Join me on this episode of Test as we delve into the fascinating world of L-carnitine. Discover how this powerful amino acid can transform body fat into energy, enhance heart health, and boost performance. I'll guide you through the protocols for fat loss, muscle gain, and optimizing androgen receptors. We'll explore the timing of L-carnitine in your diet and supplementation to achieve your desired results. Learn about the inside-out and outside-in approaches to health and how they can impact your overall well-being. Whether you're an athlete or just curious about maximizing your health, this episode is packed with insights and practical tips. Don't miss out on understanding the science behind L-carnitine and how it can be a game-changer in your health journey. Tune in now to unlock the secrets of this remarkable compound.
Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dan Garner is diving deep into L-carnitine. Quite simply, the biggest catch phrase that you can have for this is how to turn body fat into energy, but we're also gonna dig into the protocols for heart health, for performance, for fat loss, for muscle gain, androgen receptors.
We're gonna dig into all the possible protocols that you could use, how to time L-carnitine in your diet and supplementation to get the exact result that you are looking for.
As always, friends, make sure you head over to rapidhealthreport.com, rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a lab lifestyle and performance analysis for everybody, well, not for everybody, for one client, but what everybody gets inside rapid health optimization and your optimization plans, protocols, et cetera.
You can see that, go watch the full hour-long video for free over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show.
Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Anders Barner, Doug Larson, Dan Garner in the house today. Today on Barbell Shrug, we're gonna be digging to L-carnitine.
Many people may not know what L-carnitine is. Guess what? You're gonna be super, super interested in this because everybody wonders how to mobilize stored fat into energy, and right now, you should listen because Dan Garner's going to drop all the knowledge on exactly that process.
Dude, I'd love to really start this thing off since it's at the highest level. What is L-carnitine and what is its role in the body? So L-carnitine, I'm actually really excited
Yeah, man. to talk about this today because I just found kind of recently on a lot of podcasts, I'm almost always talking about the inside out stuff. So when I'm looking at labs and making decisions based on the microbiome or vitamins and minerals status or electrolyte status or hormones or something like that,
I'm almost always discussing and referring to things from the inside out that I think people kind of forgot. I program a lot from the outside in with the athletes, like I'm working with, say, Sean O'Malley and his performance outputs and protocols from the outside in, Mark Bell with the marathon, the bodybuilders I work with, all these people,
I'm doing outside in and inside out. So I'm actually really excited to talk about carnitine here today because this is something that I program from the outside in quite frequently, and it's something I really don't need lab work for.
So this is something that I think is very podcast friendly because sometimes on podcasts, it's kind of like, well, I don't know the answer of what you should do until I do your labs.
And then the listeners can be like, well, that's not totally helpful, but it is interesting. Sounds like this guy knows about big words for sure.
Right, right, right. Wait, can you further define the outside in versus inside out aspect? There are people that don't know when we do a wrap at how you're kind of the inside out guy and Andy's the outside in guy.
Like, can you just define that so people understand what you're talking about? Well, that's a philosophy I've been doing since like 2014. So this is something that I've been doing for a very long time.
I teach the inside out and the outside in in my mentorship courses that I created many, many years ago. So essentially what I wanted to create was a true holistic and systemic approach to coaching that doesn't leave anything unchecked because I've always felt that the subjective is as important as the objective.
So when I'm looking at labs or I'm looking at things very objective, like the microbiome, hormones, immune markers, blood work, urine, saliva, stool, these things are very much from the inside out.
And you can also pick up subjective things from the inside out as well regarding adrenal measures, inflammation, if somebody's got sore joints, digestive issues, if they've got loose stools, constipation, these things are all very much from the inside out.
However, you also want to utilize and encompass an outside in approach because somebody's environment around them matters as much to their results as their environment within them.
Somebody's psychological health, somebody's emotional health, somebody's sleep status, somebody's stress in life, somebody's relationship with their partners or with their boss or with their colleagues or with the teammates on their team.
These are all things I would very much consider outside in that are of equal importance as the inside out. The inside out is always very fun and sexy to discuss because it involves complicated and sophisticated things such as the mitochondria, the density, the efficiency, having micronutrient availability.
These protocols always seem very, very, very like this is my aha answer. But unless you have your outside in figured out, none of that stuff really matters.
Your routines, your rituals, the way in which you view and approach health, if it's too complicated, if it's too simple, if you like details, if you want simplicity and big picture stuff, this is all going to move in one system moving forward.
So from the inside out and the outside in, I think that everybody would have a true approach to what is going to actually allow them to identify the rate limiting step or the constraint like we call here a lot of rapid, the constraint that's actually holding them back.
Because as much as you can have a constraint being low testosterone, you can have a constraint with your morning routine starting off your entire day and ultimately wrecking the results that you're getting or having a constraint with the way in which you approach the weekends rather than approach Monday to Friday.
A lot of people have this stuff from the outside in. So that's kind of like how I approach outside in and inside out. And outside in stuff is very much applicable to be prescribed in the absence of any kind of lab work.
So this is basically how I operated the majority of my coaching career before I started working with clients who could afford lab work. And before I had the education to even interpret lab work.
So I've had a ton of experience purely doing outside in stuff before I was able to do the inside out stuff. And I'm excited to talk about it.
So I'm excited to talk about carnitine. So with that little segue here. At the top. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, let's rock. So carnitine, honestly carnitine is something where like, it's been around forever.
So this is a product that's been around forever. And I kind of just wrote it off in the beginning. If you've been taking supplements as long as me, like 20 years or so, odds are you've wasted as much money as me on supplements.
Back in the day, I mean, we had stuff. Not only did it not work, but it tasted horribly. Yeah, so we're just in the name of being a meathead.
This label says it'll get me jacked. So let me just try this. And then you find out it's like 500 milligrams of like arginine.
You think that you're gonna get gigantic off of it. Everybody that takes Organifi or athletic greens should learn what those greens tasted like a decade ago.
Oh man. Yeah. Just the raw extract. Yeah. Even whey, whey protein. Whey was disgusting.
Go ahead. I can talk about those. Go ahead. Yeah, the cement mixer that we're supposed to drink post-workout. And we still did.
But yeah, so like back in the day, I kind of wrote it off. A, cause I felt like I had wasted enough money on stuff that didn't work. And there was kind of like a red flag from the marketing.
People was like, carnitine will get you ripped. Carnitine is gonna get you lean. You'll get a six pack with carnitine. So I kind of wrote it off. And I especially kind of wrote it off because it came at a time when I was starting to read a lot more real research and develop my own opinions on things rather than just listen to experts.
And when I was reading the research, I identified that the oral bioavailability of carnitine, it's only 14 to 18%. So I'm like, oh, the oral bioavailability is quite low.
The marketing seems insane. Let me kind of stay away from this thing for a while. And then I did, stayed away from it for a while. And then you end up kind of making your way back into it, not necessarily through marketing or even a lot of like research studies cause I wasn't necessarily getting into a bunch of those.
I actually learned about it getting through the back way of learning a nutritional biochemistry. So looking at cellular responses, how beta oxidation works, how enzymes work.
And then you start to just see like, man, so carnitine's involved in energetics. It's involved in recovery. It's involved in androgen receptors.
It's involved in cardiac health. It's involved in potentiating growth hormone. It's involved in fat loss.
It's involved in glycogen sparing. It can be used not just as a glucose disposal agent, but really like a food altering agent.
It's involved in, you just start seeing it so many places and you're like, holy crap. This is actually popping up in a lot of different areas and it is amino acid, just like any other amino acid.
So despite being plagued by marketing in the past and plagued by some dumb things that you see in the early 2000s, you actually start to see, like carnitine is an umbrella term.
Like it is an amino acid, sure. A lot of people kind of end the conversation there, but there are long chain carnitines. There are medium chain carnitines.
There are carnitine transferases. And that's really what you want to leverage. You've got, you want to leverage carnitine transferases. And that's kind of how I want the listeners to listen to this podcast is that you are utilizing carnitine as your ability to leverage carnitine enzyme activity.
And we can get into that when we kind of get into fat loss because there's a carnitine acetyltransferase or CAT you'll see in the research. There's carnitine palmitoyltransferase or CPT that you'll see in the research.
These are things that you really want to leverage. Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com.
When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health.
Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach.
So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you.
Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns.
And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com.
You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and, my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward.
I really, really hope that you're able to go over to RapidHealthReport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. If it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page.
Once again, it's RapidHealthReport.com, and let's get back to the show. Mad Fientist To your point about that, I know we're talking about fat loss, which I'm really looking forward to, but in exercise physiology in graduate school, when we were learning about beta-oxidation and transferases and how fatty acids move in and out of the mitochondria, etc., and we were talking about L-carnitine, my professor said, even though biochemically, this is the mechanism, this is how it works, when you take L-carnitine as a supplement, it doesn't seem to promote any additional fat loss.
