BA needs to be taken daily to really reap the benefits. It takes up to four weeks to fully saturate your carnosine stores. Powder form is best since it's inherently cheaper and the dosages required (3-6 g/day) equate to a lot of capsules.
In the literature the performance benefits are limited to the 60-240 second effort range. But, I found that it made extended efforts at your limit, like a long steep shitfuck fire road climb, to be noticeably less miserable. It won't make you faster on those efforts than your fitness would otherwise allow, but it does seem to reduce the suffering involved and allow you to ride at that intensity for longer.
I also spontaneously lost 2-3% body fat when I started taking it which didn't suck (this is consistently observed in the literature), and I swear it's helped my alpine skiing fitness. I ran out around the end of the year and didn't re-up for about two weeks. Toward the end of that period I was definitely starting to notice more thigh burn skiing and that reversed when I started back up.
I asked Pickles (PhD physiologist) last summer if there were any plausible physiological mechanisms through which taking BA long-term could be unhealthy and he couldn't really come up with any. Maybe, possibly via it's competition with taurine uptake, but that is unlikely if your diet isn't already low in taurine and even then just stopping for a week every 1-2 months should prevent any possible issue. High-dose BA supplementation in rodents extends healthspan and median lifespan (but not maximum lifespan). There's no way to know if that translates to humans, but it is strongly indicative that BA supplementation is safe in mammals generally.
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