The Only Three Articles You Need on Creatine

If you are considering creatine supplementation, I'm thinking these three articles, taken together, cover just about everything you need to know to make an informed decision:

• Sportscience Creatine Review
• Creatine and Endurance Athletes
• Creatine: is it really safe for long-term use?

I adopted the low-dose approach described in the second article and ran with it for around a month:

However, bear in mind that the water-retention-related gain in weight is primarily a function of the high creatine-loading doses (20 to 30 grams per day) used both in many research studies and by many athletes. In a very recent study, a lower loading dose (6g of creatine per day) produced only a one-pound gain in weight ('Why Your Creatine Consumption Is Costing You Too Much,' Running Research News, vol. 14(7), pp. 1-4, 1998).

And in fact researchers are finding that lower loading doses can be as effective as the big, 20-gram per day intakes at building up muscle creatine-phosphate concentrations, provided that the lower doses are taken over a little bit more time. Basically, the new research is revealing that six one-half gram doses of creatine per day (for a total of three grams daily) over the course of about 30 days will build muscle-creatine concentrations to a level comparable to that achieved with the whopping 20-gram ingestions. Very importantly, these three-gram per day intakes appear to be associated with very little water retention and weight gain.

Thus, it appears that creatine monohydrate can be a performance-boosting (and legal) supplement for endurance runners. The best way to take it is to simply sprinkle about a half-gram of the stuff on some food (and then of course eat the creatine and comestible) six times per day. Little creatine will be lost in the urine and faeces, creating a very economical intake pattern, little weight will be gained, and the resulting heightened intramuscular creatine-phosphate concentration should have a direct, positive impact on the quality of your high-intensity training sessions. Since intensity is the most potent producer of running fitness, your creatine-boosted sessions should eventually lead to some very nice PBs.

As advertised, no weight gain, which was nice. Everything else about that approach is so gradual it's impossible to say how much benefit I reaped, if any. Could I train harder? Maybe. Some of the burpee challenges seemed a bit easier on some days, but such things are highly variable under any circumstances. I'll probably run a couple more 2-month long cycles (using the same dosage strategy) over the coming year and see how it feels. I doubt I'd take it long-term, as I'd hate to run the risk of hampering my body's ability to produce creatine naturally, as suggested in the "long term risks" article.