Creatine Isn’t Just for Muscle

How does creatine affect the body and health?

In this episode of Health Recoded, we break down the science behind creatine, cellular energy production, muscle physiology, brain health, recovery, and how creatine supplementation affects the body.

If you’ve received conflicting information about creatine, heard concerns about kidney damage or weight gain, or wondered whether creatine is actually healthy, this episode will help you understand what creatine does physiologically and how it works inside the body.

Many people don’t realize that creatine is not just a muscle supplement. 

Creatine supports cellular energy systems used throughout the body, including:
muscle tissue
the brain and nervous system
recovery systems
cognition and mental fatigue
hydration and cellular function

In this episode, we explain the anatomy and physiology behind creatine, how the phosphocreatine energy system works, what creatine does inside muscle and brain tissue, and the research behind common myths and misconceptions.

If you’re looking to improve your understanding of energy production, recovery, muscle health, cognition, or supplementation, this episode gives you a science-based and approachable place to start.

Subscribe for more conversations that help you better understand your body, physiology, and health. New episodes weekly.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:56 What is creatine?
01:56 What is the difference between creatine and creatinine?
03:37 How does creatine create energy?
06:01 How does creatine support muscle growth?
08:04 Does creatine improve cognition?
09:45 Does creatine cause kidney damage?
10:45 Does creatine improve recovery?
12:05 Does creatine cause weight gain?
13:46 Do creatine gummies work?
15:14 Does creatine cause kidney failure?
15:57 How does creatine affect women?
18:23 Do you lose muscle when stopping creatine?
19:43 How to take creatine
22:36 Key Takeaways

This content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for guidance provided by your own medical professional.

