Despite what many people think, creatine isn’t a steroid or a dangerous substance. It’s actually naturally occurring in your body and is present in foods such as meat and fish. 

Approximately 95% of your body’s total creatine pool is found within skeletal muscle (the muscles attached to your skeleton that you exercise in the gym), with the remaining 5% including other tissues such as your brain, heart and testes. 

In simple terms, if a diet naturally contains a couple of grams of creatine, your creatine stores may only be 60-80% saturated. So additional supplementation can increase the creatine levels in your body by an additional 20-40%. That can help with short-term energy demands such as weightlifting or sprinting. 

Creatine monohydrate

Creatine monohydrate is the most popular form of creatine. Although many other branded forms of creatine supplement have been introduced, often with revolutionary claims, creatine monohydrate is the most well-studied form. Don’t be lured into paying a higher price for a form that has less research on it. 

Unlike caffeine, which can have a nearly immediate impact on performance, the goal with creatine supplementation is to ‘saturate’ your muscles over time. You would typically take 3-5 grams daily (which can depend on your body weight and how much muscle you have).

Or you can follow a ‘loading phase’ where you take a higher dose for a few days, like 20-25 grams for 5 days before dropping back to a maintenance dose of 3-5 grams per day. Think of your muscles like a sponge and creatine like water; you can saturate the sponge by running the tap quickly or slowly but over time, the end result is still the same. The loading phase just gets you to the same place a bit quicker. 

Benefits of creatine

Daily creatine supplementation has positive research showing it can help increase your strength, power and lean body mass. That’s why it is so popular among bodybuilders and gym-goers. But there is also some lesser-known research showing potentially positive impacts on things like brain health. 

As creatine naturally exists in your body and your diet, the amount that supplementation can help you as an individual can vary a lot. Some people notice more drastic results (for example, vegetarians may notice more as they tend to consume less dietary creatine). Other people don’t notice anything, hence the term creatine ‘non-responders’.  

So should you take creatine?

As it isn’t an anabolic steroid or other potent substance, it’s not going to suddenly slab pounds of muscle tissue on you. Neither will it allow you to immediately double your bench press. However, it’s a cheap, safe and extremely well-studied supplement. So it’s worth giving it a go and seeing if you notice any benefits. 

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If you want to lose body fat, you have probably heard that doing fasted cardio is good for helping you achieve your fat loss goals quicker. Many people roll out their best exercise mat and do aerobic training first thing in the morning before they eat breakfast, hoping to get faster fat loss results than if they had waited until they had eaten – and there is some solid rationale behind this.

The idea with fasted cardio is that as you are training on an empty stomach, you are forcing your body to use its fat stores for fuel rather than readily available energy from whatever you have just eaten. As liver glycogen (stored carbohydrate) and insulin (a ‘storage’ hormone) are both lower first thing in the morning, it makes sense that your body needs alternative fuel sources to power you through your workout – and perhaps body fat will do the job.

The science behind fasted cardio

Research has shown that when you exercise in the fasted state, rates of fatty acid oxidation are higher than if you exercise after eating. In simplified terms, this means that your body does indeed burn more fat for fuel, which sounds exciting.

However, it is important to understand that your body using more fat for fuel is not necessarily indicative of your body burning more body fat. Think of your body like a fire: if you throw coal on a fire, you will burn coal for fuel and if you throw wood on the fire, you will burn wood. In both cases, you haven’t changed the size of the fire necessarily; you just changed its fuel source.

Why calories are key for fat loss

Your body can change its fuel source, but that doesn’t change how much body fat you store. For example, if you suddenly eat a lot more dietary fat, your body will start using this for fuel. However, that doesn’t mean you are burning more actual body fat. If you want to change the size of a fire, you need to reduce the amount of energy you throw on it relative to how much it burns. If you want to lose body fat, you need to reduce the amount of energy you consume relative to how much you burn. Tracking calories and finding a calorie deficit, therefore, is key.

Rather than simply looking at what fuel source your body uses during the workout window (a tiny period of time) it makes sense to measure your actual body fat changes over the course of several weeks. In research studies that put participants through the same exercise programme, with one group exercising in the fasted state and the other in the fed state, both groups lost body fat with no significant differences between the two.

Basically, aerobic training is great for your health and can promote fat loss. But, whether you have eaten or not doesn’t seem to make much difference either way, so do whatever is most convenient for you.

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If your goal is to build muscle, you may have heard of the ‘anabolic window’ that occurs after your workout. Some people believe that the period after your workout is so crucial for ingesting nutrients such as the best protein powders that what you consume then is even more important than what you eat for the rest of the day.

If you train in a commercial gym, chances are you have seen people slamming their protein shakes as soon as their workout finishes, as if every minute passed is a minute wasted.

The theory is sound. Exercise is a stress on the body, and consuming some protein and possibly some extra carbohydrates could help kickstart the recovery process by raising insulin levels, replenishing muscle glycogen, decreasing muscle protein breakdown and increasing muscle protein synthesis.

Basically, if you want to grow as much muscle as possible, you should drink protein immediately after your workout when your body needs it the most.

Protein timing: why it might not be as important as you think

But the importance of this hinges on what the rest of your daily food intake is like. For example, if you train fasted, then of course it makes sense that your body would benefit from some protein post-workout.

But what if you ate a high-protein meal shortly before training? If you have some protein before your workout, those amino acids are still in your body doing their thing, and consuming protein immediately post-workout is now suddenly less crucial.

In fact, if two groups of people follow the same workout programme, and one group consumes a protein shake immediately pre-workout and the other consumes it immediately post-workout, both groups appear to get similar results.¹ This suggests that although the workout window probably is important, the timing isn’t as narrow as people previously believed.²

If you are in the teeny tiny percentage of athletes who trains twice per day, then consuming something immediately after your first workout makes a lot of sense. Likewise, if you are a professional athlete who wants to stack every single odd in your favour then having a post-workout shake or meal is a great idea.

If you’re a recreational trainee who prefers not to stress about minor details, though, rest assured that eating protein near your workout (either pre- or post-) is a smart move and removes the importance of immediately chugging a shake as soon as your final set finishes.

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