How to take creatine: dose, timing and what to expect.

For almost everyone the answer is three to five grams of creatine monohydrate a day. Three grams is the dose behind the authorised UK health claim and the lowest amount shown to saturate muscle, which it does in about a month. Five grams is the dose used in most research and gives a margin for larger people and for the 12% of monohydrate that is water by weight.

How much creatine to take

Bigger bodies hold more creatine, so some researchers prefer to dose by weight: roughly 0.05 g per kilogram a day for maintenance, which puts a 60 kg woman at 3 g and a 110 kg rugby player nearer 5.5 g. In practice most practitioners keep everyone at 5 g and reduce only if the stomach objects. A level teaspoon holds about 5 g. Our dose calculator does the arithmetic, including the higher ranges used in bone and brain research.

More is not better for muscle. Once stores are full, extra creatine is excreted. Doses above 5 g have a place in bone and brain research, covered on the brain page, but they add cost and stomach risk without adding strength.

Loading phase or not?

A loading phase means taking about 20 g a day, split into four doses, for five to seven days, then dropping to the maintenance dose. Protocols from the 1990s used 30 g a day. Loading saturates muscle in about a week rather than three to four. Everything else about the outcome is identical.

Loading exists mostly because researchers running short trials could not wait a month. It is also the main reason creatine has a reputation for bloating, and the main reason many women historically avoided it. Skip it unless you have a date to hit.

When to take creatine

Timing used to be a live debate. It no longer is. Creatine works by accumulating in muscle over weeks, and recent trials comparing morning, evening and around-training doses find no meaningful difference. An evening dose does not disturb sleep. Older studies hinting at a small advantage for taking it after training with a meal are real but marginal; carbohydrate and protein nudge uptake, and food reduces the chance of stomach upset.

The practical rule is habit-stacking. Put it in the coffee, the protein shake, the electrolyte bottle or the porridge you already have every day. If you forget, take it when you remember. Do not double up the next day.

Splitting doses

If a single 5 g dose sits badly, split it: two or three grams in the morning and the rest later, or five grams sipped through a workout in a water bottle. Research comparing one 20 g bolus with a gram every half hour found the small, frequent doses retained more creatine. Splitting also removes the light-headed or wired feeling a minority of people notice from a large dose on an empty stomach. There is no downside.

What to mix creatine with

• Water or squash. Stir well; micronised creatine suspends better. Drink it promptly rather than leaving it to sit.
• Protein shake. The default for most gym-goers. Creatine is stable in a shake for the hour or so it takes to drink it.
• Tea or coffee. Hot drinks dissolve it completely. The idea that caffeine cancels creatine out rests on one small 1990s study. Later work suggests any interaction is small; ordinary coffee is fine. If you take very large caffeine doses, separate the two.
• Porridge, yoghurt or juice. All fine. Juice is mildly acidic, which does not matter over the minutes it takes to drink.

Avoid pre-mixing creatine into water for the day or the week. In solution it gradually converts to creatinine, which is inactive. Dry powder is stable for years.

Do you need to cycle creatine?

No. Cycling on and off was borrowed from the practice around anabolic steroids and has no basis for creatine. Your body reduces its own synthesis slightly while you supplement, and production returns to normal within weeks of stopping. Long-term trials show no downside to continuous daily use. It is worth noticing that people who worry about being "on" creatine permanently rarely apply the same logic to a weekly drink, which is far less well studied and far less benign.

One caveat: the "no cycling" evidence applies to normal doses. Very high intakes of 20 g or more a day are for short, specific periods, not for life.

What to expect, week by week

Week 1

Not much, unless you load. Muscle stores are filling. You may notice a little extra weight on the scales as water moves into muscle.

Weeks 2–4

Saturation is approaching. Most people notice an extra rep or two at the end of hard sets, and muscles may look slightly fuller. Pooled data put the average weight change at under a kilogram, most of it lean tissue; a minority of people gain noticeably more.

Month 2 onwards

The tank is full and stays full as long as you keep taking it. The benefits now come from the extra training volume that a fuller tank allows. Strength and lean-mass gains accumulate over months, not days.

If you stop

Muscle creatine returns to baseline over about four weeks and the water goes with it. Brain stores appear to fall more slowly, possibly over a couple of months. The strength and muscle you built while training with creatine stay, because they were built by the training.

Questions

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