People thought it would, because it seems to kind of logically make sense, but then the studies didn't really shake out as any actual real-world benefit. To your point about writing it off, I kind of wrote off L-carnitine as well for a long time, and so when you brought up wanting to do this show, I was like, oh, I thought that was something that I didn't really need to pay attention to, so I was actually really excited to do this show specifically because I decided many years ago that it was something that didn't warrant any further attention.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, yeah. And so there's a couple of reasons for that, and I'm glad you brought that up. So basically, like this is audio only, so basically, you can imagine the mitochondria on the left, and then in the center, you've got your inner cell membrane, and then on the right side, you've got your cytosol that contains all these nutrients.
Well, that inner cell membrane, that's actually what we want to leverage from a carnitine enzymatic perspective. And the reason why a lot of research studies don't work, A, because bio—bioavailability is poor.
So you need to either, A, inject it, which is actually 100% bioavailable, so you can inject carnitine, and for people who are saying, wait, inject carnitine, are you out of your mind?
It's actually legal. So you could walk up to the police station with a needle in your delt and be like, what's up, man? Yeah, this is just carnitine.
So this is—this is—it's a 100% illegal—legal—legal— Dr. Justin Marchegiani Assuming they believe you. It's carnitine. Oh, no! You're being cuffed. It's just carnitine. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, it might be a suspicious activity, but it is something—you can actually inject carnitine for 100% bioavailability, or you can just purely do the math.
So if you inject carnitine at about 500 milligrams of carnitine, typically 500 milligrams per one mil is a concentration you'll see a lot, and that's available in many places because it is legal.
That is an efficacious dose for many, many, many things. But when you do the math and you kind of average it out, okay, bioavailability is 14 to 18%, so even on the low end, if we say 15%, to make the math easier, three and a half grams of carnitine supplementation is 525 milligrams of bioavailable carnitine.
So we can just override that because the thing is injectable carnitine must be a pain in the ass because daily administration will be required and it's intramuscular. So it's not even like those little insulin needles that you see 50% of the American population need to use because of type 2 diabetes, those little things that could just go right in your stomach, hyper easy, right, or the longevity crowd, they're super into growth hormone.
That's just a little tiny insulin needle as well. That's something that's hyper quick. Carnitine is intramuscular. So to do an intramuscular injection daily, even for the most hardcore people is a real pain in the ass.
Yeah, it's a lot, right? So you can actually just kind of flip that and utilize three and a half grams of carnitine. Now to kind of pull all the way back to Doug's statement about a lot of these things didn't shake out.
Number one, oral bioavailability and what we know more about that now. Number two, to gain the benefits of carnitine, just like creatine, you need to increase carnitine muscular saturation.
So creatine muscular saturation is going to take about a month at about five grams per day if you're less than 200 pounds, it's going to take about a month. Carnitine is very similar.
In order to start maximizing the benefits of carnitine, you're going to need to increase intramuscular concentrations of carnitine. And that's not a one time event, it's not like caffeine, people want to take things and feel something right away.
You need to increase muscular concentrations of carnitine. So if it's a short study, you're not going to get that effect. And last but not least, and one of the most important components of this podcast is that if anything was timing dependent, it's carnitine.
It is such an environmentally specific supplement that if you do take it at an incorrect time, you will get the incorrect output.
Like it is carnitine is very, very, very input output in terms of when you're going to use it for fat loss, when you're going to use it for recovery, when you're going to use it for growth hormone potentiation, when you're going to use it for glucose disposal.
These are all different things and really different amounts of carnitine as well. So you guys want to explore some of those concepts? Yeah.
I want to dig into this timing thing. How is that consistent with like needing a month or whatever to to be fully saturated but it still matters when you take it if you've reached saturation?
It does seem to matter. So you need muscular saturation over the course of time, but timing in an immediate event still seems to matter.
So although enzymatic activity seems to get up regulated with saturation over the course of time, there is a timing dependent effect based upon the environment for which you're doing it.
So fat loss is a pretty good example. So getting into fat loss and up regulating these enzymes in the acute sense, what you're doing is getting back to my previous point regarding enzymatic flux, fat loss, when you are utilizing carnitine, typically 30 to 60 minutes prior to training, you're going to want about 500 milligrams of bioavailable carnitine.
So this is going to be three and a half grams of oral for most people. And for the record, I typically like L-carnitine L-tartrate for this purpose. It's one of the cheaper carnitines that you can buy.
So it's something that is going to be very available for people. But it's also one of the better researched ones as well. So just throwing that out there, L-carnitine L-tartrate is very effective.
But what you're doing is getting that inner cell membrane and lubing the flux of what's happening with carnitine acetyltransferase and carnitine palmitoyltransferase.
So carnitine acetyltransferase, this has the ability to flux all nutrients. So this is basically getting nutrients inside and outside of a cell.
So it's accelerating the recycling of that mitochondrial activity in and out. It's that entire beta oxidation process is accelerated when you have more carnitine acetyltransferase activity taking place.
Then with carnitine palmitoyltransferase, carnitine palmitoyltransferase is what actually increases mitochondrial activity in and of itself. So where acetyltransferase is getting things in and out, palmitoyltransferase is accelerating carnitine activity or rather oxidation activity happening inside the mitochondria.
So from a fat loss perspective, taking this at the right time prior to training is up regulating these enzymes to up regulate beta oxidation, which also is preserving glycogen.
Because you're liberating as many free fatty acids as possible to support your activity that you're involved in, which means that you're preserving glycogen for when you only need it most.
So during say low intensity activities, you're going to be able to utilize a lot more fatty acids. And then when it's time to turn it up, you're able to tap into that glycogen only when you need to.
Yeah, I don't know if this digs into like too much minutiae, but over that month, we'll call it just like loading phase. Does the timing specifically matter during that month?
Or is it after that month? Now we have to time it specifically with whatever the goal is. I would still always time it with whatever the goal is.
It seems to be wildly, it seems to be extremely timing dependent, even regardless of saturation. I know that sounds weird.
But there are certain types of like, even just to jump ahead, like I wasn't going to get into this just yet. But like with the heart, the carnitine is actually a very beneficial for heart health. But it seems to be most beneficial for heart health in a de-energized state.
So when you are actually at your most parasympathetic and lowest energy output, that is when carnitine is most bioavailable, sorry, most beneficial for the heart.
A, because it's actually an iron chelator for the heart. So it actually helps chelate iron, which reduces heart specific oxidative stress. But then purely as a byproduct of also improving your lipid management, which carnitine does with beta oxidation, that's what also improves heart health as well.
So carnitine being beneficial for heart health, being beneficial via iron chelation and reducing heart specific oxidative stress and lipid management.
This is maximized benefits, and this is research all the way back into the 60s, is done in a de-energized state. So it's actually recommended to take carnitine pre-bed.
So taking carnitine pre-bed is what leverages this de-energized state and what leverages enzyme activity that only happens when you sleep. So since enzyme activity specifically related to the heart only happens when you sleep, that's when it's best leveraged for that certain timeframe.
So actually a pretty good heart protocol for people to take to change the cardiac architecture would be citrus bergamot plus carnitine pre-bed. In that situation, the citrus bergamot is really working towards aiding in cholesterol profiles.
Your carnitine is aiding in beta oxidation, your carnitine is aiding in heart specific oxidative stress, it's aiding in iron chelation of the heart. And you can actually have a damn good heart protocol taking some carnitine pre-bed with some citrus bergamot.
So this kind of timing thing is not just relevant to the carnitine itself, but relevant to the current, say in this context, circadian enzymatic activity of when you're utilizing it.
Yeah, that's awesome. I love that because every time some, I shouldn't say every time, many times people like the example you used with caffeine, it's like, I drink this, I feel great.
Having that month loading phase and knowing that the actual benefits are 30 to 45 days out, there are very few supplements that actually the information and education is out there like that on something specific.
As far as fat loss goes, did we get to all of that? I know we jumped ahead to the heart health thing. or anything that we miss in the fat loss side of this? Yeah, well, you can definitely add in other situations because it can absolutely be utilized as a type of glucose disposal agent.
But I also said kind of just like a food altering agent as well. And the reason why I say that is because when you are taking carnitine, say before a cheat meal, or just kind of in general, if you have a greater saturation of carnitine, you can utilize and utilize those free fatty acids from your higher meal to just be going on the beta oxidation wheel that should already be churning, purely from the increased amount of carnitine transferase activity that you're having.
And that's what's gonna allow your current activity to be beta oxidation dominant, say during that meal or during that high calorie day.
And then also because you are utilizing beta oxidation and free fatty acids for your fuel use, you are able to better store carbohydrates as glycogen because they're not gonna be currently used as a type of fuel source since beta oxidation is going to be more dominant for it.
So purely from your ability to utilize fats more effectively by dominating them into the beta oxidation chain, your ability to preserve glycogen and therefore store glycogen more effectively since you are using beta oxidation a lot more effectively in your daily activity.