Resources:
International Society of Sports Nutrition — Common Questions and Misconceptions About Creatine Supplementation
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7871530/
NIH — Creatine Overview
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209321/
Frontiers in Nutrition — Creatine Supplementation and the Muscle-Brain Axis
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2025.1579204/full
PMC — Emerging Evidence Supporting Creatine Supplementation
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13011109/
ScienceDirect — Creatine Overview
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/creatine
Springer — Creatine Kinase System and Energy Metabolism
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00726-011-0877-3
Health.com — Creatine vs Creatinine
https://www.health.com/creatine-vs-creatinine-8679758
NIH Office of Dietary Supplements — Creatine Fact Sheet
https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Creatine-HealthProfessional/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Most people think that creatine is just a gym supplement, but it's actually an energy system supplement. Hi, I'm Alex, I'm your nurse, and today we're talking about one of the most researched supplements, creatine. Even with all that research though, there is still a lot of information and confusion about how it works or how it impacts the body. I get on social media all the time and I see people say a lot of weird things about creatine. So let's talk about it and see what it actually is. Creatine is often portrayed as a Jimbro supplement or only for those that lift or want fuller muscles, but research has shown that there's a lot more benefit to creatine than just for your muscles. It helps with your brain function, it improves your alertness, and it can help with recovery as well. So let's talk about the physiology behind creatine and how it works so that we can ideally debunk some of this common myths and information. So, what is creatine? Your body naturally uses creatine already every day. It naturally produces roughly one gram per day of creatine. So creatine is an amino acid compound found in muscles and food like red meat, and it is not a synthetic hormone. So it's a naturally occurring nitrogen-containing compound made from the amino acids arginine, glycine, and methionine. The body primarily synthesizes creatine in the liver, the kidneys, and the pancreas, but it also is obtained through foods such as red meat, fish, and poultry. 95%, roughly 95% of the body's creatine is stored in skeletal muscle, with smaller amounts found in the brain, the heart, and the testes, which is why it's so important to help supplement. Its primary physiological role is helping rapidly regenerate cellular energy in tissues with high energy demand. So one of the things I wanted to talk about first was the difference between creatine and creatinine, because this is where people get mixed up a lot. So creatine is a functional energy support compound and it helps to regenerate ATP, which is a source of energy, and it's stored primarily in the muscle and in the bones. Creatinin, it's a waste byproduct produced when creatine and phosphocreatine break down and it's filtered through the kidneys and excreted in your urine, and it's commonly measured on blood work as a kidney function marker. So the important nuance here is creatine supplementation may increase creatinine levels without necessarily indicating kidney damage in healthy individuals. So if you're taking in more creatine than somebody who isn't, for example, their creatinine level may be within range, but your creatinine level, if you're supplementing with creatine, may be a little bit higher because you have more for the body to excrete. So you're putting more of the creatine in, the body is taking more of the creatine and the phosphocreatine breaking it down and excreting it out. That does not mean that it is damaging your kidneys, though. Creatine supports energy production, and creatinine is the metabolic waste product left afterwards. So creatine doesn't just affect the muscle, it also affects cellular energy. And this is one of the key components of creatine. Creatine supports energy production. Creatinine is the metabolic waste product that is left afterwards. So just because you're taking creatine does not mean that you're putting yourself into kidney failure. Creatine doesn't just affect muscle, it affects cellular energy. How does it affect the body in this way? So ATP stands for adenosine triphosphate, and it's the body's immediate usable energy source. So every cell relies on ATP for muscle contraction, nerve signaling, active transport, cellular metabolism. And the problem is ATP stores are extremely limited in the body and deplete rapidly, particularly during high energy demand, such as exercise or physical activity. And the phosphocreatine system acts as a rapid ATP backup system. So this is why it's often advised to take creatine around your workout because you're essentially supplementing that energy source for your body. And it's not gonna be in the way of take like caffeine to give you energy, it's more to supply your body with which to use more of that energy in order to function. But we're gonna talk about that in more detail. So the phosphocreatine system, what is this? Inside muscle cells, creatine is largely stored as phosphocreatine. So during high energy demand, the ATP loses a phosphate group, so it changes from ATP to ADP. Energy is then released. So we're not going to get into all these words, but just know that it breaks down and the energy is released as a result. So creatine kinase then transfers a phosphate from the phosphocreatine back to ADP to rapidly regenerate ATP. So if an essentially it reverses that so you have more ATP with which to access. So the equation is phosphocreatine plus ADP goes to ATP and creatine. This process occurs extremely quickly and is especially important during heavy lifting, sprinting, explosive movement, and short duration, high-intensity exercise. So the phosphocreatine system is the body's fastest ATP regeneration pathway. So this is why supplementing with creatine, particularly if you're an athlete or a lifter, is so important because those stores are naturally going to be pulled from more often and could be more depleted. And so this could really help recovery. So let's talk about the muscles. Creatine. Creatine pulls water into your muscle cells and it increases intracellular water retention. So this is why people often fear the weight gain that occurs when they start creatine. You're not gaining fat. The muscles are hydrating in essence. So creatine pulls water into the muscle cells rather than simply causing generalized bloating. So your muscles can look fuller. So this increased cellular hydration can support muscle performance, recovery, protein synthesis, and training adaptations. Again, with the ATP and the recovery there. This is one of the reasons why people will gain several pounds after starting creatine. Much of that is intracellular water storage within muscle tissue. But it's honestly typically only maybe two to three pounds, five would be kind of a lot, depending on your body habitus. But creatine helps hydrate muscle cells at the cellular level. So it's really important. It's not making you gain weight, it's making your muscles fill out. Muscle performance with creatine, increasing intramuscular phosphocreatine stores improves the