Is creatine a useful supplement for athletes?

You may have heard a little about creatine, but is it a supplement you should be taking? In this article we will unpack who might benefit from taking it and what affects it has on the body.

So firstly, what is it?

Creatine is a naturally occurring compound found in our muscles and brain. It is also found through our diet in meat, seafood and (likely the reason you’re reading this) supplement form. It is involved in the supply of energy to help working muscles contract. For those of us with a good memory of Year 10 P.E theory, it helps supply the body with the energy currency of ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate).

 Why is it useful for performance?

When we have a higher storage of readily available creatine, the body is able to produce more energy in quick succession. Increasing these stores may increase fatigue resistance and enhance performance for high intensity activity. This can have a flow on effect, allowing for higher stimuli in training sessions and hence improved injury prevention, post session recovery and overall training adaptation in the long run.

If you are an athlete who regular uses resistance sessions as a part of your training, then you may want to explore creatine supplementation. This is especially true for explosive sports like sprinting or repeated high intensity sports such as football or soccer.

Creatine is often backed by sports dietitians as a useful supplement in many athlete groups due to its large body of evidence, potential for benefit and the minimal, if any, adverse effects.

What about endurance athletes?

Creatine has more than just benefit for resistance and HIIT athletes. If endurance athletes are utilising resistance training within their program (which arguably they should be), there can be benefit to supplementing with creatine. The caveat usually comes with the power to weight ratio debate where an athlete may increase water weight when loading creatine (more on that below).

With the ability to help time to exhaustion, single and repetitive sprint efforts and maximal power output, the argument would be that endurance athletes can benefit from creatine supplementation.

Why supplement?

While we can obtain creatine from our diet, the amount we would have to consume in order to keep a high level of intramuscular creatine for energy production is not feasible. If you’re wanting to top up your levels, unless you’re eating over a kilogram of meat per day, your best option is to supplement.  

If you’re going to supplement with creatine, there are usually 2 simple phases you want to be aware of; the loading phase and the maintenance phase.

As it suggests, the loading phase is when you are aiming to get your muscle creatine stores up to a point of saturation. This can take anywhere between 5-28 days to occur based on the dosage you’d likely be taking. If you want to load quickly (within 5 days), then taking 20-25g per day in 5g increments is suggested. If looking to load over a longer period (completely fine if you’re in a long training block), then just the 5g per day will eventually get you there. From this point is when we move into the maintenance phase. Simply put, the maintenance phase is keeping the levels of creatine high in the muscle so as to get maximum benefit. This is suggested to remain at that 5g per day.  

What about potential side effects?

There are plenty of studies out there regarding the safety of taking creatine within the recommended limits. What people are often concerned about is the potential (albeit small) weight gain associated with loading creatine. From a chemical perspective in our body’s muscle cells, taking extra creatine onboard just leads to a higher retention of water weight. Cells have a capacity though, so by the time you are in a maintenance phase of creatine, it’s unlikely any extra body weight (from water weight) can be contributed to the creatine itself.

Looking only at scale weight, in the short term, when utilising creatine may be short sighted though. It’s kind of like asking a fish how well it can fly. Probably not well but that’s what it’s good at.

Bottomline- if your regular training involved any aspect of repeated or maximal effort bursts, creatine has potential performance benefits for you long term. It is a very well researched, legal, cheap and safe supplement option for athletic performance.