This is something where I think that through the back door, it can help you in the fat loss argument as well, purely because you're utilizing your meals better and not just utilizing fatty acids better during certain activities.
Yeah. So if you're more, if it's easier to burn fat, so to speak, and thereby preserving glycogen, is there endurance benefits to this for endurance athletes?
Yeah, I think that there's benefits actually if for any kind of athlete for the purpose of carnitine, because when you're looking at energetics, so basically you kind of got your spectrum, right?
You've got the beginning of the spectrum where you're hyper parasympathetic. So this is like me posting the Instagram story of me walking Lucy at the end of the day when I'm done work at 4 p.m. no matter what,
I have boundaries, I cut it off, and I go, I walk Lucy, I'm in the sunlight, I've finished work, I've accomplished my task, and I'm relaxed, I'm happy, heart rate's coming down, ventilation's coming down, everything's relaxed, and I just feel better.
In this process, carnitine will be up-railing beta-oxidation even in this super parasympathetic state. And about midway through, we've got our lower-ish intensity cardio.
Now since this is middle of the spectrum, we're still going to get a benefit from carnitine in this perspective, because it's still playing a role in energetics on all level.
So even though my ventilatory changes are going up, there's a little bit more ventilation, my heart rate's a little bit higher, my tissue temperature is a bit higher, my sympathetic activity is beginning to take place in this lower-intensity cardio zone.
There's going to be some combination of glucose and fatty acids being used now, but it's still going to be very efficient in terms of the fatty acid department compared to non-carnitine saturated, and you're more adept to utilizing glucose really only when you need to.
And this of course is going to depend, there's a lot of individually-specific energy system conditioning effects happening here as well, depending on how conditioned you are, how what your level of fitness is.
And then at the end of this spectrum, you've got something like weight training. And when it comes to weight training, I think that carnitine will shine here as well, because you're going to have a situation where you're preserving glycogen more efficiently for when you really need it during your sets.
And then in between sets, if you do optimize nasal breathing and you do really try to calm down and rest and recover in between sets, you will be able to more effectively switch over to beta-oxidation in those rest periods.
And in those rest periods, the level of aerobic fitness that you have is going to determine the level of recovery of your alactic systems.
So this is something written in actually Joel Jameson's eight weeks out conditioning book that I believe everybody should read. This is something I read so long ago.
It was one of the best energy system books of all time. But essentially something I really picked up in that book and that I thought was fascinating was the fact that the aerobic system is what repairs and recovers and restocks the fuels utilized in the anaerobic systems.
So when you have greater aerobic efficiency, you are able to more quickly restock things like ATP, like creatine phosphates, like these things that are going to be used in your next bout of anaerobic output.
So when you have something like carnitine that's more effectively boosting one's aerobic output and aerobic efficiency during your rest periods, you will be more recovered for that next set moving forward.
And at the very least, you're going to be burning more fat during your rest periods with that nasal breathing. But with all that said, you've got your full spectrum, right?
You've got your low intensity, your medium, and then your ultimate high, high intensity. This is why I think carnitine is best used for multi energy system sports.
So like a power lifter, I don't think is going to get like this giant advantage from carnitine. I think bodybuilders could get some advantage, say from in the fat loss department, for their say their fasted cardio.
They could also get some benefits from the antigen receptor stuff that we can get to in a moment. But I think like the athletes, like soccer and mixed martial arts require a lot more energetic diversity than power lifting.
You know? So I just think that the actual athletes, I'm going to get in trouble for that, I think actual athletes are the ones that need coordination that don't just actually squat down and squat up.
Sit and stand? Yeah, exactly, right? I'm totally going to get flamed for that. Sorry, Matt isn't here today, you're free. You can say whatever you want.
Not just free, I'm safe. I totally want to dig into the antigen receptors and maybe this, I hope this is a quick answer.
It sounds like many of the benefits that you're talking about also come from like caffeine or other stimulants.
Is there, one, is there a difference in how those are processed in the body? Are those, am I reading that correctly or listening to that correctly?
And that kind of on the fat loss side of things, there is like a low level, like the way that they're giving you energy, processing energy.
It just sounds like some of the benefits are very similar and I may be not correct on that. Well, you're going to get a certain, you're going to get the adenosine effect from caffeine.
You're going to get catecholamine effects from caffeine to where they are liberating free fatty acids, but not necessarily upregulating the enzymes responsible for dealing with those fatty acids.
Gotcha, there you go. Yeah, so that would be the big difference. So one is stimulatory and one's not. Gotcha.
Um, fantastic, glad that was a short answer. Let's dig into androgen receptors. Absolutely, so when it comes to androgen receptors, there was a super cool study actually done by Robert Morton in 2018, I believe, and it was a 12-week resistance training study and it was identified that androgen receptor amount and sensitivity was more predictive of muscle growth across 12 weeks of resistance training than hormones.
So it was actually androgen receptors and not the hormones itself that was more predictive of muscle growth over the course of a 12-week period.
And this was in natural athletes, okay? But there was some cool things- I've heard people say similar, like from like an anecdotal perspective, like just like the athletes that respond best to the drugs.
It's not the drugs, it's the athletes who respond best to the drugs who do the best. Because a lot of the athletes that just fucking look like freaking H, you think they're taking all the drugs?
They might be taking like a normal amount of drugs. I mean, drug-geared bodybuilding is just everyone's doing it, so you gotta assume everyone's doing it. But if like some of the guys are not taking these crazy amounts, some like non-professional recreational just bros at the gym might be taking more androgens than some of these pro bodybuilders that look insane just because they respond so well to the drugs.
Yes, and I have that on direct one-on-one authority. So I work with pro bodybuilders who use doses less than guys at the gym. There are guys at the gym who absolutely believe that being a pro is just one milligram away,
10 milligrams away, 500 milligrams away. And I promise you, that's not the case. I bet that even shows up even more
There is a trail- on the female side of things. Yes, there's a lot of fat loss. There's a lot of fat loss abuse on the female side of things.
And there's a lot of trend balloon abuse on the male side of things. But it's the amount of milligrams that they feel is required to turn pro, they would be fucking heartbroken at the Olympia cycles that I've seen that are not even close to what they're running.
So androgen receptors count, genetics count. Like these things, a lot of the pro bodybuilders, they, a lot of these guys, natural are going to be way bigger than the guys who aren't natural, purely due to their ability to be hyper responders.
And then this study, it was a pretty cool example of that to where androgen receptor in natural athletes was a greater predictor of muscle growth over the course of time than even hormones themselves.
So androgen receptors are super important and carnitine is a way in which to increase androgen receptor count and increase androgen receptor activity, which is pretty damn cool.
So this is something that is not just applicable for performance enhancing drug users. Of course, it is applicable for them because if they've got more sensitivity and amount of antigen receptor, drug docks on receptor A, it does something and then it leaves and docks onto receptor B and it does something and then it continues to do that until it degrades and eventually gets excreted by the body.
Carnitine increases the sensitivity of that docking. So it actually reduces, if you are say a drug using athlete, it reduces the amount of drug that actually one needs, which is a decently fascinating concept all by itself.
If somebody is familiar with the power lifting world, the power lifting world is quite big on anadrol. Anadrol is something that gets you strong, fast, typically something that's used near the end of a peaking phase, but it's typically used in high milligram.
doses, because it's bioavailability sucks. So if you see something like Superdrol, a dose between 5, 10, 15 milligrams, you see Antidrol between 50, 75, 100 milligrams. And the huge difference in bioavailability and outcome, when somebody has more sensitive antigen receptors, then they're able to get more out of less. So they're able to actually take the same drug, but less of it due to increased sensitivity and count of antigen receptors. So that's a pretty cool and fascinating thing. But from a natural perspective, it is operating on the same outcome. You are increasing antigen receptor for the testosterone that you have, which is already predictive of something that's going to help you build muscle, get stronger, do that entire deal. So antigen receptors is actually a huge component of what makes carnitine very effective in a different way, just because I think a lot of people only think about carnitine with respect to fat loss.
I don't think people think about it with respect to heart health, or muscle building, or antigen receptors, or any of this other stuff. So it's kind of a cool way to give people the insight as to why I get excited about this thing. It's like food altering agent, plus antigen receptors, plus fat loss, plus energetics and sports performance, plus heart health. There's a lot of different things going on here for something that has no negative side effects. Yeah. On the performance side of things, can you dig into a little bit of the energy system side? You just talked a lot about if you're just a pure strength athlete, it's kind of a no-brainer. But on the energy system side, you mentioned how real athletes, people that run around and have to transit. I think soccer, if it works in soccer, it should work for everybody because you're going to have to run eight miles. That number is probably not right, but it seems about right. And mixed in there with 30, 100-meter all-out sprints built into the middle of it.
