MK-677 grogginess is the complaint Tony Huge hears most, and plenty of people quit over it. His answer in this video is that the grogginess is not a malfunction. It is the compound doing the one thing it is supposed to do. He walks through the 24-hour growth hormone pulse, the 1997 electrode sleep study that almost every health site misquotes, and the reason a middle-aged man on a growth hormone secretagogue starts wanting sleep the way a teenager does.
Video: MK677 Grogginess Explained: The Sleep Study Nobody Cites Right. Published July 28, 2026. Watch on YouTube.
What the video covers
- 00:00 The complaint: Grogginess is the number one reason research subjects want to quit MK-677, and why Tony calls it the benefit showing up.
- 00:55 Fifteen years as a research subject: On and off the compound, plus the actual sleep studies with electrodes rather than questionnaires.
- 01:26 The growth hormone pulse: Around 70% of overnight growth hormone in men comes out during deep sleep, and the biggest pulse of the day lands right after sleep onset.
- 02:10 The 1997 study: Stage four sleep up about 50% in young men, REM up more than 20%, abnormal nights down from 42% to 8%.
- 03:20 The citation that does not exist: How a nitrogen-balance author, a 32-subject IGF-1 study and a sleep result got stapled together and copied everywhere.
- 04:45 More sleep, not less: Why the “eight hours of quality in six” claim is the opposite of the finding.
- 06:56 Who the study left out: Fourteen untrained people, one to two weeks, no athletes, no year three.
- 08:01 Tony’s own side effects: Hunger, grogginess, daytime pulses and the recovery that came with them.
- 09:32 Water retention and sleep apnea: Why fluid around the neck matters and the nasal strip he uses.
- 10:28 Hunger and carbs: The roughly 50/50 split among research subjects and the carbohydrate feedback loop.
- 11:26 Blood sugar: What Tony reports about pairing MK-677 with Slin pills and his HbA1c.
Deep sleep is where the growth hormone comes from
Tony starts with the curve most people never look at. Growth hormone does not trickle out evenly across the day. It arrives in pulses, and the largest pulse of the whole 24 hours fires shortly after you fall asleep, as you drop into deep slow-wave sleep. In men, he says, about 70% of overnight growth hormone release happens inside those deep stages, and the more deep sleep you get, the bigger that pulse is.
A compound that raises growth hormone while wrecking your sleep has traded away the main production line to buy a little back. Deep sleep is not a bonus sitting on top of growth hormone. In Tony’s framing it is both the source of the hormone and the environment it works through.
The 1997 study, read correctly
Tony cites a 1997 study in the Journal of Neuroendocrinology in which healthy people took MK-677 at bedtime and then underwent a full polysomnography, electrodes on the scalp, every sleep stage scored. No self-reporting on how rested anyone felt. Two groups: eight young men aged 18 to 30 and six older adults aged 65 to 71.
In the young group at the higher of the doses the researchers chose, stage four sleep rose about 50%. Stage four is the deepest slow-wave stage, the one the growth hormone pulse rides on. REM went up more than 20%. In the older group, REM sleep jumped nearly 50% and subjects entered it faster than on placebo. The number Tony flags most is the abnormality count: on placebo, 42% of the young group’s nights deviated from a normal pattern. On MK-677, 8%.
Then he shows the part that cost him some faith in health publishing. Several large sites cite this study and get it wrong. One credits the sleep findings to Murphy and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology in 1998, with 32 subjects aged 64 to 81. Tony’s point is that no such sleep study exists. Murphy has three papers on MK-677, on nitrogen balance, bone turnover markers and a bone drug combination, and none put electrodes on anyone’s head. The 32 subjects aged 64 to 81 are real, but they come from a 1996 study on growth hormone and IGF-1 that measured no sleep at all. Someone took results from one paper, subjects from another, an author from a third, and everyone else copied it.
“Somebody took the results from one study, stapled them onto the subjects from another study, credited the guy that never ran it, and then everybody else copied it.”
Tony Huge, 03:20
Why the body asks for more sleep, not less
Another claim making the rounds is that MK-677 users felt like they got eight hours of sleep from six. Tony says it is in no paper. It is invented, and it is harmful, because it tells you that you can get by on less when the actual finding points the other way. If sleep is deeper and growth hormone is higher, the body is in growth mode, and growth mode has a cost. The cost is sleep.
