Everything Creatine

Ok after nearly 2 years of being here, I have realised that not many people actually understand the reasons behind what creatine is, how it works, or if it is used for cutting or bulking.
The questions I shall answer are these

What is creatine?
How does it work?
Is it natural?
Is it a steroid?
Is it safe?
Bulking or cutting?

Question 1:What is creatine?
Creatine has got many forms, it is however scientifically known as creatine monohydrate. The hardcore science is left out here, it is not overly important to know that, here we will learn relatively simple biological facts about it. It is an organic molecule that helps supply energy and protein to muscles.
It is mainly known to simply keep ATP readily available, however there are muscle building parts to it.
When you burn energy ATP is used, and it becomes ADP, the T and D stand for tri and di, meaning 3 and 2, therefore when you use energy ATP is being constantly broken down into ADP-and you need ATP for respiration, creatine monohydrate allows the phosphate to be replaced fast, or you can supplement creatine phosphate, which directly allows ADP to be converted to ATP.
As a result this yields more energy for you, your workouts should be easier, as your body is able to replenish molecules needed for respiration very quickly. It is also the reason why you come off creatine and sometimes feeling fatigued easily and your strength can go down, but it is not definite.
Because the body has a natural supply of creatine from red meats mainly, it is important that creatine is rather insoluble, you will find out later. But to point out what I’m saying, who here supplements creatine and has them annoying gritty bits floating around in the drink?


Question 2:
We’ve covered how it works in the 1st question really for maybe strength or endurance athletes, however for the pure interest of Hypertrophy, how does creatine work?
Well most people know that creatine fills cells up with water (again due to its insolubility) which most think just bloats you and doesn’t really build muscle. Well it does.
Protein is a solid material, and it is pretty obvious that solid materials don’t randomly move without a form of energy allowing it to be moved.
How is everything in the body transported? Water, the molecules attach to the water via areas of the protein (mostly amino acids when its being taken into the cell) being charged and get transported round the body. Here is where creatine comes in useful
To understand this process properly I need to explain two easy things, solute potential. and water potential.
Basically we have two areas, the inside of the cell, and the outside of the cell, now our bodies work by stabilising everything, The body wont work well if half its nutrients are somewhere and the other half somewhere else and then nothing afterwards. Everything spreads out evenly as best it can.
So now lets take this scenario into account
This is a very simplified way of how a cell works, but it gets the general point across.
In a normal cell we have

1000 protein molecules
5000 water molecules

In the outside of the cell we have

~1000 protein molecules
~5000 water molecules

Because the inside and outside are the same, the amount of transport of proteins is pretty much 0, they’re both balanced.
The solute potential is 1:5, 1 units of substance to every 5 units of water
The other 4 units are being used for other cells processes.
Now lets add creatine to the cell

1000 protein molecules
10,000 water molecules

If we look at this simply we can allow another 1000 protein molecules into the cell.
What do we know makes muscle grow?
Protein, therefore making your cells fill with water allows solutes to diffuse (move against a concentration gradient) into the cell allowing more nutrients to be used.

Question 3: Is it natural?
Yes, it is naturally found mostly in red meats like I said before, again the reason it is insoluble mostly is because the amount of creatine in meat is very low, and if it was absorbed and used up and converted so quickly then we wouldn’t be respiring nearly as fast, therefore it is important to have a constant supply of creatine and that it is insoluble.

Question 4:Is it a steroid?
Many people think creatine is a steroid. This substance was discovered over 150 years ago and is sold by simple health stores (that don’t even support weightlifting). It is not a steroid. If it is a steroid, then it is damn useless, if you compare someone’s results using actual anabolic steroids and then creatine, you will gain a LOT more using steroids with appropriate dieting and lifting of course.
For the final answer: No, it is not a steroid, it is an accepted supplement by all sports training governing bodies.
A lot of athletes in Olympics etc use creatine.

Question 5: Is it safe?
This depends, creatine is taken into the kidneys and made into creatinine which isn’t very nice, however due to its insolubility it doesn’t do too much damage, however sometimes your kidneys can be weaker than others for many reasons and when it does have that slight increase in creatine (as it isn’t totally insoluble) can damage them, That is why it says on the box to not take if you know you have bad kidneys or liver.
Pregnant women should not use this supplement, even though a pregnant women shouldn’t be doing sports anyway so why they put this on the tub...anyway.
It is mostly harmless to a healthy young adult.

Question 6:Bulking or cutting?
Creatine from my knowledge does not support fat storage, neither does it convert carbohydrates into fat anymore than the body already does.
In fact due to its ability to break down glucose rings easier as it replenishes more ATP I personally feel it will actually help with cutting as it allows any extra carbohydrates to be used up faster and more efficiently with minimal waste products.
It is of course however mainly used for bulkers or endurance athletes.



