Creatine: Who It Helps, Who It Doesn't, and Whether You Should Take It
- Shrey Aggarwal
- Jul 7
- 8 min read
Creatine is the most researched supplement in sport, with hundreds of trials behind it and a safety record almost nothing else can match. It's also useless for a fair number of the people who take it every day.
Both of those things are true at once, and the space between them is what this piece is about. Creatine earns its reputation for a specific set of uses and gets oversold for the rest, and knowing which is which saves you money and effort.
Quick Overview
What Creatine Actually Does
Your muscles run their most explosive efforts on a fuel called phosphocreatine, which regenerates ATP, the body's immediate energy currency, during short bursts of maximal work. Creatine supplementation increases how much phosphocreatine your muscles store, which means more available energy for sprints, lifts, jumps, and repeated hard efforts.
You already get creatine from food, mainly meat and fish, and your body makes some itself. How much you already carry shapes how much a supplement adds, which is why the same dose does more for some people than others. It also draws a little water into the muscle, which is where the small early weight gain comes from.
One practical point cuts through the marketing: creatine monohydrate is the form with the evidence behind it. The pricier variants, buffered, hydrochloride, liquid, don't outperform it (Fernández-Landa et al., Sports Med, 2023). Monohydrate is the one worth buying.
Where the Evidence Is Strongest
For strength and power, the case is about as settled as sports nutrition gets. Combined with resistance training, creatine reliably increases maximal strength, power output, and muscle growth (strength and power meta-analysis, Nutrients, 2025).
That makes it genuinely useful for a specific group: lifters, sprinters, throwers, jumpers, and team-sport athletes whose sport is built on repeated explosive efforts (footballers, cricketers, hockey players, rugby players). Anyone whose performance depends on producing force quickly, and doing it again and again, is the athlete creatine was made for. Interestingly, the upper body tends to respond a little more than the lower (strength and power meta-analysis, Nutrients, 2025).
The key phrase is "combined with resistance training." Creatine doesn't build muscle on its own. It raises the ceiling on the work you do, so the training still has to happen.
Endurance: A More Complicated Picture
This is where the story gets misread in both directions.
Creatine does not improve aerobic capacity. A 2023 meta-analysis in trained athletes found no reliable benefit to endurance performance itself (Fernández-Landa et al., Sports Med, 2023). If your goal is a higher VO2max or a better steady-state pace, creatine isn't your lever.
But writing it off entirely for endurance athletes is also wrong, and the strongest reason is glycogen. When taken alongside carbohydrate after hard exercise, creatine meaningfully increases how much glycogen the muscle rebuilds. Independent research from the University of Nottingham found around 82% greater glycogen resynthesis in the first 24 hours of recovery with creatine plus carbohydrate versus carbohydrate alone, an effect since confirmed by a separate group (Roberts et al., Amino Acids, 2016; van Loon et al., Clinical Science, 2004). For an athlete training hard day after day, faster refuelling between sessions is a real advantage.
There's also the finish. Endurance races are often decided by a final surge, and that surge runs on the same phosphocreatine system creatine supports. More available phosphocreatine can mean a stronger kick when it counts, even if the aerobic pace over the preceding hours is unchanged.
The trade-off is the water weight. Carrying a little more mass is a genuine consideration for pure endurance performance, though one study in trained runners found the added weight didn't actually worsen running economy (Beis et al., JISSN, 2011).
So the honest position for endurance athletes: not for the aerobic engine, but potentially worth it for recovery between sessions and the sprint at the end.
How to Tell If You Actually Need It
There's no cheap, routine test for muscle creatine stores, so this is reasoned from your sport and your diet rather than measured.
Start with what you do. If your sport rewards explosive, repeated, high-force efforts, creatine is likely to help. If it's purely aerobic and steady, the direct performance case is weak, and it comes down to whether the recovery benefits are worth the weight.
Then look at your plate. Creatine comes from meat and fish, so vegetarians and vegans carry lower baseline stores, and they tend to respond the most to supplementation (Fernández-Landa et al., Sports Med, 2023). On the other end, someone eating a lot of meat may already be near the top of what their muscles can hold, and they'll notice less. This is the real explanation behind so-called non-responders: they're often people whose stores were already full, so there was little room to add.
The short version: explosive sport plus a low-meat diet is the strongest case for a clear benefit. Pure endurance plus a high-meat diet is the weakest.
Beyond Performance: Brain, Sleep, and Ageing
The area drawing the most attention lately is creatine's effect on the brain, and this is where the evidence needs care, because the hype has run ahead of it.
The brain uses creatine for energy the same way muscle does, and supplementation can raise brain creatine stores. The clearest benefits show up under stress. A German government research institute ran a double-blind trial where a single dose improved cognitive performance during sleep deprivation, and the same group replicated the effect at a lower dose in a follow-up study (Gordji-Nejad et al., Sci Rep, 2024; Gordji-Nejad et al., Nutrients, 2026). Two replications from a non-industry lab is meaningful, and it holds up better than the single reviews that dominate this topic.
