Three years of lifting three times a week, 78 kg, diet is decent and I'm not in a deficit. I've never taken creatine because I assumed the effect was small and mostly water weight. A friend swears his bench went up 10 kg in two months, which sounds like a lot of other variables wearing a creatine costume. For anyone who actually tracked it, what did the numbers do, and how much stayed when you stopped?
'Just water weight' isn't the dunk people think it is, but it also isn't nothing. Some of the early scale change is water drawn into the muscle cell, and if you compete in a weight class or you race, that matters to you specifically. For general lifting it's noise.
Mine was less dramatic and more useful: one or two extra reps on the last set, consistently, across nearly every lift. Over six months that compounds into meaningfully more total volume, and the extra volume is probably where most of the strength actually came from. Also yes, about 1.5 kg on the scale in the first fortnight that is not muscle.
Dosing, since nobody's said it yet: 3-5 g a day, every day, training days and rest days alike. Loading at 20 g a day for five to seven days saturates faster, but you end up in the same place after about three to four weeks at the normal dose. I skipped loading entirely and have never found a reason to regret that.
Loading gave me stomach ache for four days. Not worth a three-week head start on something you're going to take for years.
Two months in, first time taking it. Honest answer: I cannot separate it from the fact that I started sleeping properly in the same fortnight. My lifts are up, I feel less wrecked on Thursdays, and I have no way to attribute either. Saying so plainly so nobody reads my anecdote as evidence.
What stayed when I stopped: the strength, mostly, because by then I'd trained for eight months. What went: about a kilo of scale weight and that last-rep feeling, over roughly three weeks.
Cheapest thing on the shelf with the most evidence behind it. Monohydrate. Don't overthink the rest of the aisle.
@interval_ida · last mo. · 3 replies
Best summary I know of: a 2024 meta-analysis pooling 23 randomised trials found creatine plus resistance training added roughly 4-5 kg to upper-body strength measures and around 11 kg to lower-body ones, versus training alone, in adults under 50. That's a real effect and it is also not 10 kg of bench in two months from creatine by itself, your friend was three years less trained than he is now, which is doing most of the work in that story.
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@negativesplitz · last mo.
Lower body being the bigger number is not what I expected at all.
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@interval_ida · last mo.
Some of it is just scale, squat and leg press numbers move in bigger absolute increments than bench does, so the same relative gain looks larger.
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