Powder makes you about 10% stronger

Have you heard the good news? About

This powder? if you consume a lot of fitness-related content, you've probably already heard the good news.

But being that this is more of

A general-interest food and nutrition channel, some people here might not know.

There is a flavorless white powder you can ingest and almost instantly it just makes you about 10% stronger. It's totally legal. It's allowed by every major athletic organization. It has minimal side effects. It's safe for all basically healthy adults to consume. Oh, certainly talk to your doctor about it first. But that's basically the deal.

There is no catch with creatine. It's one of the few legal supplements that actually works. I mean beyond sports nutrition, there are all kinds of supplements that work. Like if you have a doctor who tells you to go on like prenatal vitamins or something, for God's sake, go on the prenatal vitamins. They prevent birth defects. There's lots of nutritional supplements that work, but I'm talking about the supplements that claim to be able to get you jacked. Most of the legal ones either do nothing substantial or, more often, they're just really gussied up and overpriced versions of very, very simple, basic things like stimulants, caffeine. Stimulants do basically what you would expect them to do as athletic performance supplements.

There's lots of gussied up and often overpriced versions of protein powder. Protein powder works because it's really just a food. It's a highly refined food. As much as sugar is a food, protein powder is a food. It's a basic essential macronutrient. Other than that, the only legal strength supplement that's proven safe and effective by decades of research is creatine. Creatine is probably the most studied sports supplement, other than maybe protein, but protein is just a food. If it would help you in whatever you do in life to be about 10% stronger, well, then you might consider taking three to five grams of creatine every day.

Talk to your doctor about it, of course. This may not help you in every physical activity, but for anything that requires short bursts of power, for that, creatine will probably help, whether it's lifting weights or lifting heavy boxes at work. That kind of short, intense effort really relies on the anaerobic energy systems of the body, and creatine supplementation really seems to help with those particular energy systems. It's in fact totally essential to those systems, which is why your body makes creatine. It's in you right now even if you don't drink this. Creatine is just an amino acid. It's non-essential, meaning your body makes it. You biosynthesize creatine in your liver and kidneys and pancreas, and you do that out of essential amino acids that you get from eating protein, from food.

That creatine goes into your muscle cells where it performs an absolutely crucial role in the incredibly complex biochemical processes that convert food energy into actual work. Do not expect an explanation of the Krebs cycle right now. I am not qualified.

Just know that every time you move

A muscle, there is a whole series of chemical steps that have to happen inside your cells to convert your blood sugar into actual muscular contractions.

Other animals have creatine in their muscles for the same exact reason. So if and when we eat their muscles, we get additional creatine on top of the creatine our bodies make. Lots of creatine in red meat in particular, and it's been shown that people who eat meat have more creatine in their muscles than people who don't eat meat. It's a modest but meaningful difference that probably means meat eaters are a little stronger, all else being equal.

But that's fine. You don't have to eat meat. You can supplement creatine just as you can supplement protein. To recover from my workouts, I generally drink milk protein because it's cheaper and easier to prepare than meat and it's probably a lot more sustainable. Whey is just a byproduct of the cheese industry. It's going to exist whether they sell it to you or not because they're going to make cheese no matter what. It does taste kind of gross, though. You know what tastes better?

So that was an ad. The ad is now over and. I want to reiterate that absolutely nobody from the creatine industry is paying me right now to extol the virtues of creatine. I'm talking about it because it's true and I want to. In fact, the supplement industry would probably much rather I hype their other products, because creatine is so easily and cheaply synthesized that there's a lot of competition in the market. So they really can't make much money off of it. It's inexpensive. Some brands sell more expensive forms of creatine that they claim are superior, but the specific form that's been researched for decades and proven is creatine monohydrate, the most common kind, which you can find under a million different brand names.

This particular brand was the first big commercial creatine supplement to hit the market. It was back in 1993. The year before, there had been a minor controversy at the '92. Summer Olympics in Barcelona. Prominent track athletes were taking creatine, and this is before creatine was well-known. Creatine would definitely improve performance in the shorter track events. Your sprints, your hurdles. The Olympic committee does not ban creatine because it's proven safe and it would be hard to tell via screening if somebody got their creatine via supplementation, because we all make our own creatine and we get it from food, mostly meat.