For a well-rested, well-fed adult expecting a daily brain boost, the picture is far weaker. An independent meta-analysis of cognition in healthy people found only limited, task-specific effects (Avgerinos et al., Exp Gerontol, 2018), and the European Food Safety Authority reviewed the general cognition claim and judged the evidence weak (EFSA, 2024). Creatine seems to help the brain when it is under pressure, from sleep loss, ageing, or fatigue, and does little when it isn't.
Creatine for Women
Women were left out of most creatine research for decades, and the recent work correcting that is worth knowing about.
Women carry roughly 20% lower creatine synthesis and 30 to 40% lower dietary intake than men, so lower baseline stores, which may be part of why they respond well (Smith-Ryan et al., JISSN, 2025). The strength and body-composition benefits with resistance training hold up in women just as they do in men. There's also evidence for better exercise recovery across the menstrual cycle (Gordon et al., Nutrients, 2023), and for bone and muscle support in postmenopausal women when paired with resistance training.
The newer and more tentative area is mood and cognition through the menopause transition. A 2025 trial in perimenopausal and postmenopausal women reported improved reaction time and reduced mood-swing severity (Smith-Ryan et al., JISSN, 2025). It's worth treating this carefully: the study comes from a research group with creatine-industry ties, the sample was small, and perimenopause specifically remains barely studied. Promising, but a watch-this-space rather than a settled case.
Safety, Side Effects, and How Much
Creatine is among the most-studied supplements in existence, and the safety record in healthy people is strong.
The side effects that are actually reported are minor: a small amount of water retention and the slight weight gain that comes with it, and occasional stomach discomfort when a large dose is taken at once. The scary claims, kidney damage, cramping, dehydration, hair loss, aren't supported by the evidence in healthy individuals. They've been looked for repeatedly and haven't held up.
The standard dose in the research is 3 to 5 grams of creatine monohydrate per day. Some studies use a short "loading" period of higher intake to saturate the muscle faster, but taking the standard daily amount gets you to the same place within a few weeks. This is general information, not a personal prescription, and anyone with kidney concerns or an existing medical condition should speak to a doctor before starting.
So Should Everyone Take It?
No, and the honest answer is more useful than a blanket yes.
There's a strong case for creatine if you train for strength or power, play an explosive team sport, eat little or no meat, are an older adult trying to hold onto muscle and function, or are regularly under heavy sleep or cognitive stress. For those people, it's one of the few supplements that reliably delivers on its promise.
The case is weak if you're a pure endurance athlete chasing a faster aerobic pace, or a well-rested omnivore expecting a cognitive edge that the research doesn't support. It's not that creatine harms these people. It just may not do much for them, and food comes first regardless. Creatine is an addition to a solid diet and training plan, never a substitute for one.
Fueletics Perspective
Creatine's reputation is earned, but it's earned for specific uses, and most of the confusion comes from treating a targeted tool as a universal one.
Match the supplement to the athlete, not the hype. If your sport is explosive, or your diet is low in meat, or you're ageing and holding onto muscle matters, creatine is one of the safest and most reliable choices you can make. If you're a steady-state endurance athlete eating plenty of meat and sleeping well, your money and attention are better spent elsewhere, on the training and the diet underneath it.
The reason creatine is worth understanding properly is that it's the rare supplement that lives up to its research. That's exactly why it deserves to be used deliberately, by the people it actually helps, rather than taken by everyone because it's popular.
Whether creatine is worth it for you comes down to your sport, your diet, and your goals, which is exactly what a proper assessment sorts out. You can start yours at fueletics.co.
Research References
Fernández-Landa J et al. — Effects of Creatine Monohydrate on Endurance Performance in a Trained Population. Sports Medicine, 2023 — https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-023-01823-2
The Effects of Creatine Supplementation on Upper- and Lower-Body Strength and Power: A Meta-Analysis. Nutrients, 2025 — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12430374/
Roberts PA et al. — Creatine augments dietary carbohydrate mediated muscle glycogen supercompensation. Amino Acids, 2016 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4974290/
van Loon LJC et al. — Creatine supplementation increases glycogen storage in human skeletal muscle. Clinical Science, 2004 — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14507259/
Beis LY et al. — Creatine and Glycerol Hyperhydration on Running Economy in Well Trained Endurance Runners. JISSN, 2011 — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3283512/
Gordji-Nejad A et al. — Single Dose Creatine Improves Cognitive Performance During Sleep Deprivation. Scientific Reports, 2024 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54249-9
Gordji-Nejad A et al. — Single-Dose Creatine Reduces Sleep Deprivation-Induced Cognitive Deterioration. Nutrients, 2026 — https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/18/8/1192
Avgerinos KI et al. — Effects of creatine on cognitive function of healthy individuals: a systematic review of RCTs. Experimental Gerontology, 2018 — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29704637/
EFSA Panel — Creatine and Improvement in Cognitive Function: Evaluation of a Health Claim. EFSA Journal, 2024 — https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2024.9100
Smith-Ryan AE et al. — Creatine in Women's Health: Menstruation Through Pregnancy to Menopause. JISSN, 2025 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12086928/
Gordon AN et al. — Creatine Monohydrate Loading on Exercise Recovery in Active Women Throughout the Menstrual Cycle. Nutrients, 2023 — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10459976/