ability to rapidly regenerate the ATP or the energy stores, like we talked about, and it helps to recover from bouts of exercise and sustain repeated high-intensity efforts. So research consistently shows that creatine supplementation can improve your strength, your power output in the exercise, your sprint performance, and your lean muscle mass, particularly when it's combined with resistance training. So this is genuinely one of the best supplements that you can use if you're going to be active and in the gym lifting. But we're going to start talking about some of the other ways that creatine can help. You don't have to be a major athlete or a gym bro in order to supplement with this. So let's talk about why. The brain. This represents only about 2% of your body weight, but it uses roughly 20% of your body's energy. That's a lot comparatively. So because of this enormous ATP demand, the creatine phosphocreatine system is also important in brain tissue. So neurons require constant ATP production for membrane maintenance, neurotransmitter release, signaling, and cognition. So essentially just functioning. Creatine can help to buffer brain energy demands during sleep deprivation, metabolic stress, and cognitive fatigue. Emerging research is suggesting creatine supplementation can support and improve cognitive performance, processing speed, fatigue resistance, and recovery from stress. So if you're having, maybe you didn't get a lot of sleep the night prior, maybe bumping up the creatine that you take if you take it daily and taking closer to 10 milligrams to 20 milligrams can actually give you that bump of clarity, essentially, and cognitive functioning so that you don't feel so fatigued throughout the day because your body is not going to be pulling, or your brain rather is going to still be pulling, but it's going to have more to pull from. And ultimately, we could argue that your brain is probably your biggest muscle. It is flexing and working, even if it is in a slightly different way. So, kind of flipping gears here a little bit, let's talk about the kidneys again. What do the kidneys do? They filter your blood, they regulate fluid and electrolytes within your body, and they excrete any metabolic waste that is not needed from there. So creatinin is one of the markers commonly used to assess kidney function. Because creatine converts into creatinine, people taking creatine may show mildly elevated creatinine levels on their lab work. But this does not automatically indicate kidney damage or failure. Most research has not demonstrated kidney damage in healthy populations using the recommended doses, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But, however, with people that have existing kidney disease, impaired renal function, or maybe they take certain medications that could alter their kidney processing, consult with your healthcare provider first before taking creatine or discuss how much it would be safe to take. So I've mentioned it a few times, recovery. How does creatine help with recovery? Creatine may improve recovery by helping restore phosphocreatine stores faster in the body, improving cellular hydration, again, just like the muscles filling with water because we supplemented with creatine, reducing muscular fatigue as a result, and then improving repeated performance capacity. So some studies also suggest creatine can reduce exercise-induced muscle damage and inflammation after intense exercises. Again, if there's more energy and more hydration for the muscles in our body systems to pull from, then it can more accurately recover. So because creatine supports rapid ATP regeneration, again, that's energy, it may improve resilience during sleep deprivation, cognitive fatigue, and high stress demand. So this is why creatine is increasingly being studied beyond athletics and physical performance, because it's really starting to show that it affects the whole body in positive ways. So it is not a steroid, it's not a hormone, it's not testosterone or anabolic drugs. It is a naturally occurring compound in your body that is already being used daily. But let's still talk about some myths. Common misconceptions with creatine, there's quite a few of these that I found. It makes you bloat odor, it makes you gain weight. Yes, technically it'll make the scale number go up. Initial use might cause slight intracellular water retention, but this is actually good for cell and muscle hydration. This doesn't cause long-term excessive bloating or facking. This is just to say that if you do start taking creatine, expect a couple pounds increase in fluctuation. Or if you stop taking it, maybe expect to see some people will say it's more of a flat look. If you're a bodybuilder or you are lifting a lot like I do, you notice those small differences, whereas the average person might not. But if you start taking it, you might see a slight increase in your weight. But that's perfectly healthy and that's perfectly expected. Again, this is not excessive bloating and this isn't fat gain. It's just your muscles filling up with some water. So the distinction, it pulls water into muscle cells, not necessarily under your skin. So it's intracellular water retention instead of subcutaneous water retention. Okay, so there is a difference there, and it is gonna look different. The increased intracellular hydration may actually support muscle performance, recovery, energy regeneration, and then muscle fullness as well. So research shows initial creatine can increase total body water during the first several days to weeks of supplementation. So it can change water distribution in the body. That doesn't mean that it's fat gain. Another myth is is creatine ineffective with liquid? Creatine is relatively unstable in liquid for prolonged periods. So this is why a lot of many of the ready-to-drink liquid creatine products historically have not performed well. When creatine is dissolved for long periods, creatine can degrade into creatinine. Kind of what happens in the body. It goes in, you're full of water, it digests, and then it excretes it out as creatinine. So creatine monohydrate powder remains the most studied, the most effective, and the most evidence-based supported form. And this also leads me to talk about gummies. There's a lot of different forms of creatine outside of just the powder or the drinks, but a lot of gummies are starting to come onto the market. Gummies can work. If they contain adequate creatine dosage, the creatine remains stable and the dosing is consistent within the different gummies. The bigger issue is that many gummies contain lower doses of creatine, added sugar, or more expensive dosing per gram than what you would get for just basic monohydrate powder. So physiologically, creatine absorption itself is not dramatically impaired just because it's in gummy form. The key factor is the total effective dose within the gummy. We talked a little bit about this already. Kidney failure with creatine. Creatine breaks down into creatinine. Creatinin is commonly measured in lab work for a kidney marker and typically will indicate one way or the other how the kidneys are doing, but particularly if they're not doing well or if they're failing. But because creatine supplementation can slightly elevate creatinine levels, that's historically caused concern that creatine damages the kidneys. That is not the case. It is just that there is more to be excreted. So the higher creatinine does not