Happy Friday!
I sat down with my friend Tony Pemberton from The Enhanced Man last week to talk through one of my favorite energy tools, 5-Amin0-1MQ.
If you want my best practices for dosing 5-amino-1MQ, oral and injectable, this is it.
5-amino-1MQ is one of the most practical energy compounds I use.
Some days, I just want energy on demand. One small injection and it's like flipping a switch.
Here are my best practices on how to dose it and use it.
Mechanisms
5-amino-1MQ blocks an enzyme called NNMT. (NNMT is short for nicotinamide N-methyltransferase. Think of it as an enzyme that eats up the raw material your cells use to make NAD.)
When you suppress NNMT, more NAD becomes available inside the cell.
NAD is the molecule your cells run on for energy. Levels drop as you age. NNMT expression tends to increase with age and greater visceral fat.
So we're not adding NAD from the outside, we're letting the body keep more of its own.
Oral Dosing
The oral is where most people start.
I take it at 150 mg per day when I actually want to feel it. A lot of capsules come as 50 mg, so that's three a day for me.
Some people do well at 100 mg. I've run 100 mg cycles too. It works.
You get a clear benefit for about 30 to 60 days. Energy, performance, maybe a little fat loss.
Then it fades.
Past 60 days, I stop noticing much. You can keep taking it and it just doesn't hit the same.
So I treat the oral as a 60-day cycle. Run it, take time off, come back to it.
In summary,
100 to 150 mg per day
150 mg is my sweet spot for actually feeling it
Cycle roughly 60 days, then take a break
Expect tolerance to build past 60 days
Injectable Dosing
We didn't have easy access to injectable 5-amino-1MQ a couple of years ago. Now we do.
It comes as a lyophilized powder. You reconstitute it, then inject subQ.
The dose is much lower than the oral. I like 1-2 mg per day.
Some people run 5-10 mg. For me, that's way too strong. It creates so much energy that it gets uncomfortable.
So I keep it simple. 1 mg subQ per day, 5 days on and 2 days off.
In my experience, the injectable doesn't seem to desensitize like the oral does.
I can run it well past 60 days. Daily, or 5 days a week. The tolerance just doesn't build up as it does with the capsules.
It also feels more potent milligram for milligram. A lot more out of a much smaller dose.
In summary,
1 to 2 mg per day
1 mg is plenty for most people
5 days on, 2 days off works well
Can run longer than 60 days without the same drop-off
5 to 10 mg is overkill in my experience
Best Practices
You don't have to run 5-amino-1MQ in a cycle at all. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't.
The injectable works great as an on-demand energy tool.
Bad sleep the night before? Inject 1 mg. Under a lot of stress? Same. Traveling and feeling wrecked? Same.
One milligram and you flip the switch. You've got energy for the day.
That's become one of my favorite uses for it.
5-Amino vs. NAD+
People ask why I don't just inject NAD+ directly. Fair question.
When you inject NAD+, you're flooding the body with it. You'll get an effect. I'm not saying it doesn't work. I even like using it sometimes.
But your body has enzymes that chew up NAD. So, how much of that injected NAD actually stays available to use? Hard to say.
With 5-amino-1MQ, we never introduce NAD+. We lower NNMT, allowing more of your own NAD to remain available inside the cell.
There's one more piece here, and I want to be careful how I frame it.
There's long been some unease around exogenous NAD+ and cancer. The theory is that flooding the body with NAD could potentially feed an existing tumor. Personally, I don’t worry about this, but we have to admit it’s a nonzero possibility.
5-amino-1MQ may work the other way. In rodent studies, lowering NNMT is anti-proliferative, and researchers have observed tumor shrinkage.
I want to be clear here. That's preclinical animal data, not human outcomes. Don't read it as a cancer treatment claim.
But mechanistically, I like that 5-amino-1MQ gives us the NAD benefit by improving the cell's metabolic environment rather than dumping NAD in from the outside.
Expectations
The number one benefit for me is energy. Better workouts. More energy across the day. That's the most reliable thing it does.
Fat loss? It's there, but it's small.
If you took 5-amino-1MQ on its own and expected fat to melt off, you'd be let down. It's nowhere near a GLP-1 or a growth hormone peptide for that.
Where it pulls its weight for fat loss is alongside those tools. Stack it with a GLP-1, a GH peptide, cardio, and MOTS-c, and it adds something. On its own, it's an energy tool first.
One real-world use I've seen a lot lately is GLP-1 fatigue.
Plenty of people get wiped out on a GLP-1. You're in a calorie deficit, and your hormones and thyroid dial down a bit over time. 5-amino-1MQ helps bring that energy back up.
Final Thoughts
5-amino-1MQ is one of the energy tools I keep coming back to.
If you're new to it, start with the oral at 100-150 mg per day and run it for about 60 days.
If you want something more potent that you can run longer, the 1 mg subQ injectable is my pick. 5 on, 2 off.
And if you just need to flip the switch on a rough day, that single 1 mg injection is hard to beat.
I'm getting more bullish on this one, not less.
Have a fantastic weekend!
Best,
Hunter