What’s the Best Way to Take Beta-Alanine?

What’s the Best Way to Take Beta-Alanine?
Much like creatine 3, you can’t just take beta-alanine right now and expect it to kick in 15 minutes from now as you pull into the gym parking lot. Beta-alanine takes its time and gradually builds up levels of muscle carnosine.

In fact, the size of individual doses doesn’t even matter much. Instead, it’s the total dose over time that affects muscle carnosine levels. Furthermore, carnosine has a super long clearance rate in the muscle, so pretty much the longer you take it, the better you’ll be able to perform any form of exercise lasting between 1 and 5 minutes.

If, after some period of time, you stopped taking it, levels would decline at the rate of approximately 2% every two weeks, which is glacial as far as clearance rates go. So take beta-alanine before a workout if it’s more convenient that way, but it doesn’t really matter much when you take it.

All that being said, beta-alanine is also considered a secondary neurotransmitter, meaning that it has a stimulatory effect. Unlike the endurance and strength-building capacities of beta-alanine that take a few days to kick in, the stimulatory properties kick in within minutes, at which point you might feel a mild tingly feeling on your scalp or arms.

This phenomenon is called “parasthesia.” It’s mildly annoying but painless, and it disappears quickly. That, by the way, is the only known side effect of beta-alanine supplementation.