Transcription
I want to ask you about creatine.
Yeah.
I'm 50. I started taking weight training and running when I was like 16 maybe. Yeah. And I started taking creatine 'cause back then I was skinny. I wanted to put on muscle. I think creatine was sort of first discussed or released back then when I was maybe 18 or something like that. Something like that. 18, 19. Um, so I've been taking it a long, long time.
Yeah.
5 to 10 grams. But the original protocol, which nobody does anymore, but I confess I still do it 'cause I enjoy it, was to take 5g, 3 to 5 times per day. There was this loading phase and you would mix it with a little bit of grape juice 'cause the idea was you were supposed to spike your insulin and then you get more into the muscles. And then you had a maintenance dose, which was 5 grams per day. Um, and the idea back then was that you need to do a wash out every 20 weeks or so where you just stop taking it, you urinate out a bunch of water, and then you reload. And I confess, I've continued to do this minus the grape juice, but occasionally I'll do the grape juice thing. I don't think there's any real merit to the loading phase, maintenance phase idea. But back then and still now, I feel like creatine has made me feel great, um, stronger. Um, I did, I wasn't aware of the cognitive benefits. They weren't being studied back then.
They weren't being studied back then. But what are your thoughts on why creatine suddenly has become this like banner supplement? It's like supplement of the year. We should start a supplement of the year thing, right? For a while, I think vitamin D and melatonin came first.
Um, we'll have to figure out what years those were. Then, uh, I feel like creatine got supplement of the year for 2026, unless something else comes along. So creatine, supplement of the year 2026, even though it's been around for a long, long time. What do you think happened?
Well, so first I want to talk about your loading phase. And I like that was really for the studies that were being done, right? Because if you're taking 5 grams a day of creatine, it takes about three to four weeks for your muscle creatine stores to become saturated. And researchers aren't going to do it steady or they wait that long. So the loading phase really was just—
So that's what inspired it.
Yeah, it was it's in this isolated bubble of in the experimental protocol. But like in the real world, you have three weeks or if you're like an athlete and you hadn't, you know, taken the creatine, you don't have your creatine stores up and you have to quickly rapidly—
Got it. I was just amazed at how quickly it worked. I, I, I might be a hyper-responder, but I legitimately put on, I realized some of it was water, or most of it was water, but somewhere between probably 4 and 8 lbs of of water in the muscle mass. I don't want to call it lean mass because it's, you know, it's water in the muscle. Um, but I, I just was, I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is crazy," you know? And, um, and then people thought maybe it was a steroid. It's not a steroid. Maybe it's bad for your kidneys. Turns out it's safe for your kidneys. And most everyone, um, pretty remarkable molecule.
Yeah. I mean, obviously creatine is stored as creatine phosphate in our in our cells. We make, to some degree, between 1 to 3 grams of creatine a day. Our liver, our brain also makes it. It's used to make energy. And so your muscles, if you're working out, you're really consuming a lot of energy, right? It's very energetically demanding. So having the creatine stores higher in your muscle is beneficial because one, you're going to be able to increase your training volume, right? So it's not like creatine is anabolic in the sense that protein or amino acids are, right? It's not like directly affecting muscle protein synthesis. It's just helping you train more, getting more reps and, you know, whatever it is, your training volume is going up. And because your training volume's going up, then you're obviously putting more stress on your muscles, which is going to lead to increased muscle protein synthesis and, you know, obviously there's water probably as well. That said, you know, you asked me, you know, what happened? So I got interested in creatine back in 20 when I started basically weight training and obviously had heard about it forever. Ever took it. And, um, as I started to get into resistance training, I was like, "I better start taking this. This is I'm like in this in this world now." And started doing some research on taking it. So I was taking the 5 grams a day because that's really what most of the studies show. Creatine monohydrate, that's the most well-researched form of creatine. And I was taking 5 grams a day because I was interested in improving my my training volume and and getting the the benefits of it, right? Um, and then I had Darren Cando on the podcast. Uh, that was in 2024, I think it was. And, um, once I had started getting into the creatine research, the brain stuff started has been coming out over the past, you know, few years.
And that's for me become very interesting. I remember the first time I heard about it years ago, it was like, "Oh, it's it's helping improve cognitive function in older, older, you know, people."
Yeah. The phosphocreatine system seems to be somewhat, um, biased towards forebrain structures, you know? I mean, obviously it's in lots of brain areas, but that there might be a heavier reliance on it for—
Brain areas that are associated with strategic planning and, you know, working memory and. Yeah. If you, if you were to sort of just map the the sort of density of usage of the phosphocreatine system, you'd you'd see a frontal bias for sure.
Okay.
Yeah. Um, well, anyways, that's kind of where my interest in in, you know, kind of diving deeper. Anything that's helping the brain is interesting to me, as I know to you as well.
