Wondering if creatine is something for you? Then this article is ideal for you! We will cover 6 questions that you can all answer with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. From the results, you can determine whether creatine is something for you or whether you should not buy it.
Table of Contents
- Question 1: Are you willing to pay $14 (~€12,8) per month?
- Question 2: Do you want to improve your explosive training performance?
- Question 3: Do you want to build more muscle mass?
- Question 4: Can you accept that the difference may not be great?
- Question 5: Are you ready to gain weight?
- Question 6: Are you willing to keep taking creatine consistently?
- The results
Question 1: Are you willing to pay $14 (~€12,8) per month?
Yes, you read that right! Using creatine will cost you about $14 a month on average. Below you can read how we arrived at this amount.
Normal creatine use is about 3-5 grams per day. For 100 grams of creatine, you pay about $7.5-$14. You can save on this by buying a large amount at once, for example. However, we use these numbers for calculations. Then we look at the 2 extreme situations.
The first situation is the use of 3 grams of creatine per day in combination with a price of $7.5 per 100 grams; so this is the cheapest situation. In this situation, you arrive at a price per month of ~$6.8.
In the second situation, we are looking at a use of 5 grams per day in combination with a price of $14 per 100 grams; so this is the most expensive situation. In this situation, you arrive at a price per month of ~$21.
The average of these 2 situations is about $14. This equates to a price per year of 168 dollars (~154 euros). So be aware of this!
Question 2: Do you want to improve your explosive training performance?
With the help of creatine you can improve your explosive training performance. But what exactly is this?
Explosive training involves a lot of force that is delivered in a maximum of 40 seconds. During this effort, the energy is obtained almost completely anaerobically in your body; without the use of oxygen. An explosive workout, for example, includes sprinting or lifting weights in the gym.
To understand how creatine can improve this performance, we need to look at the cellular level. In your body you have the substance ATP; you can see this as the general ‘payment method’ for everything that costs energy in your body. Simply put, you give a muscle ATP and then it can contract.
By default, you have a storage of ATP in your muscles. If you are going to deliver explosive power, this is the first ATP you will use, but this supply starts to run out after about 6 seconds. After this you switch to another system; the ATP-CP system. This is where creatine comes in. The substance ADP is also stored in your muscles, ADP can be converted together with creatine phosphate into ATP which you can then use to deliver explosive power.
By taking creatine as a supplement you have more creatine phosphate in your muscles and you can therefore produce more ATP while delivering explosive power. This will give you more energy and will result in better performance.
Question 3: Do you want to build more muscle mass?
Creatine can help you gain more muscle mass. The way creatine does this is quite self-explanatory. We saw in question 2 that creatine provides more explosive power. This will mean that you can do more repetitions in the gym, for example, or train with heavier weight compared to normal.
This will lead to a stronger growth stimulus for your muscles and your muscle mass will therefore increase. Several studies show this effect. A review[1] by P. D. Chilibeck combined 22 studies and indeed concluded that creatine leads to higher lean tissue mass (this is the weight of your body excluding fat).
In addition to the enhanced explosive power, there seem to be other mechanisms by which creatine can increase muscle mass, but there is still a lot of uncertainty about this.
Question 4: Can you accept that the difference may not be great?
Although creatine has a proven effect, creatine will not work equally well for everyone. This depends, among other things, on the amount of creatine that you already have naturally in your muscles, with some this is more than with others.
If you have naturally already stored a lot of creatine in your muscles, supplementing creatine will probably have a lesser effect. In addition, you should also prepare for the fact that the effect of creatine is not unbelievably great anyway. It certainly gives you a small advantage, but you will not suddenly go from 50 to 80 kilos with the bench press, for example.
So don’t expect too much from it; it can only disappoint. Decide for yourself whether you think this small benefit is enough to start taking creatine.
Question 5: Are you ready to gain weight?
In all likelihood you will gain weight by taking creatine. On the one hand, this can be due to the increase in muscle mass that we have just discussed, but it can also be due to an increase in the amount of water in your body.
By using creatine you will retain more water in your body. At the beginning this will often be about 1 kilo (~2.5 pounds). With prolonged use, this can add up to nearly 3 kilograms (~6 pounds). So keep this in mind; you may see an increase in water retention in your body. In addition, if you do a sport in which you are in a specific weight class, it is important to take this into account.
Question 6: Are you willing to keep taking creatine consistently?
By taking creatine as a supplement, you therefore have a greater storage of creatine in your muscles. This larger storage provides the effect that creatine has.
It is important to know that you must continue to maintain this storage. It is best to take creatine every day. If you stop taking creatine for a few weeks, the creatine levels in your muscles will drop back to normal and you will lose the positive effect. As a result, you will lose the extra explosive power.
The results
You should now have answered all questions with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I hope we were able to help you a little bit in deciding whether creatine is for you! Did you say ‘yes’ to 5-6 of the questions? Then I would definitely try creatine. If you said ‘yes’ to 3-4 of the questions I would recommend doing some more research on creatine and in case you answered ‘yes’ to 1-2 questions I don’t think creatine is for you.
If creatine is not for you, then protein powder may be something for you, click here to read more about it.
Lifestyle coach [5+ years of fitness experience]