Where does L-carnitine fit into just performance, we'll call it performance enhancement side of this? Well, I think it fits in and through some of the ways we've discussed. I do think it fits in through leveraging the energy system stuff we've discussed. I do think it fits in through leveraging engine receptors that we've discussed. I do think it fits in via fat loss that we've discussed.
And then I also think it fits in when someone hits the wall. If you're out there playing soccer, hitting the wall is your inability to get pyruvate into CoA. That's what hitting the wall is. Hitting the wall is your inability to get pyruvate into CoA. But carnitine is what allows you to jack up the pyruvate by jacking up that enzyme activity. So it delays fatigue,
I guess we'll say it. It delays the onset of fatigue because you're creating an ability to convert more pyruvate into CoA. And I think that that's a giant way, on top of the energy system stuff, your ability to purely make the enzyme reactions take place to accelerate pyruvate into
CoA to avoid and delay hitting the wall. I think that's a giant potentiator of performance on top of everything else. But I think potentiating performance should actually just kind of lead into our other conversation of potentiating recovery. You're only ever going to perform to the degree that you are recovered. If you play soccer today, and then you're supposed to play soccer tomorrow because it's a tournament, and then you go into tomorrow's game 80% recovered, how well do you think you're going to play to 80% of your potential? The answer is very straightforward. You're only ever going to perform to the degree that you are recovered.
So I think that carnitine, through its ability to help you recover, will ultimately help you perform way better beyond all of its energetic stuff. But this is where kind of the environment thing happens. And this is where like things kind of just get cool for a nerd like me, because like heart health, carnitine pre-bed is ideal for fat loss and energetics, carnitine pre-workout or pre-game is ideal. But for recovery, and depending on when you take it, if you are utilizing it as a growth hormone potentiator, then before bed is ideal, you would actually take it with your growth hormone at about five to 10 milligrams per unit of growth hormone. This is for all the longevity people out there. Longevity is like one of the most popular topics right now. And everybody seems to be taking growth hormone because of it. But carnitine is a very fascinating thing. Like you look at, it's like this whole world of pharmacokinetics and how these things work. And you're looking at basically a drug timeline to make something, this is hyper complex made super simple. When you're looking at a drug timeline, you basically have a pharmacokinetic, and that is from drug to receptor. And then you have pharmacodynamics, which is from receptor to excretion. So kinetic, drug to receptor, dynamic receptor to excretion. When you're looking at parallel timelines, when you actually know half-lives and when certain things peak and when certain enzymes are supposed to happen, you can actually take certain things to leverage certain things at a certain time based on the pharmacokinetic and the pharmacodynamic of what's happening with the thing that you're taking. Carnitine actually has this beautiful and totally underrated, I'll say, relationship with growth hormone to where they run parallel. You're going to have this parallel benefit to where you're going to have hepatic activity, growth hormones benefiting the liver and creating the liver is creating growth factors from growth hormone stimulating that liver. Growth hormones also going to be liberating free fatty acids. Carnitine is going to be able to leverage that. Carnitine is leveraging the growth factor potentiation. Carnitine is leveraging the mTOR potentiation of growth hormone. It's doing all of these things in parallel, in unison with growth hormone. So if somebody wanted to leverage recovery and they were taking growth hormone, that they could take five to 10 milligrams of carnitine with their growth hormone in order to leverage that component of it. Or if there is somebody who is purely using the natural pulsatile release of carnitine pre-bed and they're not actually on growth hormone, take carnitine pre-bed. You're still going to be leveraging certain aspects of that pathway.
So taking carnitine pre-bed can leverage and potentiate the growth hormone pathways based on kinetics and dynamics. But from a recovery perspective, carnitine seems to shine in the recovery perspective from neural fatigue. So if you beat yourself down with power lifting doubles and triples, or if you're doing extended rest pause sets or stretch, we've done a brutal workout, right? If you're just killing yourself in there, these types of workouts create a bunch of acetyl groups that bind to your muscle cells post-workout and do a lot of things that are unfavorable to recovery. And the real problem is your actual recovery process will not begin until those acetyl groups have been cleared.
Those need to be cleared. They need to be removed from the system. And those acetyl groups create a ton of neurological fatigue. That's where you're going to see it the most. The type of what, you know, it's oversimplification, but everybody calls it central nervous system fatigue.
So if you're the type of person, I know, it pains me to even say that. I specifically remember an entire episode of Barbell Shrug where Galpin just annihilated that specific thing. It was like the first time I ever heard Galpin many, many years ago.
Dude, that show. The first time I ever heard it was like in the early 2000s and Louis Simmons said, oh, you've got central nervous system fatigue. I was like, oh shit, that sounds smart. He's probably right.
That's got to be it. That's a hundred percent. That's why I'm not strong. Everybody that has ever lifted a weight started saying it.
Dude, I swear it came from Louis Simmons. He was the first guy I heard it from and it was so long ago. But essentially, if you're the type of person who, like your joints aren't sore and your muscles aren't sore, but like you just mentally don't really want to go to the gym or if you're the kind of person who maybe you're deep into a diet, you know, you're deep into the rapid transformation contest and you're deep and you can just feel that neural fatigue accumulation telling you to stop going to the gym.
Stop starving yourself and overtraining. We have no energy left. There's nothing to use. Exactly. So if you're deep in hypocalorism or if you're somebody who's just kind of maybe on a brutally heavy, neurologically fatiguing program, then quarantine actually post-workout seems to be ideal. And this would be a lower dose actually.
This would be, if it would be injectable, it would be 200 milligrams from an oral perspective that works out to 1.75 grams of L-carnitine L-tartrate.
So in the post-workout period to more effectively and accelerate the removal of these acetyl groups that are connected to neurological fatigue, then quarantine post-workout seems to be ideal. And actually, when you look at the research, quarantine post-workout is actually where the antigen receptor stuff was done as well. So as far as that fatigue and the antigen receptor activity, that can be taken post-workout. But for the other purposes, you know, environment, as you're kind of seeing, really matters here. So between the growth hormone potentiation, between the neuro fatigue, between the acetyl groups, I think that that just adds a huge strength to the argument we've created towards carnitine and performance.
So I probably need to lose a little bit of fat. I would definitely want to get stronger. I need a healthy heart. And I'd love to increase recovery. L-carnitine sounds like the thing that I need to be working on for a month. And then I'll start to see some benefits there.
But at the very beginning of this, we were talking about how do we implement it for the specific goal? Is there like a broad brushstroke that we can make using L-carnitine? Or does it need to be specific to each of those goals in order to achieve that goal?
I would want it to be specific to those goals in order to achieve the goal. Yeah, it is something that's environment dependent. So if you're somebody who is interested in heart health,
I would have it pre-bed. If you're somebody who's interested in energetics and fat loss, I would have it pre-workout. If you're somebody who needs recovery support, I would have it post-workout. If somebody wants androgen receptors with support, I would want to have it post-workout as well. If you're somebody who's interested in growth hormone potentiation, I would have it before bed. These are situations where I absolutely think timing matters. Lots of times timing doesn't. Beta-alanine, timing doesn't really matter. Creatine, timing doesn't matter.
Multivitamin doesn't really matter. or carnitine seems to really matter. Yeah, so it's definitely something that matters. And it's definitely, like you were saying, it's something that's wildly well-rounded, man.
Good for the heart, good for fat loss, good for recovery, good for growth. I don't want to put off the idea that anything's magical here, but it just impacts so many proteins in the body.
It impacts so many enzymes in the body. And, you know, don't take my word for it. Just go look into nutritional biochemistry, please. It's something that's, this information's already out there.
Nothing I've said here is theory, it's tactics. Everything I'm talking about is tactical. This is something you can go do, you can go try.
It's actually also an antioxidant for the brain on top of that. And more important than the brain, it increases sperm motility.
Ooh, swimmers, swimmers. More important than the brain, it increases sperm motility. And it actually increases the sodium potassium pump activity in spermatogenic cells.
So it's actually been demonstrated to increase sperm count and increase sperm motility. If your sodium needs that help, it is a fertility thing, too.
Yeah, I eat an enormous amount of red meat. Is this something that I would need to supplement on top of red meat? Or is eating roughly one and a half to two pounds of red meat a day sufficient?
I would still supplement on top of it. I would absolutely supplement on top of it, yeah. I don't eat that much, by the way. Yeah, that is quite a bit.
Yeah, that is quite a bit. So I would definitely still supplement with it purely because it's non-toxic. And I would want you to stick to the research rather than us kind of guests.
Yeah, fantastic. Dan Garner, where can the people find you? My man, you can find me at dangarnernutrition on Instagram.
I love that. Doug Larson. Also on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner.
We are barbells shrugged, barbells shrugged. I just made my first two Instagram posts, by the way, in like two years. What?
I know, right? I feel like. Me too. Yes, yes. I will go along with that for right now.
