What I Tell My Clients About One of the Most Researched Supplements on the Market
By Coach Michaelene Conner, Wellbeing and Strength & Conditioning Coach, and Nutritional Practitioner
Over the past year, I’ve noticed something interesting. The questions about creatine aren’t coming from bodybuilders anymore. More often, they’re coming from parents. Parents of football players, wrestlers, swimmers, soccer players, and teenage daughters who train year-round in competitive sports. They want to know if creatine is safe, whether it actually works, and if their son or daughter should be taking it.
At the same time, I’m hearing the same questions from active adults, weekend warriors, and retirees looking to maintain strength and independence as they age. Creatine has moved well beyond the weight room and into mainstream conversations about fitness, performance, and healthy aging.
My answer is usually the same: maybe.
Creatine is one of the most researched supplements available, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs it. Whether it provides meaningful benefits depends largely on how you train, your goals, and what you’re expecting it to do.
Before discussing who may benefit, it’s important to understand what creatine actually is. Creatine is not a foreign substance being introduced into the body. We produce it naturally in the liver, kidneys, and pancreas, and we obtain additional amounts from foods such as beef, pork, salmon, tuna, and other animal proteins. Supplementation simply increases the amount available to working muscles beyond what diet and natural production may provide on their own.
When clients ask how I recommend taking creatine, I keep things simple. I recommend creatine monohydrate because it remains the most studied, effective, and economical form available. For athletes who want to rapidly increase muscle creatine stores, I suggest a loading phase of 20 grams per day divided into four 5-gram servings for five to seven days. After that, a maintenance dose of 3 to 5 grams daily is sufficient. Those who prefer to skip the loading phase can simply begin with 3 to 5 grams per day. It takes longer to reach full muscle saturation, but the end result is essentially the same.
One of the most common questions I receive is whether creatine should be taken before or after exercise. The research suggests that timing is far less important than consistency. The real objective is maintaining adequate creatine stores within the muscle, so taking it regularly matters far more than taking it at a specific time of day.
Another misconception is that taking more creatine produces greater results. Muscles can only store a finite amount. Once those stores become saturated, additional supplementation provides little added benefit. Excess creatine is ultimately converted into creatinine and eliminated through the urine. In other words, if a little is good, more is not necessarily better.
The biggest misconception surrounding creatine is that it builds muscle. It doesn’t—at least not directly. Creatine functions primarily as a fatigue buffer. It helps replenish ATP, the immediate energy source muscles rely on during short bursts of intense activity. As ATP stores become depleted, power output begins to decline. Creatine helps restore that energy system more rapidly, allowing athletes to maintain performance during repeated high-intensity efforts.
This is an important distinction. Increasing creatine stores within the muscle does not automatically build muscle tissue. Creatine is not an anabolic steroid, growth hormone, or muscle-building drug. What it does is support the energy systems that allow an athlete to train harder, recover between efforts, and potentially perform more total work. Any increase in muscle size is typically the result of improved training over time, not the creatine itself creating new muscle.
In practical terms, creatine may help an athlete complete one more repetition, maintain power slightly longer, recover more quickly between sets, or reduce the decline in performance that occurs as fatigue accumulates. Those improvements may seem small, but over weeks and months of training they can translate into meaningful gains in strength and performance.
This distinction is also why creatine isn’t necessary for everyone. The harder and more explosive the activity, the greater the potential benefit. Football players, wrestlers, sprinters, strength athletes, and individuals engaged in repeated high-intensity exercise are often the people most likely to notice a difference. Someone whose exercise consists primarily of walking, casual cycling, or occasional fitness classes may experience very little change.
That’s why I don’t automatically recommend creatine to everyone I work with in my practice. In many cases, I’d rather see someone focus on the basics first: consistent exercise, quality sleep, adequate protein intake, hydration, and a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. Those habits will always provide a greater return on investment than any supplement.
One interesting finding from the research is that vegetarians and vegans often respond particularly well to creatine supplementation. Because creatine is naturally found in meat and fish, people who consume little or no animal protein frequently begin with lower creatine stores and may experience a greater response when supplementing. This is one reason why results can vary from person to person.
Women often ask whether creatine will make them bulky. The answer is no. Creatine is not a hormone, nor does it magically transform someone into a bodybuilder. What it may do is support recovery, training capacity, performance, and the maintenance of lean muscle tissue. Women are discovering the same thing athletes have known for years: creatine is an energy-support supplement, not a muscle-building shortcut.
Another common concern is weight gain. Yes, creatine can cause the scale to move upward, but this isn’t body fat. Creatine increases water storage inside muscle tissue. Every gram of glycogen stored in muscle is accompanied by approximately three to four grams of water. As muscle creatine stores increase, water retention inside the muscle cell often increases as well. That’s one reason muscles may appear fuller after supplementation.
Some people mistakenly interpret this early increase in body weight as new muscle. In reality, much of the initial change is water being stored within muscle tissue. While muscles may appear fuller, this should not be confused with the actual process of building new muscle fibers.
For athletes, this is usually viewed as a positive. For someone watching the scale closely, it can come as a surprise.
In recent years, researchers have also become interested in creatine’s potential role beyond athletics. The brain consumes enormous amounts of energy each day, and scientists continue studying creatine’s potential impact on cognitive performance, mental fatigue, memory, and healthy aging. The research is ongoing, but it’s one reason creatine has gained attention far beyond the weight room.
So, should you take creatine?
If you’re looking for a miracle supplement, the answer is no. If you’re sleeping poorly, skipping workouts, neglecting protein, and hoping a scoop of powder will solve the problem, the answer is definitely no.
But if you’re training hard, lifting weights, competing, sprinting, or trying to maintain strength and muscle as you age, creatine is one of the few supplements I can discuss with confidence. Not because it’s trendy. Not because it’s heavily marketed. Because after decades of research, it continues to do exactly what it was designed to do.
It helps buffer fatigue.
And sometimes, that little extra capacity is enough to help you perform at your best.
About the Author
Michaelene Conner is a Wellbeing Coach, Strength and Conditioning Coach, and Nutritional Practitioner who specializes in helping clients improve performance, health, and quality of life through practical, science-based strategies.
To learn more, visit CoachConner.com.
You can also listen to Michaelene’s book, Good Brain, Bad Brain, Your Brain, available on Audible and Amazon.
Interested in creating a personalized fitness, nutrition, or performance plan? Let’s build one together.
Email: coachmikeconner@gmail.com
Text: (404) 358-3250