Just How Much Muscle Can Creatine Help You Gain?
Another day and another research paper showing us just how effective creatine can be. Creatine is already one of the most well researched supplements on the market. Time and time again it’s been shown to be beneficial for strength, power, body composition and there’s even some emerging evidence to show it might be beneficial for brain health too. Which is why I recommend it as a key part of a nutrition plan for most athletes.
A recent meta-analysis has added yet more evidence to this pile as it sought to answer the question of just how much muscle mass creatine can help you gain. Here we’ll run through what they did and what they found, so grab yourself some creatine and let’s dive in.
How Does Creatine Supplementation Affect Body Composition?
The meta-analysis we’re diving into was titled “The Effect of Creatine Supplementation on Resistance Training-Based Changes to Body Composition: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis” by Desai et al (2024).
They carried out a systematic review of 12 randomised controlled trials from across the globe! The total amount of participants across all trials was 362 adults, consisting of mostly men (87%) without pre existing health conditions who resistance trained.
They sought to discover just how much of an impact creatine can have on muscle mass when combined with resistance training. They used changes in fat free mass and body fat percentage in these trials as a marker of this.
The headline takeaway from this meta-analysis was that creatine supplementation and resistance training increased muscle mass by 1.14kg on average compared with just resistance training alone. They also found that creatine reduced body fat percentage by 0.88% on average.
How Creatine Monohydrate Works in Resistance Training Programs
Creatine is a molecule that’s produced in our body by our liver, kidneys and pancreas and stored in our muscles as creatine phosphate/phosphocreatine.
It plays a role in generating ATP in periods of short intense physical or mental activity. It does this by donating it’s phosphate group to ADP molecules creating ATP.
By increasing the availability of phosphocreatine in the body through supplementation of creatine, we can essentially increase the speed of recycling of our energy stores. This is what’s thought to bring about the benefits on strength and power from creatine supplementation.
This may lead to more effective exercise and thus more of a benefit from resistance training. Creatine is also thought to stimulate certain signalling pathways to increase protein synthesis, and there’s a potential impact on water retention inside the muscle cell which will show up as an increase in fat free mass.
Who Can Benefit From Creatine and Resistance Training?
As alluded to in the introduction to this blog, I believe that due to the weight of evidence behind creatine nearly everyone could benefit from supplementing from it. It’s benefits for strength, power and lean mass are unparalleled, and because of the emerging evidence around creatine and brain health it could be worth taking even if you don’t resistance train.
In fact the study above also found that the benefits of creatine on body composition were statistically the same for both trained and untrained athletes. Of course the any untrained athletes in the above study were then subject to resistance training for the study but the benefits of creatine were still there.
How Much Creatine Should I Take?
Most studies advise that you should take around 0.03g/kg per day with a loading phase of 0.3g/kg/day for 7 days. That loading phase is not necessarily needed unless you want to reap the benefits of creatine significantly quicker. The only time that I have ever carried out a loading phase is when I came back from holiday having not supplemented with creatine and I had a weightlifting competition in two weeks.
In that instance I loaded so as to saturate creatine stores significantly quicker, outside of that, just taking the maintenance dose which will be around 3-5g/day is so fine and you’ll reap the benefits.
There’s also no real need to cycle on and off creatine, being consistent with your supplementation is where you’re likely to see the real benefits.
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