If you want to hang out with Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner and see them do a lab lifestyle and performance analysis, make sure you head over to rapidhealthreport.com.
That is where you can see a 60 minute video of those dudes breaking it down for one of our clients that was nice enough to let us post their lab video up there.
So get over to rapidhealthreport.com and everybody that comes into Rapid Health Optimization is going to get one of those plus some additional pieces.
So rapidhealthreport.com. And you can also get in there, set up a call with me, see if you are the right fit for Rapid Health Optimization. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.
We're gonna dig into all the possible protocols that you could use, how to time L-carnitine in your diet and supplementation to get the exact result that you are looking for.
As always, friends, make sure you head over to rapidhealthreport.com, rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a lab lifestyle and performance analysis for everybody, well, not for everybody, for one client, but what everybody gets inside rapid health optimization and your optimization plans, protocols, et cetera.
You can see that, go watch the full hour-long video for free over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show.
Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Anders Barner, Doug Larson, Dan Garner in the house today. Today on Barbell Shrug, we're gonna be digging to L-carnitine.
Many people may not know what L-carnitine is. Guess what? You're gonna be super, super interested in this because everybody wonders how to mobilize stored fat into energy, and right now, you should listen because Dan Garner's going to drop all the knowledge on exactly that process.
Dude, I'd love to really start this thing off since it's at the highest level. What is L-carnitine and what is its role in the body? So L-carnitine, I'm actually really excited
Yeah, man. to talk about this today because I just found kind of recently on a lot of podcasts, I'm almost always talking about the inside out stuff. So when I'm looking at labs and making decisions based on the microbiome or vitamins and minerals status or electrolyte status or hormones or something like that,
I'm almost always discussing and referring to things from the inside out that I think people kind of forgot. I program a lot from the outside in with the athletes, like I'm working with, say, Sean O'Malley and his performance outputs and protocols from the outside in, Mark Bell with the marathon, the bodybuilders I work with, all these people,
I'm doing outside in and inside out. So I'm actually really excited to talk about carnitine here today because this is something that I program from the outside in quite frequently, and it's something I really don't need lab work for.
So this is something that I think is very podcast friendly because sometimes on podcasts, it's kind of like, well, I don't know the answer of what you should do until I do your labs.
And then the listeners can be like, well, that's not totally helpful, but it is interesting. Sounds like this guy knows about big words for sure.
Right, right, right. Wait, can you further define the outside in versus inside out aspect? There are people that don't know when we do a wrap at how you're kind of the inside out guy and Andy's the outside in guy.
Like, can you just define that so people understand what you're talking about? Well, that's a philosophy I've been doing since like 2014. So this is something that I've been doing for a very long time.
I teach the inside out and the outside in in my mentorship courses that I created many, many years ago. So essentially what I wanted to create was a true holistic and systemic approach to coaching that doesn't leave anything unchecked because I've always felt that the subjective is as important as the objective.
So when I'm looking at labs or I'm looking at things very objective, like the microbiome, hormones, immune markers, blood work, urine, saliva, stool, these things are very much from the inside out.
And you can also pick up subjective things from the inside out as well regarding adrenal measures, inflammation, if somebody's got sore joints, digestive issues, if they've got loose stools, constipation, these things are all very much from the inside out.
However, you also want to utilize and encompass an outside in approach because somebody's environment around them matters as much to their results as their environment within them.
Somebody's psychological health, somebody's emotional health, somebody's sleep status, somebody's stress in life, somebody's relationship with their partners or with their boss or with their colleagues or with the teammates on their team.
These are all things I would very much consider outside in that are of equal importance as the inside out. The inside out is always very fun and sexy to discuss because it involves complicated and sophisticated things such as the mitochondria, the density, the efficiency, having micronutrient availability.
These protocols always seem very, very, very like this is my aha answer. But unless you have your outside in figured out, none of that stuff really matters.
Your routines, your rituals, the way in which you view and approach health, if it's too complicated, if it's too simple, if you like details, if you want simplicity and big picture stuff, this is all going to move in one system moving forward.
So from the inside out and the outside in, I think that everybody would have a true approach to what is going to actually allow them to identify the rate limiting step or the constraint like we call here a lot of rapid, the constraint that's actually holding them back.
Because as much as you can have a constraint being low testosterone, you can have a constraint with your morning routine starting off your entire day and ultimately wrecking the results that you're getting or having a constraint with the way in which you approach the weekends rather than approach Monday to Friday.
A lot of people have this stuff from the outside in. So that's kind of like how I approach outside in and inside out. And outside in stuff is very much applicable to be prescribed in the absence of any kind of lab work.
So this is basically how I operated the majority of my coaching career before I started working with clients who could afford lab work. And before I had the education to even interpret lab work.
So I've had a ton of experience purely doing outside in stuff before I was able to do the inside out stuff. And I'm excited to talk about it.
So I'm excited to talk about carnitine. So with that little segue here. At the top. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, let's rock. So carnitine, honestly carnitine is something where like, it's been around forever.
So this is a product that's been around forever. And I kind of just wrote it off in the beginning. If you've been taking supplements as long as me, like 20 years or so, odds are you've wasted as much money as me on supplements.
Back in the day, I mean, we had stuff. Not only did it not work, but it tasted horribly. Yeah, so we're just in the name of being a meathead.
This label says it'll get me jacked. So let me just try this. And then you find out it's like 500 milligrams of like arginine.
You think that you're gonna get gigantic off of it. Everybody that takes Organifi or athletic greens should learn what those greens tasted like a decade ago.
Oh man. Yeah. Just the raw extract. Yeah. Even whey, whey protein. Whey was disgusting.
Go ahead. I can talk about those. Go ahead. Yeah, the cement mixer that we're supposed to drink post-workout. And we still did.
But yeah, so like back in the day, I kind of wrote it off. A, cause I felt like I had wasted enough money on stuff that didn't work. And there was kind of like a red flag from the marketing.
People was like, carnitine will get you ripped. Carnitine is gonna get you lean. You'll get a six pack with carnitine. So I kind of wrote it off. And I especially kind of wrote it off because it came at a time when I was starting to read a lot more real research and develop my own opinions on things rather than just listen to experts.
And when I was reading the research, I identified that the oral bioavailability of carnitine, it's only 14 to 18%. So I'm like, oh, the oral bioavailability is quite low.
The marketing seems insane. Let me kind of stay away from this thing for a while. And then I did, stayed away from it for a while. And then you end up kind of making your way back into it, not necessarily through marketing or even a lot of like research studies cause I wasn't necessarily getting into a bunch of those.
I actually learned about it getting through the back way of learning a nutritional biochemistry. So looking at cellular responses, how beta oxidation works, how enzymes work.
And then you start to just see like, man, so carnitine's involved in energetics. It's involved in recovery. It's involved in androgen receptors.
It's involved in cardiac health. It's involved in potentiating growth hormone. It's involved in fat loss.
It's involved in glycogen sparing. It can be used not just as a glucose disposal agent, but really like a food altering agent.
It's involved in, you just start seeing it so many places and you're like, holy crap. This is actually popping up in a lot of different areas and it is amino acid, just like any other amino acid.
So despite being plagued by marketing in the past and plagued by some dumb things that you see in the early 2000s, you actually start to see, like carnitine is an umbrella term.
Like it is an amino acid, sure. A lot of people kind of end the conversation there, but there are long chain carnitines. There are medium chain carnitines.
There are carnitine transferases. And that's really what you want to leverage. You've got, you want to leverage carnitine transferases. And that's kind of how I want the listeners to listen to this podcast is that you are utilizing carnitine as your ability to leverage carnitine enzyme activity.
And we can get into that when we kind of get into fat loss because there's a carnitine acetyltransferase or CAT you'll see in the research. There's carnitine palmitoyltransferase or CPT that you'll see in the research.
These are things that you really want to leverage. Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com.
When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health.
Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach.
So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you.
Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns.
And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com.
You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and, my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward.
I really, really hope that you're able to go over to RapidHealthReport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. If it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page.
Once again, it's RapidHealthReport.com, and let's get back to the show. Mad Fientist To your point about that, I know we're talking about fat loss, which I'm really looking forward to, but in exercise physiology in graduate school, when we were learning about beta-oxidation and transferases and how fatty acids move in and out of the mitochondria, etc., and we were talking about L-carnitine, my professor said, even though biochemically, this is the mechanism, this is how it works, when you take L-carnitine as a supplement, it doesn't seem to promote any additional fat loss.
People thought it would, because it seems to kind of logically make sense, but then the studies didn't really shake out as any actual real-world benefit. To your point about writing it off, I kind of wrote off L-carnitine as well for a long time, and so when you brought up wanting to do this show, I was like, oh, I thought that was something that I didn't really need to pay attention to, so I was actually really excited to do this show specifically because I decided many years ago that it was something that didn't warrant any further attention.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, yeah. And so there's a couple of reasons for that, and I'm glad you brought that up. So basically, like this is audio only, so basically, you can imagine the mitochondria on the left, and then in the center, you've got your inner cell membrane, and then on the right side, you've got your cytosol that contains all these nutrients.
