Creatine making me weaker?!?!

[Davegrun]

I started taking creatine a week ago, it is "Nature's Best perfect creatine monohydrate." I noticed that i have been struggling alot putting up the same weight i easily did before the creatine, especially on bench press. Today, i couldn't even finish my third set which i always do easily. Whats going on?

 

[JollyRogers]

you drinking allot of water while on it, I mean like for this week vs last week?

same as cals?

 

[Davegrun]

Yeah, a TON of water. Actually, now that i think about it, everything went up accept my bench, which went down. I can do all the excercises i do easier than before, but for some reason, my bench went down.

 

[JollyRogers]

If you go too hard for too long, you can stagnate and decrease in weight, It happens to me, you have to go light some weeks to go heavy other weeks. Or you will just keep dropping in weight as well as reps...ect

this is where some training programs come in handy, they let you load up for awhile then deload so you can go heavy agian but much more ...something like that.

thats why I like just doing simple stuff like going light then heavy ..lol

 

[endpoint]

I see people start creatine and think "oh i can train harder now!"......then they burn out. its not a magic pill/powder

maybe you are burning out?

 

[Davegrun]

I am gaining weight though, that is the weird thing. And as of now, my bench is the only thing that is getting worse. I am able to add an extra rep in too almost every thing i do, exept bench, which i am losing reps in.

 

[guldukat]

I started taking creatine a week ago, it is "Nature's Best perfect creatine monohydrate." I noticed that i have been struggling alot putting up the same weight i easily did before the creatine, especially on bench press. Today, i couldn't even finish my third set which i always do easily. Whats going on?

Did you see the Simpsons episode when Homer became a vigilante?

At one point, Lisa said something like, "Gee, dad, and I suppose that hat you're wearing keeps tigers away. You don't see any tigers around, do you?" She was being sarcastic.

Homer didn't get it, and concluded that his hat MUST have kept the tigers away. Old Homer

Everyone makes false causes from time to time (just not as bad as Homer), and this creatine = decreased bench press is one of them. It can't have anything to do with your decreased bench...that you simply noticed that around the same time is a coincidence.

No...since everything else is going up, the creatine is obviously working. And it would seem that you're not overtraining overall, but probably ARE overtraining pecs or the pushing muscles. Maybe you're doing too much work, too hard, too often. Or maybe you're simply burned out on bench presses.

It'd help to see what your routine looks like. At a guess, I would say you make it your primary pec builder on chest days...am I right? How many sets, reps and weight are we talking about? (Another guess: since you say you're doing a third set easily, I'd figure you ordinarily do more than 3 working sets.) Do you push it to failure on multiple sets? And most important of all, how long have you been bench pressing hard; i.e., when was the last time you did a lighter training cycle?

And it's only a week that you've struggled with the same poundage, right? How many reps have you lost?

Give us some details, but in the meantime, keep taking creatine. It cannot magically stop progress in one bodypart yet nudge it along in everything else.