What Does Creatine Do?

What does creatine do? Creatine is arguably the best dietary supplement when it comes to building lean muscle mass. Research studies show that creatine can help build lean muscle mass, strength, and exercise performance. Most people don’t know that creatine is found naturally in our muscle cells. It helps your muscles produce energy during high intensity training and heavy lifting.

What does creatine do? iStock- photo credit: Djavan Rodriguez

Half of the creatine stores in your muscle cells come from eating red meat and the rest is made from your liver and kidney from amino acids. Your body produces creatine from amino acids such as glycine and arginine.

What creatine does is it helps to produce more ATP which is a high energy molecule. When you have more ATP, your body can perform better during exercise. ATP is considered the most important energy source when it comes to heavy lifting and high intensity exercises.

Some of the other things that creatine can do other than building lean muscle is:

• Improves muscle repair and new muscle growth while improving satellite cell signaling.
• It helps lift water content into your muscle cells which causes a cell volumization effect and the result is improved muscle growth.
• It helps to prevent protein and muscle breakdown.
• Studies have shown it can help raise and increase your anabolic hormones.

A lot of older research studies have shown that taking creatine increased muscle fiber by 2 to 3 times more than training alone. A 2009 research review study showed that with or without resistance training if you consume creatine can improve muscle mass in older adults.

When it comes to sports and performance and creatine:

• Research studies have shown that creatine can improve jumping and sprinting performance in soccer players.
• Studies have shown to increase power in the final sprint time for cyclists.
• Studies have shown to improve power development in swimmers.

The creatine dosage instructions suggest you do a loading phase which is taking 20 grams of creatine per day for 5 to 7 days. After the loading phase period take 3 to 5 grams of creatine per day to maintain high levels of creatine in the muscles.

If you choose not to do the loading phase which some people do, just take 3 to 5 grams of creatine per day. And if you do this research studies show it could take at least 4 weeks to have creatine stores in your muscles.

Because creatine pulls water in your muscles it is important to drink lots of water to help you stay hydrated. If you combine creatine along with consistent resistance training, it is beneficial for women when it comes to strengthening their bone density and improving their body composition.

You can start to see the effects of creatine consumption in about 2 to 4 weeks roughly.

The Bottom Line is creatine is arguably the best dietary supplement when it comes to building lean muscle. And it helps with improving strength and increasing your exercise performance especially when it comes to heavy lifting and high intensity exercises.

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