Well, that inner cell membrane, that's actually what we want to leverage from a carnitine enzymatic perspective. And the reason why a lot of research studies don't work, A, because bio—bioavailability is poor.
So you need to either, A, inject it, which is actually 100% bioavailable, so you can inject carnitine, and for people who are saying, wait, inject carnitine, are you out of your mind?
It's actually legal. So you could walk up to the police station with a needle in your delt and be like, what's up, man? Yeah, this is just carnitine.
So this is—this is—it's a 100% illegal—legal—legal— Dr. Justin Marchegiani Assuming they believe you. It's carnitine. Oh, no! You're being cuffed. It's just carnitine. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, it might be a suspicious activity, but it is something—you can actually inject carnitine for 100% bioavailability, or you can just purely do the math.
So if you inject carnitine at about 500 milligrams of carnitine, typically 500 milligrams per one mil is a concentration you'll see a lot, and that's available in many places because it is legal.
That is an efficacious dose for many, many, many things. But when you do the math and you kind of average it out, okay, bioavailability is 14 to 18%, so even on the low end, if we say 15%, to make the math easier, three and a half grams of carnitine supplementation is 525 milligrams of bioavailable carnitine.
So we can just override that because the thing is injectable carnitine must be a pain in the ass because daily administration will be required and it's intramuscular. So it's not even like those little insulin needles that you see 50% of the American population need to use because of type 2 diabetes, those little things that could just go right in your stomach, hyper easy, right, or the longevity crowd, they're super into growth hormone.
That's just a little tiny insulin needle as well. That's something that's hyper quick. Carnitine is intramuscular. So to do an intramuscular injection daily, even for the most hardcore people is a real pain in the ass.
Yeah, it's a lot, right? So you can actually just kind of flip that and utilize three and a half grams of carnitine. Now to kind of pull all the way back to Doug's statement about a lot of these things didn't shake out.
Number one, oral bioavailability and what we know more about that now. Number two, to gain the benefits of carnitine, just like creatine, you need to increase carnitine muscular saturation.
So creatine muscular saturation is going to take about a month at about five grams per day if you're less than 200 pounds, it's going to take about a month. Carnitine is very similar.
In order to start maximizing the benefits of carnitine, you're going to need to increase intramuscular concentrations of carnitine. And that's not a one time event, it's not like caffeine, people want to take things and feel something right away.
You need to increase muscular concentrations of carnitine. So if it's a short study, you're not going to get that effect. And last but not least, and one of the most important components of this podcast is that if anything was timing dependent, it's carnitine.
It is such an environmentally specific supplement that if you do take it at an incorrect time, you will get the incorrect output.
Like it is carnitine is very, very, very input output in terms of when you're going to use it for fat loss, when you're going to use it for recovery, when you're going to use it for growth hormone potentiation, when you're going to use it for glucose disposal.
These are all different things and really different amounts of carnitine as well. So you guys want to explore some of those concepts? Yeah.
I want to dig into this timing thing. How is that consistent with like needing a month or whatever to to be fully saturated but it still matters when you take it if you've reached saturation?
It does seem to matter. So you need muscular saturation over the course of time, but timing in an immediate event still seems to matter.
So although enzymatic activity seems to get up regulated with saturation over the course of time, there is a timing dependent effect based upon the environment for which you're doing it.
So fat loss is a pretty good example. So getting into fat loss and up regulating these enzymes in the acute sense, what you're doing is getting back to my previous point regarding enzymatic flux, fat loss, when you are utilizing carnitine, typically 30 to 60 minutes prior to training, you're going to want about 500 milligrams of bioavailable carnitine.
So this is going to be three and a half grams of oral for most people. And for the record, I typically like L-carnitine L-tartrate for this purpose. It's one of the cheaper carnitines that you can buy.
So it's something that is going to be very available for people. But it's also one of the better researched ones as well. So just throwing that out there, L-carnitine L-tartrate is very effective.
But what you're doing is getting that inner cell membrane and lubing the flux of what's happening with carnitine acetyltransferase and carnitine palmitoyltransferase.
So carnitine acetyltransferase, this has the ability to flux all nutrients. So this is basically getting nutrients inside and outside of a cell.
So it's accelerating the recycling of that mitochondrial activity in and out. It's that entire beta oxidation process is accelerated when you have more carnitine acetyltransferase activity taking place.
Then with carnitine palmitoyltransferase, carnitine palmitoyltransferase is what actually increases mitochondrial activity in and of itself. So where acetyltransferase is getting things in and out, palmitoyltransferase is accelerating carnitine activity or rather oxidation activity happening inside the mitochondria.
So from a fat loss perspective, taking this at the right time prior to training is up regulating these enzymes to up regulate beta oxidation, which also is preserving glycogen.
Because you're liberating as many free fatty acids as possible to support your activity that you're involved in, which means that you're preserving glycogen for when you only need it most.
So during say low intensity activities, you're going to be able to utilize a lot more fatty acids. And then when it's time to turn it up, you're able to tap into that glycogen only when you need to.
Yeah, I don't know if this digs into like too much minutiae, but over that month, we'll call it just like loading phase. Does the timing specifically matter during that month?
Or is it after that month? Now we have to time it specifically with whatever the goal is. I would still always time it with whatever the goal is.
It seems to be wildly, it seems to be extremely timing dependent, even regardless of saturation. I know that sounds weird.
But there are certain types of like, even just to jump ahead, like I wasn't going to get into this just yet. But like with the heart, the carnitine is actually a very beneficial for heart health. But it seems to be most beneficial for heart health in a de-energized state.
So when you are actually at your most parasympathetic and lowest energy output, that is when carnitine is most bioavailable, sorry, most beneficial for the heart.
A, because it's actually an iron chelator for the heart. So it actually helps chelate iron, which reduces heart specific oxidative stress. But then purely as a byproduct of also improving your lipid management, which carnitine does with beta oxidation, that's what also improves heart health as well.
So carnitine being beneficial for heart health, being beneficial via iron chelation and reducing heart specific oxidative stress and lipid management.
This is maximized benefits, and this is research all the way back into the 60s, is done in a de-energized state. So it's actually recommended to take carnitine pre-bed.
So taking carnitine pre-bed is what leverages this de-energized state and what leverages enzyme activity that only happens when you sleep. So since enzyme activity specifically related to the heart only happens when you sleep, that's when it's best leveraged for that certain timeframe.
So actually a pretty good heart protocol for people to take to change the cardiac architecture would be citrus bergamot plus carnitine pre-bed. In that situation, the citrus bergamot is really working towards aiding in cholesterol profiles.
Your carnitine is aiding in beta oxidation, your carnitine is aiding in heart specific oxidative stress, it's aiding in iron chelation of the heart. And you can actually have a damn good heart protocol taking some carnitine pre-bed with some citrus bergamot.
So this kind of timing thing is not just relevant to the carnitine itself, but relevant to the current, say in this context, circadian enzymatic activity of when you're utilizing it.
Yeah, that's awesome. I love that because every time some, I shouldn't say every time, many times people like the example you used with caffeine, it's like, I drink this, I feel great.
Having that month loading phase and knowing that the actual benefits are 30 to 45 days out, there are very few supplements that actually the information and education is out there like that on something specific.
As far as fat loss goes, did we get to all of that? I know we jumped ahead to the heart health thing. or anything that we miss in the fat loss side of this? Yeah, well, you can definitely add in other situations because it can absolutely be utilized as a type of glucose disposal agent.
But I also said kind of just like a food altering agent as well. And the reason why I say that is because when you are taking carnitine, say before a cheat meal, or just kind of in general, if you have a greater saturation of carnitine, you can utilize and utilize those free fatty acids from your higher meal to just be going on the beta oxidation wheel that should already be churning, purely from the increased amount of carnitine transferase activity that you're having.
And that's what's gonna allow your current activity to be beta oxidation dominant, say during that meal or during that high calorie day.
And then also because you are utilizing beta oxidation and free fatty acids for your fuel use, you are able to better store carbohydrates as glycogen because they're not gonna be currently used as a type of fuel source since beta oxidation is going to be more dominant for it.
So purely from your ability to utilize fats more effectively by dominating them into the beta oxidation chain, your ability to preserve glycogen and therefore store glycogen more effectively since you are using beta oxidation a lot more effectively in your daily activity.
This is something where I think that through the back door, it can help you in the fat loss argument as well, purely because you're utilizing your meals better and not just utilizing fatty acids better during certain activities.
Yeah. So if you're more, if it's easier to burn fat, so to speak, and thereby preserving glycogen, is there endurance benefits to this for endurance athletes?
