What Is Creatine? Benefits, Dosage, and How It Works

What is creatine monohydrate?

Creatine — a compound first discovered back in 1832 — sat largely ignored by athletes for well over a century, until interest took off in the early 1990s. Its popularity has grown enormously ever since, and a whole range of creatine forms and compounds have appeared on the market along the way. We won't get into those today. Instead, we'll focus on the original and still most popular form: creatine monohydrate.

First, it's worth pointing out that creatine isn't some foreign substance — your body produces it naturally in the liver, and you're already getting some of it from ordinary food, mainly meat. The richest sources are red meat (beef) at roughly 4.1–6.3 g per kilogram, chicken at 4.5–5.6 g per kilogram, and pork at 2.4–6.4 g per kilogram. The average human body holds around 100–140 g of creatine in total, and most people use up roughly 2 g of it per day, which the body then has to replace — either by making more itself or getting it from food. You can't really influence your own production, but you can influence how much you take in from outside sources. As shown above, food alone makes that genuinely difficult: 100 g of beef contains around 0.5 g of creatine, so getting 5 g from beef alone would mean eating roughly a kilogram of meat — not exactly practical for your wallet or your digestion. That's where creatine as a supplement comes in.

Creatine monohydrate is sold in two main forms: powder and tablets. Neither is clearly "better" than the other, though powdered creatine — especially the micronized (very finely ground) kind — tends to be absorbed a little more easily. Tablets have the advantage of being easy to carry around and easy to dose precisely, but they typically cost noticeably more than the powdered form. It really comes down to whether the extra convenience is worth paying for.

How does creatine actually work?

So how does creatine work? It acts on two fronts:

1. it increases muscle size
2. it increases strength

Muscle tissue is made up largely of water, and supplementing with creatine increases the amount of water held inside muscle cells — which naturally increases muscle volume. (This is also why you should increase your fluid intake while taking creatine — for example, roughly an extra liter of water per 10 g of creatine per day.) That's not the whole story, though: the increase in intracellular water also improves nutrient delivery to the muscle (better protein synthesis), which in turn supports further muscle growth. The strength gains come from creatine's role in regenerating ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the energy source muscles draw on during resistance training.

Now let's look at dosing. Two approaches are most common:

• Take 20–30 g of creatine per day for the first 5–7 days — the so-called loading phase — then drop to 5 g per day for around 20 days after that. The downside of this approach is that during the loading phase, some of the creatine simply gets excreted in urine before the muscles can use it. The upside is that muscles reach saturation quickly.
• The second approach is simpler and more economical: take 5 g on rest days and 10 g on training days. Muscle saturation happens more slowly this way, but you avoid the "wasted" creatine lost during a loading phase.

Both approaches end up producing broadly similar results in practice.

It's a good idea to mix creatine into a carbohydrate drink (a gainer), with around 50 g of fast carbohydrates being a reasonable amount. Carbs trigger an insulin response, and insulin helps shuttle creatine into the muscle cells. After 6–8 weeks of continuous use, take a break of around two weeks. If you keep taking creatine without a break for longer than that, its effect gradually diminishes until it's barely noticeable. You won't completely avoid some drop-off in effectiveness over time either way, but cycling off for a similar length of time afterward will make it noticeably more effective than taking it continuously.