Sorry, gym rats, but all that creatine you've been relying on? It may have been for nothing, according to a new clinical trial — at least at the dose you were probably taking it.
After having over fifty people undergo a 12-week resistance training program, a team of researchers in Australia found that the group who took creatine supplements on a daily basis didn't have more substantial gains that the group that didn't, as they wrote in a study published in the journal Nutrients.
"We've shown that taking five grams of creatine supplement per day does not make any difference to the amount of lean muscle mass people put on while resistance training," said senior author Mandy Hagstrom, an exercise scientist at UNSW Sydney, in a statement about the work. "The benefits of creatine may have been overestimated in the past, due to methodological problems with previous studies."
This may come as an assault on a hallowed institution of weightlifting wisdom. The muscle-building benefits of taking creatine, a safe substance produced naturally by the body, wasn't just mere bro science, but backed by a substantive body of research. Just swallow five grams a day, the common advice goes, and you're on your way to hypertrophy heaven.
Supplementing creatine is also thought to produce other salubrious effects, promoting brain health, bone health, and even reducing all-around mortality, according to the researchers. Better yet, it's really cheap. If getting big was your calling, there was no reason not to take it.
This latest study puts a dent in that image. To take part in the trial, the researchers selected relatively healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 50 with limited training history. They were all put on the same resistance training program of three lifting sessions per week, and instructed to keep track of what they ate in a food log. To precisely measure muscle growth, their changes in body composition were measured using x-ray imaging techniques.
A key factor that makes the experiment stand out is that it had the participants take creatine a week before they started the program, instead of starting everything all at once. This avoided a problem encountered by previous trials: confounding the creatine's effects with the benefits of lifting weights.
"We had what we call a wash-in phase, where half of the participants started taking the supplement, without changing anything else in their daily life, to give their body a chance to stabilize in terms of its response to the supplement," Hagstrom said in the statement.
At first, the creatine group showed about an extra pound of mass gained in the first week. But this eventually flattened out to match the control group, suggesting that the gains weren't due to muscle mass, but fluid retention; one of creatine's well known effects is causing your muscles to draw in more water.
"Then once they started exercising, they saw no additional benefit from creatine which suggests that five grams per day is not enough if you're taking it for the purposes of building muscle," Hagstrom said.
It's not over for creatine evangelists, though. One potential takeaway is that to produce the mythical muscle-building benefits, we should be taking more creatine — perhaps ten grams per day, instead of five. There's also the possibility that creatine's effects are borne out in the long term for advanced lifters, and not just the several-month period of the study with relative newbies.
"It would be really interesting to see if creatine has more of a long-term benefit," coauthor Imtiaz Desai, a fellow UNSW Sydney exercise scientist, said in the statement. "When you start weight training, you have those beginner gains in strength and those start tapering off around the 12-week mark and become slower, so it's possible the support from creatine might come at a later stage."
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