Does Creatine Truly Improve Exercise Performance?
Creatine may just be the workout supplement you need to take your workouts to another level.
You often hear of different supplements that you should take to improve your ability to build muscle and strength. Pre-workout, BCAA’s, protein shakes, the list goes on and on. One supplement that has become one of the most popular workout supplements is creatine.
What is creatine?
Creatine is an amino acid compound that can be combined with a phosphate group to form phosphocreatine, a source for ATP (energy) synthesis. Within our body, it’s primarily produced in the liver but can also be formed in the pancreas and kidney. Typically vegetarians have lower levels of creatine since the majority of creatine from our food sources come from meat and dairy. Whether sourced within our body, or from our diet, creatine primarily gets transported to our skeletal muscle (where 95% of the creatine in our body is stored).
Creatine can be used as a source for ATP synthesis when it’s converted to phosphocreatine. The phosphate group from phosphocreatine can then be transferred to ADP to form ATP, the form of energy our body uses. We use ATP to provide energy for many body functions, such as performing muscle contractions during exercise. Phosphocreatine provides a very rapid source of energy, as it can generate ATP much quicker than the breakdown of glucose or fat would. This makes phosphocreatine a great source of energy for high intensity exercise, where our body has a high demand of ATP, and needs it quickly. However, since the phosphocreatine pool in our body is rather small, it doesn’t provide a sustainable source of energy like glucose and fat (which is why creatine supplementation mainly benefits short, intense bursts of exercise).
Why supplement creatine if our body can produce it and we can get it from our diet?
The purpose of creatine supplementation is to increase total muscle creatine content. Typically creatine is supplemented by taking 20g a day (4 x 5g) for 5–7 days (the loading phase), then taking a maintenance dose of around 5g a day to ensure that creatine levels remain elevated. Having higher levels of creatine available in the body is supposed to enhance exercise performance.
It has been shown that supplementation can effectively elevate muscle creatine levels, which theoretically would increase the amount of phosphocreatine that can be formed. Increasing the amount of phosphocreatine will provide a larger source of ATP production, which means more energy available while exercising.
So does research show that creatine can improve exercise performance?
A study involving young males performing 8 weeks of resistance training showed that creatine supplementation enhances strength in as quick as two weeks in the bench press, shoulder press, and leg press. Another study recruited 30 athletes to perform 4 weeks of a training routine and creatine supplementation. The individuals who took creatine saw greater increases in strength in the squat. Overall, these studies both show that creatine has great potential to elevate your ability to build strength when resistance training.
A meta-analysis evaluating different studies on creatine supplementation showed that creatine supplementation typically enhances strength performance for both the lower limb (leg press, squat) and upper limb (bench press and chest press), particularly exercises that span less than 3 minutes. This aligns with the theory that creatine is most effective in enhancing high intensity, short duration exercise.
Does everyone respond to creatine supplementation?
Even though it sounds great that creatine can elevate performance, not everyone is equally responsive to creatine supplementation. Usually those with a lower base level of creatine (e.g vegetarians) see greater increases in creatine content from supplementation, compared to those with higher base levels. This indicates that our body has a limited threshold for the amount of creatine it can store. It’s been shown that those who respond more to supplementation (i.e. those who have naturally lower body levels of creatine), are the ones that see the most benefit with creatine supplementation.
That doesn’t mean that all hope is lost for those who don’t have low base levels of creatine. A study comparing the effects of creatine on vegetarians and non-vegetarians performing 8 weeks of resistance training showed that vegetarians see greater improvements in muscle growth and strength. These vegetarians had a lower level of creatine compared to the non-vegetarians at the start of the study, and were more responsive to the supplementation, leading to a greater benefit being seen. However, it’s important to note that the non-vegetarians still saw improvements in muscle building and strength with creatine.
Take-Away Points:
Creatine has been proven in countless studies to be an effective workout supplement to improve muscle and strength building. Even though vegetarians and those with lower base levels of creatine typically see the most benefit with supplementation, non-vegetarians still see a significant effect as well.
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