Yeah, I think that there's benefits actually if for any kind of athlete for the purpose of carnitine, because when you're looking at energetics, so basically you kind of got your spectrum, right?
You've got the beginning of the spectrum where you're hyper parasympathetic. So this is like me posting the Instagram story of me walking Lucy at the end of the day when I'm done work at 4 p.m. no matter what,
I have boundaries, I cut it off, and I go, I walk Lucy, I'm in the sunlight, I've finished work, I've accomplished my task, and I'm relaxed, I'm happy, heart rate's coming down, ventilation's coming down, everything's relaxed, and I just feel better.
In this process, carnitine will be up-railing beta-oxidation even in this super parasympathetic state. And about midway through, we've got our lower-ish intensity cardio.
Now since this is middle of the spectrum, we're still going to get a benefit from carnitine in this perspective, because it's still playing a role in energetics on all level.
So even though my ventilatory changes are going up, there's a little bit more ventilation, my heart rate's a little bit higher, my tissue temperature is a bit higher, my sympathetic activity is beginning to take place in this lower-intensity cardio zone.
There's going to be some combination of glucose and fatty acids being used now, but it's still going to be very efficient in terms of the fatty acid department compared to non-carnitine saturated, and you're more adept to utilizing glucose really only when you need to.
And this of course is going to depend, there's a lot of individually-specific energy system conditioning effects happening here as well, depending on how conditioned you are, how what your level of fitness is.
And then at the end of this spectrum, you've got something like weight training. And when it comes to weight training, I think that carnitine will shine here as well, because you're going to have a situation where you're preserving glycogen more efficiently for when you really need it during your sets.
And then in between sets, if you do optimize nasal breathing and you do really try to calm down and rest and recover in between sets, you will be able to more effectively switch over to beta-oxidation in those rest periods.
And in those rest periods, the level of aerobic fitness that you have is going to determine the level of recovery of your alactic systems.
So this is something written in actually Joel Jameson's eight weeks out conditioning book that I believe everybody should read. This is something I read so long ago.
It was one of the best energy system books of all time. But essentially something I really picked up in that book and that I thought was fascinating was the fact that the aerobic system is what repairs and recovers and restocks the fuels utilized in the anaerobic systems.
So when you have greater aerobic efficiency, you are able to more quickly restock things like ATP, like creatine phosphates, like these things that are going to be used in your next bout of anaerobic output.
So when you have something like carnitine that's more effectively boosting one's aerobic output and aerobic efficiency during your rest periods, you will be more recovered for that next set moving forward.
And at the very least, you're going to be burning more fat during your rest periods with that nasal breathing. But with all that said, you've got your full spectrum, right?
You've got your low intensity, your medium, and then your ultimate high, high intensity. This is why I think carnitine is best used for multi energy system sports.
So like a power lifter, I don't think is going to get like this giant advantage from carnitine. I think bodybuilders could get some advantage, say from in the fat loss department, for their say their fasted cardio.
They could also get some benefits from the antigen receptor stuff that we can get to in a moment. But I think like the athletes, like soccer and mixed martial arts require a lot more energetic diversity than power lifting.
You know? So I just think that the actual athletes, I'm going to get in trouble for that, I think actual athletes are the ones that need coordination that don't just actually squat down and squat up.
Sit and stand? Yeah, exactly, right? I'm totally going to get flamed for that. Sorry, Matt isn't here today, you're free. You can say whatever you want.
Not just free, I'm safe. I totally want to dig into the antigen receptors and maybe this, I hope this is a quick answer.
It sounds like many of the benefits that you're talking about also come from like caffeine or other stimulants.
Is there, one, is there a difference in how those are processed in the body? Are those, am I reading that correctly or listening to that correctly?
And that kind of on the fat loss side of things, there is like a low level, like the way that they're giving you energy, processing energy.
It just sounds like some of the benefits are very similar and I may be not correct on that. Well, you're going to get a certain, you're going to get the adenosine effect from caffeine.
You're going to get catecholamine effects from caffeine to where they are liberating free fatty acids, but not necessarily upregulating the enzymes responsible for dealing with those fatty acids.
Gotcha, there you go. Yeah, so that would be the big difference. So one is stimulatory and one's not. Gotcha.
Um, fantastic, glad that was a short answer. Let's dig into androgen receptors. Absolutely, so when it comes to androgen receptors, there was a super cool study actually done by Robert Morton in 2018, I believe, and it was a 12-week resistance training study and it was identified that androgen receptor amount and sensitivity was more predictive of muscle growth across 12 weeks of resistance training than hormones.
So it was actually androgen receptors and not the hormones itself that was more predictive of muscle growth over the course of a 12-week period.
And this was in natural athletes, okay? But there was some cool things- I've heard people say similar, like from like an anecdotal perspective, like just like the athletes that respond best to the drugs.
It's not the drugs, it's the athletes who respond best to the drugs who do the best. Because a lot of the athletes that just fucking look like freaking H, you think they're taking all the drugs?
They might be taking like a normal amount of drugs. I mean, drug-geared bodybuilding is just everyone's doing it, so you gotta assume everyone's doing it. But if like some of the guys are not taking these crazy amounts, some like non-professional recreational just bros at the gym might be taking more androgens than some of these pro bodybuilders that look insane just because they respond so well to the drugs.
Yes, and I have that on direct one-on-one authority. So I work with pro bodybuilders who use doses less than guys at the gym. There are guys at the gym who absolutely believe that being a pro is just one milligram away,
10 milligrams away, 500 milligrams away. And I promise you, that's not the case. I bet that even shows up even more
There is a trail- on the female side of things. Yes, there's a lot of fat loss. There's a lot of fat loss abuse on the female side of things.
And there's a lot of trend balloon abuse on the male side of things. But it's the amount of milligrams that they feel is required to turn pro, they would be fucking heartbroken at the Olympia cycles that I've seen that are not even close to what they're running.
So androgen receptors count, genetics count. Like these things, a lot of the pro bodybuilders, they, a lot of these guys, natural are going to be way bigger than the guys who aren't natural, purely due to their ability to be hyper responders.
And then this study, it was a pretty cool example of that to where androgen receptor in natural athletes was a greater predictor of muscle growth over the course of time than even hormones themselves.
So androgen receptors are super important and carnitine is a way in which to increase androgen receptor count and increase androgen receptor activity, which is pretty damn cool.
So this is something that is not just applicable for performance enhancing drug users. Of course, it is applicable for them because if they've got more sensitivity and amount of antigen receptor, drug docks on receptor A, it does something and then it leaves and docks onto receptor B and it does something and then it continues to do that until it degrades and eventually gets excreted by the body.
Carnitine increases the sensitivity of that docking. So it actually reduces, if you are say a drug using athlete, it reduces the amount of drug that actually one needs, which is a decently fascinating concept all by itself.
If somebody is familiar with the power lifting world, the power lifting world is quite big on anadrol. Anadrol is something that gets you strong, fast, typically something that's used near the end of a peaking phase, but it's typically used in high milligram.
doses, because it's bioavailability sucks. So if you see something like Superdrol, a dose between 5, 10, 15 milligrams, you see Antidrol between 50, 75, 100 milligrams. And the huge difference in bioavailability and outcome, when somebody has more sensitive antigen receptors, then they're able to get more out of less. So they're able to actually take the same drug, but less of it due to increased sensitivity and count of antigen receptors. So that's a pretty cool and fascinating thing. But from a natural perspective, it is operating on the same outcome. You are increasing antigen receptor for the testosterone that you have, which is already predictive of something that's going to help you build muscle, get stronger, do that entire deal. So antigen receptors is actually a huge component of what makes carnitine very effective in a different way, just because I think a lot of people only think about carnitine with respect to fat loss.
I don't think people think about it with respect to heart health, or muscle building, or antigen receptors, or any of this other stuff. So it's kind of a cool way to give people the insight as to why I get excited about this thing. It's like food altering agent, plus antigen receptors, plus fat loss, plus energetics and sports performance, plus heart health. There's a lot of different things going on here for something that has no negative side effects. Yeah. On the performance side of things, can you dig into a little bit of the energy system side? You just talked a lot about if you're just a pure strength athlete, it's kind of a no-brainer. But on the energy system side, you mentioned how real athletes, people that run around and have to transit. I think soccer, if it works in soccer, it should work for everybody because you're going to have to run eight miles. That number is probably not right, but it seems about right. And mixed in there with 30, 100-meter all-out sprints built into the middle of it.
Where does L-carnitine fit into just performance, we'll call it performance enhancement side of this? Well, I think it fits in and through some of the ways we've discussed. I do think it fits in through leveraging the energy system stuff we've discussed. I do think it fits in through leveraging engine receptors that we've discussed. I do think it fits in via fat loss that we've discussed.