That said, in order to saturate your muscles with all of the creatine that it could possibly hold, you'd probably have to eat a lot of meat, like way more meat than would be healthy for a normal person. So supplements. The muscle creatine difference between a supplemented person and a normal meat eater, that's about as big as the difference between a meat eater and a non-meat eater, which is to say it's not a huge difference, but it's big enough to notice. It depends on your body size and composition, of course, but generally scientists find that five grams of creatine monohydrate a day is the most anyone's body can actually hold. Any more, you would just pee out, and extremely high doses could hurt your kidneys. You can start with a loading phase of about 20 grams a day for a week. That has been shown to help you get your muscles saturated faster. Then you just maintain at five grams a day thereafter.

Without the loading phase, it takes a few weeks to hit that saturation point and get maximum benefit. What exactly happens when you first load up on exogenous creatine? Well, I can remember what happened back in my early 20s, I think, is when I first started taking creatine. I remember hours after I took my first big dose, I got incredibly thirsty. I had this very weird feeling all over my body, like all of the water in my body was being sucked into someplace else in my body, which, funny enough, turns out to be exactly what was happening. Creatine is an osmotic, just like sodium. So it basically sucks up water, sticks to water. When you supplement creatine, it's going to make you thirsty. You'll drink water and then you will gain weight, maybe a couple of pounds of water retention.

That's a bad thing when it happens in response to sodium that you eat, because sodium is stored in your blood and therefore that extra water retention that you have, it goes through your bloodstream and it raises your blood pressure.

That's the main reason why sodium is

Potentially bad for you.

Sodium is also found in lots of other tissues, and so that's where all that water goes. It makes you look puffy. I look puffy sometimes, but it's not because of the creatine. It's mostly because of the pizza and other garbage. Creatine is almost entirely stored in your muscles, so the extra water from creatine goes into your muscles. If that's visually appreciable at all, it just makes you look slightly more jacked.

So, anyway, the first time I loaded up on creatine, I got really thirsty and I drank a lot of water, and then I was fine. Then a few days later, I went to the gym and I was just suddenly noticeably stronger. Just all of a sudden. It was that simple. I was just stronger. The 35-pound dumbbells felt like 30s. It was a miracle. Studies consistently find that people on creatine supplements are able to push about 10% more weight, though there's a lot of variation around that center.

Women don't seem to usually respond quite as well as men, though they do respond, if they respond. Some people don't respond to creatine supplementation at all, and nobody knows why. According to some studies, as many as a quarter of people just don't seem to respond at all. It doesn't hurt them, but it doesn't help them. Could creatine hurt anyone? Well, the experts generally say the same thing, which is that people with kidney or liver disease, they should not take creatine, and maybe not people with high blood pressure. Though, on the other hand, there are some studies indicating creatine can actually help with high blood pressure. That seems to be an open scientific question. Creatine could interact with certain medications.

So as always, talk to your doctor. The experts generally say that kids, teens should not take creatine, because all kinds of things that are perfectly safe for adults can mess with a growing body. Also, there's just not much research about young people taking creatine and what it does to them. There is one study that found an increased risk of testicular cancer among people who took over-the-counter strength supplements, which included creatine, but were not limited to creatine. So it might not have been the creatine. Plus, some other scientists who read that study wrote in to say, well, the real cause might be anabolic steroids that people take, in addition to the legal supplements. People sometimes make anti-creatine arguments comparing creatine to steroids, and that's just completely insane. I mean I'm pro-creatine, but ultimately the effect is pretty modest and therefore the risk is modest.

Steroids can completely transform you, but it comes at a cost. There's a lot of really, really big risks with steroids, which is why they're generally illegal in most jurisdictions. Here's another anti-creatine argument that you hear sometimes. People say, "What's the point of taking creatine? As soon as you go off the creatine, you're going to lose the extra strength." Yeah, that's a silly argument. That's like saying, "What's the point of food? I mean you eat food and you feel great, but then if you ever stop eating food, then you get all weak and tired. Boy, food. Food sucks." When you ingest anything that's needed by your body's energy systems, well, that's going to allow you to do more work, which is good. In the gym, it allows you to lift more weight, which allows you to stimulate more muscle growth, and the gains stay with you even if you go off the creatine.

But I'll probably never go off the creatine because there's basically no downside. I usually put it in with my protein shake. Studies have also shown that you're more likely to actually absorb it into your muscle cells if you eat it with some sugar. So I usually have a few bites of something sweet afterward because I'm not a real athlete. There's just no downside to creatine. Now tell me, have you heard the good news?..