with a licensed clinician, not a dosage chart.

What Doses Did the Human CJC-1295 Studies Actually Use?

CJC-1295 has real human dosing data — that is what separates it from most gray-market peptides — but the numbers look nothing like the clinic protocol.

The core study is Teichman 2006: two randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind ascending-dose trials in healthy adults aged 21 to 61. CJC-1295 was given subcutaneously in four ascending single doses in the first trial, and in two or three weekly or biweekly doses in the second. A single injection raised mean plasma GH 2- to 10-fold for six days or more and IGF-1 1.5- to 3-fold for 9 to 11 days, the drug's measured half-life was 5.8 to 8.1 days, and the paper concluded it was best tolerated at 30 or 60 micrograms per kilogram¹. Run that on an 80-kilogram adult: 60 mcg/kg is 4.8 milligrams in one injection — 48 times the folklore's 100 mcg shot — given weekly, not nightly.

The follow-on study, Ionescu and Frohman 2006, injected healthy men with 60 or 90 mcg/kg once, then sampled blood every 20 minutes overnight a week later. Trough GH levels rose 7.5-fold with pulsatility preserved, mean GH rose 46%, IGF-1 rose 45% — and there was no significant difference between the two doses². That last detail matters later, because it is the closest thing to a real dose-ceiling observation in this literature, and it happened at doses dozens of times larger than anything a clinic sells.

The Version Problem: The Studied Drug Is Not the Sold Drug

Both human studies dosed CJC-1295 with DAC — the drug-affinity-complex modification that binds the peptide to albumin and produces that multi-day half-life¹. What research-chemical vendors mostly sell as "CJC-1295" in stack vials is the no-DAC version, also called Mod GRF(1-29): a different molecule with a half-life of minutes, and no published human dose-finding study of its own. So the one genuinely studied human dosing schedule belongs to a compound most buyers are not actually holding. The two versions are not interchangeable, and the differences run deeper than duration — we break them down in CJC-1295 with DAC vs no-DAC.

What Doses Did the Human Ipamorelin Studies Actually Use?

Ipamorelin's reputation — the "clean," selective GH pulse — comes from Raun 1998, which is animal pharmacology: pituitary cells, anesthetized rats, and conscious swine, with GH-release potency reported in nanomoles per kilogram and the headline finding that ipamorelin, unlike GHRP-2 and GHRP-6, did not raise ACTH or cortisol even at more than 200-fold its effective dose³. Useful science; not a human dosing study.

The human pharmacokinetic data come from Gobburu 1999: eight healthy men per dose level received intravenous infusions at five escalating rates, from 4.21 to 140.45 nmol/kg over 15 minutes — roughly 3 to 100 micrograms per kilogram. The peptide showed a terminal half-life of about 2 hours, and each infusion produced a single episode of GH release peaking at 40 minutes and then declining to negligible levels — at every dose tested⁴. One pulse per dose, gone within hours: that is the measured shape of ipamorelin's effect in humans.

The largest human trial is Beck 2014, a phase 2 randomized controlled trial for postoperative ileus: 0.03 mg/kg intravenously twice daily for up to seven days — about 2.4 milligrams per infusion for an 80-kilogram patient, or roughly 24 times the folklore shot, twice a day. The drug was well tolerated, and it failed: median time to a first tolerated meal was 25.3 hours on ipamorelin versus 32.6 on placebo, not statistically significant⁵. Ipamorelin has been dosed in humans at multiples of anything a clinic sells, in a proper trial, and the trial missed its endpoint.

Where Does the 100 mcg + 100 mcg Protocol Come From?

Not from any of the studies above. The trail runs through bodybuilding forums, where a "saturation dose" of roughly 1 mcg/kg — rounded to a flat 100 mcg — was asserted for the GHRP/GHRH class in the late 2000s and has been copied between vendors and clinics ever since. It is worth being precise about which parts of that idea have scientific support and which do not.

What is real: receptor-mediated GH release does saturate. Gobburu measured a half-maximal stimulatory concentration for ipamorelin⁴, and Ionescu found no added effect from 90 mcg/kg of CJC-1295 over 60². Diminishing returns at some dose is genuine pharmacology.

What is not: the specific claim that 100 mcg subcutaneously is that saturation point for either peptide. No published human subcutaneous dose-response study establishes it — for ipamorelin, no human subcutaneous dosing study of any kind has been published at all. The nightly-before-bed timing, the five-on-two-off pattern, and the eight-to-twelve-week cycle length are equally untraceable to a trial; the on-off logic in particular is examined in our review of peptide cycling protocols, and the same folklore problem runs through sermorelin dosing, the older GHRH peptide these clinics also sell.

One caution against misreading this section: the fact that studies dosed far higher is not an argument for taking more. The studied compound was different (DAC), the routes were different (IV for ipamorelin), the settings were monitored trials — and the safety record is not clean. The FDA's compounding review of these substances notes serious adverse events associated with CJC-1295, including increased heart rate and a systemic vasodilatory reaction, and a published report of serious adverse events, including death, when ipamorelin was administered intravenously for gastric motility⁹. The gap between studied doses and sold doses is evidence that the sold protocol is unanchored — nothing more.