And, um, and so I—
Learned a lot from this podcast I did with Darren Kando. He, you know, researches creatine and collaborates with a lot of different researchers that are doing, you know, research on the brain and muscle and, you know, lots the bone. Turns out it's beneficial for the bone as well. But the brain, it's interesting. We also make creatine in the brain, but, um, it's not like, so it's kind of like the muscle, right? You're not just going to, if you take creatine, you don't work out, you're not going to, you're not going to get any increase in lean mass, right? It's not going to do much of anything because you're not putting in the work. I think the same goes with the brain as well, where it's like researchers started to find out that, well, you can't just take creatine and it's going to enhance cognitive function. It's in the background of stressing the brain, right? You're stressing your muscles by a workout. Same goes for the brain. It's like in these situations of stress, whether that's sleep deprivation, whether it's, you know, a traumatic brain injury. I mean, I would argue, you know, there's a lot of psychological stress, depression, constantly using your brain like you and I right now in this conversation. We're we're learning, we're thinking. I mean, it is stressful on the brain, right? So, I mean, I am obviously speculating here and taking taking and extrapolating, right? I'm not saying that there's studies showing that, but it does seem as though that's when creatine seems to shine in the brain. And you might go, "Well, your brain makes it," and it's true. Your brain does make, you know, again, it's, I think between 1 to 3 grams or something. I'm not exactly sure how much, but it makes its own creatine. And it's kind of resistant to taking up the creatine that you're supplementing with. Um, particularly because, for one, the muscle is very greedy. So when you're getting to that 5g range, muscles are really consuming. If you're working out in particular, right, your muscles are kind of consuming that because that's they're very greedy for it, right? Uh, and and there have now been, I think, a handful of studies showing that when you start to get above that, there was a study out of Germany showing this, and it's a small study. This needs to be replicated. Like this is all new, you know, emerging data. But that study showed that once you start to get to, you know, 10g, then if you look by MRI, you can start to see that creatine levels are increasing in certain brain regions and perhaps in the brain regions that you were talking about. And they're going higher than than what you would get from just your brain normally making its own creatine. So the 10 grams of creatine a day, which is now what my baseline is, is based off of that. But there's studies now showing that, um, if you are in this sort of stressed state, your brain is stressed, like for sleep, sleep deprivation, for example, you're sleep-deprived for 21 hours and your brain's not working very good after not sleeping for 21 hours, right? I mean, that's obviously when I have a, when I travel internationally, I never really sleep good on an international flight. And so I'm like, not, if you were to come find me after that flight, I'd be like, not working very good, right?
Cognitively.
You and everybody else.
Right. Yeah. Well, some people can sleep great on a plane, but I'm not one of those people. So, um, there have now been at least one study showing that if you give someone, it's like something like 35 grams per kilogram body weight of creatine, which comes out to a lot. I mean, it's like 20, 25. It depends on your body weight, right? Like 20, 25 grams, perhaps even more. I mean—
I mean, I'm 100 kilograms. That's a lot.
A lot. So for me, it's more like 20, 25 grams, right? But if you give individuals that high dose in that, you know, sleep-deprived state, that they're cognitively not only performing normal, but they're performing better than their baseline. And that, of course, generated a lot of interest. There have been studies coming out since then showing that, okay, if you give older adults with mild cognitive impairment, perhaps mild, you know, early stage Alzheimer's disease, again, 20 grams, you're giving in the 20 gram range of creatine, it's improving their cognitive function. Why is that? Well, creatine is important to make energy. And when your brain cells are stressed out, right? I mean, like energetic demand goes up. And if you have more creatine, it's going to make things easier. There's also some inflammation that's being generated in that stress state. And it seems as though creatine is also having both an indirect and direct effect on inflammatory processes as well.
This is all early, early data, like, like more needs to be done. But I think there's enough safety data out there now where it's like, well, it's really not harmful to take 10 grams a day. I take 10 grams a day every day.
You spread it out?
I do it in two doses. I mean, some people are very sensitive to a 10 gram dose where they might like get a GI irritation effect. It can give some people, um, diarrhea.
Diarrhea. Exactly. Yeah. So, the very scientific way of putting it. But I mean that. So, I, I do spread it out and I take it. I don't take it at night. I like to take mine in the morning.
And I don't know, Andrew, this might be a placebo. I feel like I'm constantly in a stress. I'm constantly in a my brain is under a lot of stress. I'm constantly learning. I'm reading papers and like I said, I'm, I'm extrapolating here. This isn't sleep deprivation. That's obviously a much more extreme type of stress, but I have noticed that taking my 10 grams, going from 5 to 10, really does seem to affect my brain functioning like later in the day where I seem to keep— keep going better, where I, I'm not getting as tired. And it could be placebo, which is fine. Like I said, I am fine with placebo effects as long as what I'm ingesting is not actually bad for you. Placebo is fine with me. Um, but it is working for me. When I travel, I do, when I'm going to the East Coast, I mean, I'm on the West Coast, so when I go anywhere and I have to give a talk early in the morning and I never sleep good in a hotel, I, I'm always sleep deprived. I mean, I, I don't know that a time that I haven't been traveling and I'm going to start traveling with my pillow like you do, 'cause that's brilliant, because that's like one of my, that's one of my problems. But there's many problems in hotel rooms that lead to me not sleeping as good, right? So I take 20, sometimes 25 grams of creatine in those situations. And there of it's like, you know, it's not all the time.
But it seems to help me. Again, and like I said, I'm okay with placebo, which is fine. But we do have some evidence that it might. And I think this is kind of where people are already interested in creatine. And so when you start to go, "Well, maybe it's going to be beneficial for the brain," if it's going to improve cognitive function, that's really something that people are interested in. Then.