Read this (all of it)... it's something I wrote a while ago (on another forum), so this is a direct c/p. I've been reading about creatine for years, one of the best comprehensible sources I've found are in Michael Colgan's sports nutrition guide.
How much Creatine?
The daily intake of creatine you need for maximum effect on muscle & strength, depends on how much muscle you have to fill.
Some guides to creatine use, use bodyweight to calculate creatine need. It's a poor measure because folk vary widely in bodyfat. Bodyfat doesn't need creatine. Over 95% of body creatine is in your muscles. At the Colgan Institute (nutrition in a nutshell, these are the guys to trust) they use muscle weight as the major criterion. Muscle weight in athletes is about 50% of lean weight in men and 35% of lean weight in women. So, in order to find out your personal creatine requirement, you have to know your lean weight, that is, your bodyweight minus your fat weight. (For more on lbw, read the mass gaining book).
Studies in the early '90s found that low doses of creatine didn't raise muscle creatine much. It has been found that the same results for blood creatine levels in single case studies. So there's some justification for loading creatine at the beginning of a cycle. Wether this strategy is essential to trigger super-loading of the muscles, is still being investigated. Until the evidence is out, loading is in.
Loading
Use a 6-day creatine loading regimen, with 0.5 grams of creatine per kilogram muscle weight. To save you the sums, the daily amount of creatine for loading, based on your lean weight is given in the table below.
Once you're loaded, it doesn't take al ot of creatine to keep you there. There's some evidence from Paul Balsom that subjects at unspecified levels of exercise, need only 10% of the loading dose. In case studies of athletes exercising at high intensity, they have found this amount insufficient. Until better controlled evidence comes out, you should adopt 25% of the loading dose as the maintenance criterion. Maintenance doses are also given in the table. That's all the creatine you'll ever need.
Divided Doses
The best way to load creatine is, divided doses, taken at spaced intervals thoughout the day. Divide your daily intake into four. Take one dose 30-60 minutes before workout. Creatine is then digested and in the bloodstream by the time you begin exercise.
Take another dose immediatly after workout. After exercise your muscles are hungry for creatine. So if you get into the bloodstream within 30 minutes after workout, you get a further edge in muscle uptake. Take the two other doses spaced out to fill the day.
Sugar is Essential
The second strategy is sugar. You enhance muscle uptake of creatine by taking each does with an 8 oz. drink containing 30-40 grams of mixed sugars. The sugars stimulate the insulin that is essential to push creatine through muscle cell membranes.
Use a 50:50 mix of grape juice and grapefruit juice. Grapefruit juice contrains acids and enzymes that reduce stomach acidity by stimulating the pancreas to release acid buffering chemicals.
Boost Insulin Efficency
The third strategy is to maximize insulin efficency. In almost all the research and in some case studies at the Colgan Institute, some individuals showed increased blood creatine levels, but no increase in muscle or strength. Various researchers suggest this failure may be caused by inefficent insulin metabolism or insulin resistance, whereby insulin fails in its normal task of moving chemicals through the cell membrane.
Here's the interesting part:
When the nutrition and blood profiles of the non-responders were examined, two prominent problems were found. First, most of their diets contained insufficient chromium for normal insulin metabolism. Many of them also showed somewhat elevated blood sugar, blood insulin, and blood triglycerides, the classic symptom of trilogy of insulin resistance. When you add the known insulin potentiators, 400-800 mcg of chromium picolinate, 300-600 of omega-3 fatty acids, and 100mg of alpha-lipoic acid to the creatine mix, many of the failures become success.
25mg of dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) were also used in some cases. Levels of this hormone begin to decline after age 20, and recent research shows that supplementation with 25mg per day, restores youthful levels and enhances insulin efficiency.
Cycle Creatine
Finally, you should cycle creatine. No one knows wether continuous creatine supplementation interferes with the body's own ability to make creatine, or wether the human body adapts to the supplements over long-term use, so that muscle creatine declines to its former level. Until that reasearch is done, cycle creatine over 8 weeks witha 4-week rest.
What form of Creatine
With such reliable results extending to every kind of athlete and sport, it's no wonder that companies selling creatine will do anything to increase their market share. Various kinds of creatine, especially creatine citrate and creatine pyruvate, compete with creatine mixed with everything from ginseng and royal jelly to adenosine triphosphate. Then there's liquid creatine, super stable creatine, creatine serum, creatine chews, creatine tablets, Old Uncle Tom Cobbly and All.
Effervescent Creatine is a marketing ploy.
Latest to hit the market is effervescent creatine. This product provides a telling example of what happens in the sports supplement industry, as companies try to gain a commercial edge, with little thought for efficacy of the product, and with no thought at all for the athletes who buy it. So I want to spell it out in detail to help you avoid being fooled by the many bogus claims we see all the time in product advertisements.
Effervescent creatine sounds exotic but it is simply creatine monohydrate mixed with plain old bicarbonate of soda and citric acid. As with various effervescent salts on the medical market, it's suposed to increase creatine absorption. Gibe me a break! Creatine monohydrate is well absorbed anyway without fizzing it.
Back in 1992, Paul Greenhaff at the University of Nottingham in England and Roger Harris of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden clearly showed that a single dose of 5 grams of creatine monohydrate rapidly increased blood and muscle levels of creatine. Feeding athletes and bodybuilders six doses of 5 grams per day, they found that 40% of the creatine was extreted on Day 1 rising to 68% by Day 3. Their data show that the human body absorbs creatine so well that it saturates in less than a week. Absorption of creatine is not a problem to worry about.
Advertisers of effervescent creatine also make big play about non-responders, claiming that their creatine will solve the problem. Micheal Colgan has studied creatine for over nine years and if there's one thing he can tell you, it's not the absorption or the form of creatine that causes some people to fail to respond. The most common problem he and other researcher have found with non-responders to creatine is insulin resistance, or inefficient insulin metabolism. Got it? Good.
The final verdict.
There's not a scrap of scientific evidence that any other creatine works better than plain creatine monohydrate taken with apporpriate carbs. In fact, with all the other compounds arbitrarily mixed with creatine in some of these products, it's likely they don't work as well. Almost all the studies to date have been done wtih creatine monohydrate, which is therefore the sole and only form of creatine for which there is scientific evidence of effectiveness.
There's a lot of bad creatine out there, and, if you've been having problems, it's probably the bargain brand you're using. All the good brands are very fine powder, with virtually no taste, no grit, no smell.
Good luck!
"No amount of fire can drive the engine, except that which is precisely focussed on the pistons."
-Dr. Michael Colgan
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