When looking for a supplement it is always important to view it as objectively as possible. Far too often I hear people tell me that creatine is unnatural and causes water retention.

For the life of me, I do not understand where people have found this information – I have searched the internet far and wide to find the culprit for this statement.

The reality is, we have near-endless amounts of peer-reviewed science detailing the massive benefits of this supplement.

If you are serious about bodybuilding and strength training you need to checkout creatine.

What is Creatine?

The first question you should always ask yourself when you take a supplement – what is this? I mean, you couldn’t just walk down the street and eat some random food on the sidewalk, why ingest something just because it has been packaged.

Creatine is a compound formed in protein metabolism and present in most living tissue. It is involved in the supply of energy for muscular contraction.

Let me make this very clear – creatine is a natural substance found in everyday food, its created by the body and it can be supplemented. The first two points are the most important.

Everyday foods such as meat, eggs, fish and other dense proteins generally carry a creatine concentration.

Creatine is a completely natural substance that many of us will already ingest on a regular basis. The purpose of supplementing is to quantify the results by regulating our dosage.

How does Creatine work?

Creatine is a natural substance that many of us consume on a daily basis (with the exception of vegetarian/vegan populations) through meat, eggs and some dairy products. Creatine works by increasing the total amount of stored phosphates in your muscle cells.

During exercise, your body uses ATP as fuel – but all fuel has a cost, and you lose a phosphate in the energy transfer, leaving you with ADP (which your body cannot use as energy).

In order to restore this into ATP, the body must draw from phosphocreatine in the body. Supplementing creatine enables your body to faster replenish this ATP store, thereby allowing you to train harder – for longer.

If you’d like to watch a video I made on this concept click here.

Supplementing creatine will metabolize into phosphocreatine and will help to enable your body to draw from more concentrated phosphocreatine in the cell, resynthesizing ATP – thereby allowing you to train for longer and recover faster.

The purpose of supplementing creatine is to enable for faster ATP resynthesis.

Increase Size and Strength

Many of us have a similar goal when it comes to fitness – get bigger and stronger. You train with heavyweights in an effort to stimulate hypertrophy so that the muscles will grow larger (myofibril hypertrophy).

For more information on hypertrophy, continue reading here.

If you can continue to train for longer, without feeling fatigue and soreness you can induce more hypertrophy. Creatine supplementation has been shown to increase the potential for strength in both high weights/low reps and low weights/high reps.

Irrespective of the style of strength training you are doing creatine supplementation will help you push further.

Creatine Summarized

I understand skepticism – this is what drives performance and innovation. With this in mind, there are decades of science detailing the benefits of creatine supplementation both in performance measures and its safety.

Don’t be silly, supplement creatine.