My personal use of creatine:
I’ve tried using a loading phase and normal dosage to find it bloats nastily, i did get gains however it was minimal, however at said time my diet was rubbish and my lifting could be bettered at least 50 times over, therefore my judgement on a loading phase is not brilliant. I then with much better lifting and diet tried taking it only for lifting days, as that’s when I would need it mostly, and creatine stays in the system for quite a long time so its not as if my body would flush it all out after a few hours like a lot of nutrients. I did get gains with that and had no bloating, I would suggest this for anyone who wishes to bulk without a time limit and who doesn’t want to bloat much or gain much fat, maybe you want just 10lbs more muscle and cant be bothered to have a massive 25lbs lean muscle + 10lbs fat bulk and go through rigorous cutting to end up with 10-15lbs added at low BF%
I hope this article has been informative and has helped anyone who was unaware of how creatine worked.
None of this article is taken from sites, all of this is made from my own scientific knowledge of how this molecule works, and my own knowledge of how biological systems work.
I have worked with this type of science for nearly 2 years and it involves this type of subject matter (never done creatine but I’ve done enough to know how it would work)

[EDIT]:Drink plenty of water when supplementing creatine, otherwise you will do damage to your kidneys-whether originally healthy or not. Standard water intake for a bodybuilder is a gallon a day, i would suggest adding a good litre to your water intake.

 
Written By Andrew (Twistedlink)

Very informative article. Answered the questions in a simplified manner so people could understand it. Alot of people are oblivious to what creatine is. It upsets me when I get criticism by people who do not know what creatine actually is. Thanks for presenting this info. 
 
You mention in your article that creatine is supplemented by endurance athletes. I would have to disagree with you on this.
 
There are several different types of energy paths and enzymes utilized by the human body.
 
1. The first is the phosphagen system. This lasts from 0-30 seconds. It utilizes ATP and Creatine phosphate.
 
2. The second is anaerobic (without oxygen) glycolysis (breakdown of glucose for energy). This lasts from 30 seconds to a minute. This involves the muscle cell breaking down glucose and converting it to pyruvate which turns into lactic acid.
 
3. The third energy path for the body is aerobic (with oxygen) respiration. This lasts from minutes to hours. This is when oxygen indirectly aids in lactic acid being converted back into glucose. I am not going to go into detail about this right now it is alot of cell chemistry that even confuses me. I wrote an article here during last summer that highlights some of this stuff at http://www.discussbodybuilding.com/Theory_of_doing_cardio_only_after_an_intense_strength_training_session/m_153517/tm.htm 
 
So endurance athletes operate at the aerobic level of training. Because creatine phosphate expires within 30 seconds, this substrate would not be helpful for endurance athletes.
 
Just wanted to clarify that for you.

body weight: 250
Bench: 365
Squat: 555 w/ briefs and knee wraps
Deadlift:585

- tps strongman   

A couple technical clarifications:

Creatine monohydrate is one form of creatine (a creatine molecule with a water molecule attached to it).

ATP is the energy carrier molecule of your cells. So when your cells burn sugars or fats, they produce ATP. When your cell needs to do something (e.g. when your muscle contracts), it breaks phosphates off of ATP to produce ADP. Creatine Phosphate can donate its phosphate to ADP to recycle it into ATP. The chemistry behind how (and why) ATP works for this energy transfer is an interesting topic too, but probably beyond the scope of this article.

Creatinine isn't produced by the kidneys, it's removed by them (along with all kinds of other bodily waste.) Creatine is not completely stable in the body, so over time it breaks down into creatinine, which is useless. You're body needs to replenish its creatine supply as this happens (from food, its own creatine creation process, or creatine supplementation), and the creatinine waste needs to be removed, which is the job of the kidneys. Doctors test for creatinine in the blood because it's diagnostic of kidney function. If your kidneys aren't working, creatinine will build up to high levels in your blood. Supplementation of creatine could produce somewhat (but not sharply) higher levels of creatinine in the blood just because you've got more creatine there to break down. But in that case, elevated creatinine levels aren't necessarily an indicator that your kidneys are having problems. This is probably the source of the (unsubstantiated) rumor that creatine is bad for the kidneys.

There isn't any clinical evidence that creatine can damage your liver or kidneys, so contraindications directed at those with kidney or liver problems or pregnant women are more-or-less a "better safe than sorry" approach. The extra creatinine could hypothetically produce additional stress on the kidneys (because it's that much more waste to remove), but it's probably a drop in the bucket. But again - better safe than sorry; the benefits of creatine aren't earth-shattering.

You may want to add a note that in addition to getting creatine in your diet from meat, your body also makes part of its own supply of creatine.