Muscle Diet

L-carnitine is supposed to burn fat inside the muscle, but my biochemistry teacher said that the stuff’s a total scam. Is this true?

L-carnitine is not a scam. It’s a fascinating amino acid for many reasons. It’s essential to mobilizing fat and can increase fat burning. It can increase endurance and stamina by utilizing more fat for energy. But what bodybuilders don’t know is that it also increases nitric oxide for better pumps, recovery, strength, and hormone levels.

Approximately 90% of L-carnitine is stored within your muscle cells. Recently, scientists have proven that if we could somehow increase L-carnitine levels in the muscle, we could increase endurance by 25% while cranking up fat burning. Good news for guys looking to get shredded. What’s even better news is that top researcher, Dr. Paul Greenhaff, has discovered a way to increase L-carnitine levels inside muscle cells, and it’s going to change the way we supplement once it catches on. How did he do it?

It all has to do with dramatically jacking up insulin. Since insulin is your body’s “storage” hormone, you must use it to drive L-carnitine into muscles the same way you would with creatine. In fact, Dr. Paul Greenhaff is the same researcher who first showed us how to increase the absorption of creatine by taking carbohydrates. One has to wonder if the “insulin sensitizers” or glucose disposal agents like vanadyl sulphate, alpha lipoic acid, selenium, cinnamon extract, and certain amino acids can further boost muscle L-carnitine.