His analogy is the teenager. A 15-year-old sleeps 12 hours on a Saturday and nobody calls a doctor. He is growing, and growing requires recovery. A grown man who pushes his growth hormone back toward what it was at 19 should expect his body to start demanding sleep like it did at 19. The grogginess is that demand. Tony’s own pattern confirms it: when he treated MK-677 as a reason to sleep less, he was drowsier and recovered worse. When he combined it with forcing himself to sleep more, he got his best results. He is careful to say it is not a sleeping pill. It did not make him fall asleep faster or sleep longer on its own. It improved the quality of the sleep he got, and he paired it with other things that supported falling asleep.
Who the study left out
Tony is not knocking the study, but fourteen people, one week for the young group and two for the older, and not one trained athlete among them. Nobody was lifting hard or eating to grow. The study can say the compound changes sleep in untrained people over two weeks. It cannot say what year three looks like, what happens in a man training six days a week who needs more recovery, or whether the effect desensitizes over time.
Until someone runs that trial, what fills the gap is anecdote, and Tony gives his. Thirteen or more years of intermittent use, on and off, which let him run many experiments. Hunger and grogginess came with it. So did better recovery, more muscle and a bigger appetite for quality food, which he says has declined with age. He used it when he wanted to eat a lot to put on size and when he was training harder, because the recovery benefit was greatest then. His own lab work, he says, showed pulses through the day, not just one bigger nighttime spike, and each daytime pulse brought a little drowsiness, the body deciding it was time to grow even in daylight.
Three side effects that intersect with sleep
Water retention rises with growth hormone, and Tony says that is fine inside the muscle. Around the neck or the heart it is not, and fluid around the neck on top of a thick neck and some fat is enough to cause sleep apnea. His fix has been a nasal strip to open the nasal passage, and his diagnostic has been asking whoever he shares a bed with whether he stops breathing, snores, or seems to be working to breathe.
Hunger is hit or miss. In his case, carbohydrates fed the hunger, so more carbs meant more hunger, and skipping carbs before bed let him sleep through it. He estimates about half of research subjects sleep fine and half feel enough hunger to disturb sleep, and he wants trials that compare morning against evening dosing with a bigger sample, ideally with genetics, to find out why.
Blood sugar is the last one, because elevated glucose is also bad for sleep. Tony reports that whenever he took Slin pills alongside MK-677, his blood sugar and HbA1c did not rise; in his account the combination more than offset the insulin sensitivity decrease he would otherwise expect.
Cheat Sheet Pivot
What Tony reported and what the cited study measured, not instructions.
- The 1997 study gave MK-677 at bedtime to 14 people and measured sleep with electrodes: stage four sleep up about 50% and REM up more than 20% in young men, REM up nearly 50% in older adults, and abnormal nights falling from 42% to 8% in the young group.
- Tony treats the grogginess as a signal to sleep more, not a side effect to fight with caffeine, and says his best results came when he combined MK-677 with deliberately longer sleep.
- He manages apnea risk from water retention with a nasal strip and a partner’s report on his breathing, avoids carbs before bed to blunt hunger, and reports pairing it with Slin pills kept his HbA1c from rising.
- The study had no trained athletes and ran one to two weeks; long-term and athlete-specific effects remain anecdotal.
MK-677 and the other secretagogues Tony compares are in the Miracle Molecules Cheat Sheet. For his 12-week run with full labs, read MK-677 (Ibutamoren) Honest Review: 12 Weeks, Full Bloodwork, and for the pulsatile versus continuous distinction that explains why MK-677 behaves differently from tesamorelin, see Tesamorelin Exposed: Same Growth Hormone, Different Doorway.
Where the evidence stops
The only electrode sleep study Tony cites is 14 untrained people over one to two weeks. It says nothing about years of use, hard training, or desensitization, and Tony says so. The daytime pulse pattern comes from his own labs, not a trial. The 50/50 hunger split, the carbohydrate feedback loop and the Slin pill effect on his HbA1c are his observations and his research subjects’ reports, not controlled data. Nobody has run the morning-versus-evening dosing comparison he asks for.
What is solid is the mechanism he builds on: growth hormone pulses ride on deep sleep, MK-677 increased deep sleep in the one study that measured it properly, and the widely copied citation for that finding is wrong in author, journal, sample size and age range.
Keep going
For the other question people ask about this compound, read Can MK-677 Make You Taller? What the Research Shows. Companion write-ups for new videos go out first to the tonyhuge.is email list, and the growth hormone archive lives on tonyhuge.is.