automatically mean kidney damage, particularly if you're supplementing with creatine within a healthy level. There's actually some increased research on women in creatine, and it is growing rapidly. So one of the, it's not really a myth, but it's a little bit more of the misinformation that I wanted to highlight and discuss. Women may naturally store less creatine than men on average and really need to supplement with it more. Possible contributing factors could include lower muscle mass compared to men typically, or hormonal profile and fluctuations, and then lower dietary intake of red meat on average, but that one's kind of subjective. Because of this, some women may actually experience meaningful benefit from supplementation outside of just muscle growth and looking bulky. There's plenty of people that I talk to about supplementing with this, and they say that they don't want to gain weight and they don't want to get bulky, and ultimately you are missing out on a lot of other benefits, like we just talked about with supplementing with creatine, or rather with not supplementing with creatine. So research is exploring creatine's role in strength, recovery, cognition, aging, muscle preservation, and bone health for women, especially during aging, menopause, and periods of stress or sleep deprivation. Think about how much the female body on average goes through. And that's not to say that men don't go through stress as well. But with our different hormone profile fluctuating every 28 days, then on top of that, should you ever get pregnant and have children, childbirth is war. Like I don't care how people look at it, childbirth is war. Like that is a big deal to put your body through. And we can talk about specifics on that if you want to learn. But then from there, you want to talk about postpartum and breastfeeding and then aging and menopause. There's so many changes that go on in the female body just for hormones alone. And so to supplement with something that can supplement all of these different processes so that you have more energy, you have better recovery, you have more bone density, you have improved muscles. Why not? Like that seems like a no-brainer to me. So do you have to take it? Absolutely not. But I just want to talk about some of this stuff and give you the information so that you can make the best decisions for your own health. I mentioned this a little bit a while ago, but you lose muscle after stopping creatine. If you stop taking it, your muscle creatine levels will drop back to baseline, reducing some of the water-driven muscle fullness, but you will not lose actual muscle mass or tissue that you built. You might look flat, maybe, or you might feel like you look flat. I'm not saying you actually will, but you might feel like your muscles look less full because they are. But that doesn't mean that you actually lost strength. If creatine supplementation stops, muscle creatine stores gradually return to baseline over several weeks. As this happens, some intracellular water decreases, and so muscles can look less full or less volumized, even just a little bit. But this doesn't equate to losing actual muscle tissue. True muscle loss, atrophy, occurs from inadequate stimulus, detraining, insufficient protein intake, and catabolism over time or the muscles breaking down essentially. Stopping creatine doesn't suddenly remove your contractile proteins or your actual muscle tissue. So you may lose some water-driven fullness, but not the muscle that you've actually built. So now that we've debunked some myths, how do we take creatine? There's different types of creatine. We talked about gummies and liquids. Ultimately, creatine monohydrate is the most researched, the most effective, and the safest form of creatine with no superior alternative so far. You can get this from Amazon and a powder, you can get um like capsules that have the dose in there if you want to take it that way, but mix it in a little shot of water and take it really quick, or mix it in an energy drink before like your protein drink before you're going into the gym and drink it before you go in or after you come out. Ideally, you want to mix it and then drink it within I think it's 20 to 30 minutes, because again, if that creatine sits in the liquid for too long, it will degrade. So mix it with liquid or water in order to drink it in the morning. That's perfectly fine. That's how you're supposed to take it, but it's just how long it sits in the water, okay, for it to be effective. So muscle creatine stores may increase 20 to 40 percent with supplementation. So recommended doses, three to five milligrams, sorry, three to five grams daily for maintenance, and then there's discussion about a loading dose, 10 to 20 grams for a few days as you're starting, but it's not necessary, you can just start taking it. I believe it's roughly three grams for females on average and five grams for males on average. I've personally started to increase my dose though, because Rhonda Patrick talks a lot about how helpful creatine is and how you actually need more than you think you do, particularly closer to the 10 grams, can start to help with brain health focus and cognition. So I take, I think it's roughly five to eight grams on average a day. Somebody will probably come for me in the comments and say that that's not healthy. Okay, but I've done my research and it works for me so far. Ultimately, consistency is key. So if you don't want to do loading doses, that's perfectly fine. Um, take it daily, even on your rest days. You don't have to time this around your exercise if you don't want to. We'll talk about that in a second, but Timing matters less than just doing it consistently. That way, your body has the accurate, adequate amounts of storage with which to pull from. Want to drink plenty of water when we take it, creatine pulse water into the muscle cells, so you want to stay well hydrated throughout the day. And then the best time to take, many studies suggest taking it shortly before or after your workout and mixing it with a carb or a protein source can help to improve absorption. But if you're not, again, a gym junkie like I am, and you just want to take it in the morning with all your other supplements, then do that. That's better than not taking it at all. So, my key takeaways: creatine primarily supports one thing throughout the body, and that is rapid energy availability. It affects not just your muscles, your brain, your kidneys in a healthy way, your bones, and ultimately your body needs more stores with which to pull from. Most of the fear around creatine comes from misunderstanding the water shifts, the lab markers, or confusing creatine with hormones, not from the actual research. And no, it's not a steroid, it's not just for Jimbrose, it's for everybody, because if you have a body, it has creatine and it needs it to function. I hope this helped explain some of the importance of creatine, how it affects the body, but more importantly, to dispel some of the information or confusion, I should say misinformation or confusion around the supplement. If you have any questions, you can leave a comment. You can also reach out to me on Instagram at HealthRecoded Podcast. I will answer there. I host this every week and I talk about all different kinds of health topics. So if there's something you want to talk about, please reach out. I would love to hear it. I will see you guys next week and thank you for listening.