And then I also think it fits in when someone hits the wall. If you're out there playing soccer, hitting the wall is your inability to get pyruvate into CoA. That's what hitting the wall is. Hitting the wall is your inability to get pyruvate into CoA. But carnitine is what allows you to jack up the pyruvate by jacking up that enzyme activity. So it delays fatigue,
I guess we'll say it. It delays the onset of fatigue because you're creating an ability to convert more pyruvate into CoA. And I think that that's a giant way, on top of the energy system stuff, your ability to purely make the enzyme reactions take place to accelerate pyruvate into
CoA to avoid and delay hitting the wall. I think that's a giant potentiator of performance on top of everything else. But I think potentiating performance should actually just kind of lead into our other conversation of potentiating recovery. You're only ever going to perform to the degree that you are recovered. If you play soccer today, and then you're supposed to play soccer tomorrow because it's a tournament, and then you go into tomorrow's game 80% recovered, how well do you think you're going to play to 80% of your potential? The answer is very straightforward. You're only ever going to perform to the degree that you are recovered.
So I think that carnitine, through its ability to help you recover, will ultimately help you perform way better beyond all of its energetic stuff. But this is where kind of the environment thing happens. And this is where like things kind of just get cool for a nerd like me, because like heart health, carnitine pre-bed is ideal for fat loss and energetics, carnitine pre-workout or pre-game is ideal. But for recovery, and depending on when you take it, if you are utilizing it as a growth hormone potentiator, then before bed is ideal, you would actually take it with your growth hormone at about five to 10 milligrams per unit of growth hormone. This is for all the longevity people out there. Longevity is like one of the most popular topics right now. And everybody seems to be taking growth hormone because of it. But carnitine is a very fascinating thing. Like you look at, it's like this whole world of pharmacokinetics and how these things work. And you're looking at basically a drug timeline to make something, this is hyper complex made super simple. When you're looking at a drug timeline, you basically have a pharmacokinetic, and that is from drug to receptor. And then you have pharmacodynamics, which is from receptor to excretion. So kinetic, drug to receptor, dynamic receptor to excretion. When you're looking at parallel timelines, when you actually know half-lives and when certain things peak and when certain enzymes are supposed to happen, you can actually take certain things to leverage certain things at a certain time based on the pharmacokinetic and the pharmacodynamic of what's happening with the thing that you're taking. Carnitine actually has this beautiful and totally underrated, I'll say, relationship with growth hormone to where they run parallel. You're going to have this parallel benefit to where you're going to have hepatic activity, growth hormones benefiting the liver and creating the liver is creating growth factors from growth hormone stimulating that liver. Growth hormones also going to be liberating free fatty acids. Carnitine is going to be able to leverage that. Carnitine is leveraging the growth factor potentiation. Carnitine is leveraging the mTOR potentiation of growth hormone. It's doing all of these things in parallel, in unison with growth hormone. So if somebody wanted to leverage recovery and they were taking growth hormone, that they could take five to 10 milligrams of carnitine with their growth hormone in order to leverage that component of it. Or if there is somebody who is purely using the natural pulsatile release of carnitine pre-bed and they're not actually on growth hormone, take carnitine pre-bed. You're still going to be leveraging certain aspects of that pathway.
So taking carnitine pre-bed can leverage and potentiate the growth hormone pathways based on kinetics and dynamics. But from a recovery perspective, carnitine seems to shine in the recovery perspective from neural fatigue. So if you beat yourself down with power lifting doubles and triples, or if you're doing extended rest pause sets or stretch, we've done a brutal workout, right? If you're just killing yourself in there, these types of workouts create a bunch of acetyl groups that bind to your muscle cells post-workout and do a lot of things that are unfavorable to recovery. And the real problem is your actual recovery process will not begin until those acetyl groups have been cleared.
Those need to be cleared. They need to be removed from the system. And those acetyl groups create a ton of neurological fatigue. That's where you're going to see it the most. The type of what, you know, it's oversimplification, but everybody calls it central nervous system fatigue.
So if you're the type of person, I know, it pains me to even say that. I specifically remember an entire episode of Barbell Shrug where Galpin just annihilated that specific thing. It was like the first time I ever heard Galpin many, many years ago.
Dude, that show. The first time I ever heard it was like in the early 2000s and Louis Simmons said, oh, you've got central nervous system fatigue. I was like, oh shit, that sounds smart. He's probably right.
That's got to be it. That's a hundred percent. That's why I'm not strong. Everybody that has ever lifted a weight started saying it.
Dude, I swear it came from Louis Simmons. He was the first guy I heard it from and it was so long ago. But essentially, if you're the type of person who, like your joints aren't sore and your muscles aren't sore, but like you just mentally don't really want to go to the gym or if you're the kind of person who maybe you're deep into a diet, you know, you're deep into the rapid transformation contest and you're deep and you can just feel that neural fatigue accumulation telling you to stop going to the gym.
Stop starving yourself and overtraining. We have no energy left. There's nothing to use. Exactly. So if you're deep in hypocalorism or if you're somebody who's just kind of maybe on a brutally heavy, neurologically fatiguing program, then quarantine actually post-workout seems to be ideal. And this would be a lower dose actually.
This would be, if it would be injectable, it would be 200 milligrams from an oral perspective that works out to 1.75 grams of L-carnitine L-tartrate.
So in the post-workout period to more effectively and accelerate the removal of these acetyl groups that are connected to neurological fatigue, then quarantine post-workout seems to be ideal. And actually, when you look at the research, quarantine post-workout is actually where the antigen receptor stuff was done as well. So as far as that fatigue and the antigen receptor activity, that can be taken post-workout. But for the other purposes, you know, environment, as you're kind of seeing, really matters here. So between the growth hormone potentiation, between the neuro fatigue, between the acetyl groups, I think that that just adds a huge strength to the argument we've created towards carnitine and performance.
So I probably need to lose a little bit of fat. I would definitely want to get stronger. I need a healthy heart. And I'd love to increase recovery. L-carnitine sounds like the thing that I need to be working on for a month. And then I'll start to see some benefits there.
But at the very beginning of this, we were talking about how do we implement it for the specific goal? Is there like a broad brushstroke that we can make using L-carnitine? Or does it need to be specific to each of those goals in order to achieve that goal?
I would want it to be specific to those goals in order to achieve the goal. Yeah, it is something that's environment dependent. So if you're somebody who is interested in heart health,
I would have it pre-bed. If you're somebody who's interested in energetics and fat loss, I would have it pre-workout. If you're somebody who needs recovery support, I would have it post-workout. If somebody wants androgen receptors with support, I would want to have it post-workout as well. If you're somebody who's interested in growth hormone potentiation, I would have it before bed. These are situations where I absolutely think timing matters. Lots of times timing doesn't. Beta-alanine, timing doesn't really matter. Creatine, timing doesn't matter.
Multivitamin doesn't really matter. or carnitine seems to really matter. Yeah, so it's definitely something that matters. And it's definitely, like you were saying, it's something that's wildly well-rounded, man.
Good for the heart, good for fat loss, good for recovery, good for growth. I don't want to put off the idea that anything's magical here, but it just impacts so many proteins in the body.
It impacts so many enzymes in the body. And, you know, don't take my word for it. Just go look into nutritional biochemistry, please. It's something that's, this information's already out there.
Nothing I've said here is theory, it's tactics. Everything I'm talking about is tactical. This is something you can go do, you can go try.
It's actually also an antioxidant for the brain on top of that. And more important than the brain, it increases sperm motility.
Ooh, swimmers, swimmers. More important than the brain, it increases sperm motility. And it actually increases the sodium potassium pump activity in spermatogenic cells.
So it's actually been demonstrated to increase sperm count and increase sperm motility. If your sodium needs that help, it is a fertility thing, too.
Yeah, I eat an enormous amount of red meat. Is this something that I would need to supplement on top of red meat? Or is eating roughly one and a half to two pounds of red meat a day sufficient?
I would still supplement on top of it. I would absolutely supplement on top of it, yeah. I don't eat that much, by the way. Yeah, that is quite a bit.
Yeah, that is quite a bit. So I would definitely still supplement with it purely because it's non-toxic. And I would want you to stick to the research rather than us kind of guests.
Yeah, fantastic. Dan Garner, where can the people find you? My man, you can find me at dangarnernutrition on Instagram.
I love that. Doug Larson. Also on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner.
We are barbells shrugged, barbells shrugged. I just made my first two Instagram posts, by the way, in like two years. What?
I know, right? I feel like. Me too. Yes, yes. I will go along with that for right now.
If you want to hang out with Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner and see them do a lab lifestyle and performance analysis, make sure you head over to rapidhealthreport.com.
That is where you can see a 60 minute video of those dudes breaking it down for one of our clients that was nice enough to let us post their lab video up there.
So get over to rapidhealthreport.com and everybody that comes into Rapid Health Optimization is going to get one of those plus some additional pieces.
So rapidhealthreport.com. And you can also get in there, set up a call with me, see if you are the right fit for Rapid Health Optimization. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.
