Cardarine dosage and evidence

What is Cardarine?

How does Cardarine work?

It switches on PPAR-delta, a gene switch that turns up fat burning in muscle.

What do people who took Cardarine report?

This is what real people say happened to them, good and bad. Nobody measured it. A report cannot tell a real effect from the lift people get just from expecting it to work, from a diet or training change made at the same time, or from what was really in the vial. We still put it near the top. It is the next best thing to a study in people: what happens when real people use it, including what goes wrong.

• Endurance is what people say they want from it and what the favourable accounts describe, usually inside the first week or two. Those accounts sit directly alongside people describing the opposite, including endurance getting worse during long distance training, which makes this one of the more contradictory pictures in this set.
• Amounts described start around 5 to 10 mg daily and run to 20 mg or more, on cycles of roughly two to three months with similar time off. Fat loss, where it is reported at all, is usually placed around weeks six to ten rather than early.
• Severe tiredness is the most common bad report, and several people describe stopping within three or four days because of it while noting that it is the reverse of what they expected. Itchy rashes across the back are described by more than one person, in one case still visible months later.
• Bloodwork reports disagree with each other. Sharply raised LDL, the bad cholesterol, and raised liver enzymes after about a month at the higher amounts appear. So do reports of better blood fat results from other people. A raised fasting glucose reading appears and is then questioned by the same poster who raised it.
• The rodent carcinogenicity data is brought up in most threads and is usually met with the argument that the animals received something on the order of a hundred times more, for their whole lives. That exchange repeats rather than resolves.
• Sourcing dominates the later part of these discussions. The extreme spread in individual response is commonly put down to nobody knowing what is actually in the vial, and counterfeit or underdosed product is treated as the default assumption rather than the exception.

Sources: Cardarine threads on ExcelMale and MESO-Rx, with T-Nation and LongeCity threads surfaced by the same site-restricted search, September 2026. Nothing above is attributed to any specific post and no post is reproduced.

The evidence, in charts

The studies we cite

• Study in people2012
  Lipid effects of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-delta agonist GW501516 in subjects with low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol: characteristics of metabolic syndrome

  The biggest human trial moved blood fats the right way, and the story still ends badly. 268 people with low good cholesterol took one of three doses or a dummy for 12 weeks. Good cholesterol rose by about a sixth, triglycerides fell by about the same, and another harmful cholesterol marker fell too. Twelve weeks is the longest anyone has taken it in print. Development stopped over cancers in rodents, and that work was never published in full.

  The largest published human trial, run by GSK: 268 people with low HDL took 2.5, 5 or 10 mg or placebo for 12 weeks. HDL cholesterol rose up to 16.9%, triglycerides fell 16.9% and apoB fell 14.9%. Twelve weeks is the longest published human exposure; the rodent carcinogenicity findings that ended development were never published as a primary paper.

  PMID 22814748 Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology
• Animal study2008
  AMPK and PPARdelta agonists are exercise mimetics

  In mice. With training, it improved endurance.

  GW501516 plus training improved endurance in mice.

  PMID 18674809 Cell