How to Take Creatine - Don't Compromise Your Results!How to Take Creatine Supplements
To start with, creatine monohydrate is expensive. You could easily pay $50.00 for a medium-sized bottle. Understanding how to take creatine and get its maximum benefit is essential. Don't waste money. Make sure you take creatine the smart way!
Creatine loading is the most common method of taking creatine supplements. Basically, the individual will take ~15g of creatine every day for the first 6-8 days. This essentially sops up all that extra ATP around and stores it for later when you get to the gym. Check here for more information on how creatine works. If you’re looking for an exact amount of creatine you should take for this first week, it’s generally recommended to take about 0.2g of creatine per kg of body weight. Since 1.0 kg is equal to about 2.2 lbs, you can calculate how much creatine you need for this first week. Let’s calculate how much creatine a 170 lb individual would need… 170 lbs x (1.0 kg/2.2 lbs) = 77.3 kg body weight Since you need ~0.2 g of creatine per kg of body weight per day… 0.2g creatine x 77.3 kg = 15.46g of creatine per day Easy, right? I wrote the formulas this way just for ease of explanation – if you want a quick formula, use this one… [(weight in lbs)/2.2kg] x 0.2g = x grams of creatine per day How much creatine should you take after this first week of creatine loading? The average individual needs between 2 and 5 grams of creatine per day to keep his muscles saturated with creatine. A simple way to calculate how much you need after this first week is to divide the amount you took in the first week by 10. Since the 170 lb individual needed 23.2g of creatine for the first 6-8 days, he only needs about 2.32 grams of creatine per day afterwards to maintain this hyper-loaded state (an average American diet contains 1g or less of creatine per day). So, you only need to supplement 1 or 2 grams per day after the initial week.
How to Take Creatine: Creatine Cycling Creatine loading is a great way to get started, but not a great way to keep it going. If you continue with the loading (by taking 2-5 grams of creatine per day), your gains will drop off quickly within the first month. Creatine cycling is the answer. It's important to remember that your body is an extraordinary machine. It knows what you're taking in, how much to excrete, and how to adapt to changes. Taking creatine is no different. Your body will adapt to the extra creatine intake. The effect will drop off because your body will not continue to synthesize its own creatine (because it's now readily obtained in the diet). The concentration of creatine in the muscles drops back to normal, even with the supplement. The key is to trick the body into believing that the diet isn't a good source for creatine. As a result, creatine synthesis in the liver continues, and concentrations remain high. Your gains won't be lost and you won't get "weaker". Understanding how to take creatine will most likely revolve around cycling. The Cycle Proper cycling is important to make sure you're not overloading your body with creatine and compromising your results. Here's a basic scheme for creatine cycling...
The main concept of this cycle is to gradually reduce your creatine intake over the period of a few months. This effectively tricks your body into thinking it needs to keep producing it's own creatine. Loading Phase This is the same as the creatine loading section above. Basically, you'll be saturating your muscles with creatine. See the section above for more info. Maintenance Phase Remember, you don't need much creatine at all to maintain that which is already present in the muscles. Divide your intake from the loading phase by 10! People might say you need much more, but the fact is that your body can only absorb so much of it. During this period, your body is continuing to reduce synthesis of it's own creatine. Void Phase For an entire month, don't take any creatine at all. This puts your body back into the synthesis mode, keeping your creatine levels high and maximizing energy production. How to Take Creatine: Gradual Increase Another method of taking creatine is to simply take more of it gradually over a period of time. So, instead of taking 15g per day for a week, start off with 3g per day, then increase to 5 grams, and so on until you’ve taken a total of (15g x 7 days) a total of about 100 g of creatine. The end result is the same with both creatine loading and gradually increasing the dose – but creatine loading is sometimes seen to give faster results. The problem is, however, that the body will adapt to your creatine intake. If you use this method, it's important to take about a month off after 4 weeks of taking creatine. As it turns out, the method of cycling is the best to maintain results!
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