The Vial Math Is Real Even When the Protocol Is Not

One part of the dosage question is honest arithmetic rather than folklore: converting a labeled vial into a known concentration. The stack commonly ships as a combined vial — for example 5 mg of CJC-1295 (no-DAC) plus 5 mg of ipamorelin as one powder. Add 2 milliliters of bacteriostatic water and you have 2.5 mg/mL of each peptide; on a U-100 insulin syringe, where 100 units span 1 mL, each unit mark then carries 25 micrograms of each compound, so a 100 mcg + 100 mcg draw is 4 units. Change the water volume and every one of those numbers changes with it.

Our peptide reconstitution calculator runs that conversion for any vial, the bacteriostatic water calculator works the diluent decision in the other direction, and the insulin syringe units converter handles the units-to-volume step alone. The technique itself — and the sterility practice around it — is covered in how to reconstitute peptides and how to inject peptides. Two limits on all of it: a blended vial fixes the ratio, so the two peptides cannot be dosed independently, and the arithmetic only tells you what a syringe unit contains. It cannot tell you what belongs in the syringe, because no human trial has answered that.

Banned in Tested Sport at Any Dose

For a drug-tested athlete, the dosage debate is moot. Both peptides fall under WADA Prohibited List category S2 — peptide hormones, growth factors, and related substances — prohibited at all times, in and out of competition, and USADA warns athletes directly against "research chemical" peptides of exactly this kind¹⁰. There is no compliant dose. Anti-doping laboratories treat the pair as a priority target: methods specifically for detecting GHRH analogs like CJC-1295 are an active area of anti-doping chemistry⁶, and when Norwegian police submitted an unknown seized preparation to the Oslo doping-control laboratory in 2009, mass spectrometry identified it as CJC-1295 — a substance the lab noted was being sold to the public without ever completing clinical trials⁷. You can check any compound's status in our WADA prohibited-status checker, read the category-by-category breakdown in the WADA prohibited list for peptides, and see detection-window reality in do peptides show up on drug tests.

The Market Layer: What You Are Actually Buying

Neither peptide is an FDA-approved drug, and both sit on the FDA's list of bulk substances flagged for significant safety risk in compounding — ipamorelin acetate under both the 503A and 503B interim policies⁹. We track where each compound stands in the peptide regulatory tracker. The practical consequence is a two-tier market, and the dosage question lands differently in each.

On the research-chemical tier, the Henninge seizure is the permanent caution: illicitly manufactured peptides reach buyers before any trial finishes, and only a laboratory can say what a vial holds⁷. A certificate of analysis is the minimum filter — how to actually verify a COA shows what a real third-party document looks like, and peptide vendor red flags catalogs the sales patterns that should end the conversation.

On the telehealth tier, a prescriber sets the dose — but the pricing is its own arithmetic test. ElitePhysiqMD prices CJC-1295 with ipamorelin at $315.00 a month, and every displayed price on that page is already 10% off for enrolling in a recurring subscription, so the one-time rate is higher and never shown. Live Vital lists CJC-1295/ipamorelin at $116 a month, but its "/mo" figures are ten-week protocol totals divided by three rather than by 2.3 calendar months, understating every price by roughly 30% — and no strength or vial size is published for any product on the site, so a per-milligram comparison is impossible. Telos Rx currently lists all four of its CJC-1295/ipamorelin tiers as "TBC — pricing to be confirmed" — an advertised product with no advertised price at all — and its terms authorize a retroactive re-rating charge if you cancel a multi-month plan early, re-billing delivered months at the shortest plan's higher rate.

Bottom Line

The honest answer to "what is the CJC-1295 and ipamorelin dosage?" is that the published human record contains real numbers — 30 to 90 mcg/kg of the DAC version weekly for CJC-1295¹², 3 to 100 mcg/kg intravenous infusions and 0.03 mg/kg twice daily for ipamorelin⁴⁵ — and that none of them validate, resemble, or even address the 100 mcg + 100 mcg subcutaneous nightly protocol the clinics sell. No human trial has tested that regimen, no human study has dosed the no-DAC version at all, and the class's best-studied cousin, MK-677, is the standing reminder that even a secretagogue dosed correctly in a real trial moved biomarkers without improving strength or function⁸.

Whether the stack achieves anything at any dose is a separate question with its own answer — our ipamorelin + CJC-1295 stack review walks through the outcome evidence, ipamorelin side effects covers what the "clean peptide" reputation leaves out, and GHRP-2 vs GHRP-6 vs hexarelin places ipamorelin among the secretagogues it was designed to improve on. For where GH peptides sit against the rest of the recovery field, see GH peptides and recovery and our evidence-ranked best recovery peptides board. And if you take one sentence from this page, take this one: a protocol every seller agrees on is not the same thing as a protocol any study has tested.