Starting Creatine 7 Years into Lifting

Recounting my personal experience after roughly one year of creatine usage. Did creatine help boost my compound lifts by about 15 kg each in just a few months?

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It’s one of those sweet white powders highly coveted the world over… well, at least the lifting world over. Creatine is among the golden trifecta of supplements, alongside whey and caffeine, well understood in today’s fitness zeitgeist to be one of the only supplements worth a damn with very little in the way of negative consequences. It is effectively the only supplement reliably demonstrated to have positive effects on strength, hypertrophy, and anaerobic activity, plus recovery more generally, legally and without androgenic or anabolic effects.

Suffice to say, there are no silver bullets in strength training and fitness. Some people do not really respond well to creatine, and for those that do, the benefits are relatively negligible compared to something like anabolic steroids and will not make up for a lack of sound training and nutrition in most populations.

In my case, seeing as my training, strength, and mass were improving steadily over the years without it, I never felt a strong impetus to take it. However, as I have steadily approached higher levels of strength and size, my rate of progress has slowed. Whereas cost was a bigger consideration for me in the primordial days of my fitness journey, no longer is it a real burden to add another little supplement into the budget (one of the cheaper ones, at that), and I was willing to at least try and eek out whatever I could considering there is nearly zero risk.

I will not mince words; in spite of my modest training age, I was surprised by the outcomes, for better and for worse. I would even go so far as to say that creatine consumption had a direct role in some pretty significant gains of around 15 kg/33 lbs per major compound movement. Overall, though, I stand by the general consensus: that its effects are incremental rather than transformational. I have not and will not take take it indefinitely, even though cycling is probably not necessary, for a number of reasons that I will cover below.

Humble Beginnings

Following a powerlifting meet in November of 2021, I was easing back into the swing of training early in 2022, and was beginning to think about ways to advance. Creatine had been on my radar for a long time, so in late January of 2022, I figured I would bite the bullet and give it a shot. I was getting a bit heavy for my liking, so I had also decided to enter a calorie deficit around the same time.

I had assumed that I would not really reap the full benefit if I started supplementation during a cut, but I understood well the physiological implications of creatine’s impact on ATP production could not hurt training, even if I couldn’t fully capitalize on it. More productive and energetic training sessions could only lead to positive outcomes, deficit or not.

Things actually wound up going even better than I expected, especially for my bench press. During the aforementioned prep for the meet in November, I had failed a 167.5 kg/369 lbs bench. Between January and March, I had made numerous leaps forward on my bench progress. After chasing 170 kg/375 lbs for years, I hit it and more, numerous times in the span of two months, turning it into a submaximal single and culminating in a PR of 177.5 kg/391 lbs that March. In just two months, I went from being a mid-300s bencher to knocking on the door of 400 lbs.

It was’t as though progress was limited entirely to bench, either. I continued to hit pretty significant rep PRs on squat and especially deadlift and their variants, including taking my 4 rep deadlift PR up about 15 kg, and hitting a 5 rep squat PR in roughly the same time period. My overall work capacity in the gym was much higher, especially as compared to previous training bouts in a calorie deficit. Both my ability to perform multiple sets, as well as my ability to sustain that intensity throughout the workout longer, seemed highly improved.

Granted, to chalk all of this progress up to creatine would be naive. All-around solid programming and coaching were obviously the cardinal factors here, and perhaps I was reaping some long-standing gains or hitting my ceiling by easing off the gas and clearing some meet prep fatigue. However, I cannot remember the last time when I had made so much continuous progress in such a short period of time, particularly while hovering at roughly the same weight the entire time.

Not All Sunshine and Rainbows

Wait… hovering around the same weight? Wasn’t I supposed to be in a small caloric deficit? Well, yes, and I was. And I believe I did drop a decent amount of fat. However, progress was much slower than I expected, definitely in part because of creatine consumption. Over the course of 4 weeks, I had only lost around 2 or 3 pounds when I expected to lose 8 to 10.

Water Weight Woes

Was it my ineptitude? Was I just eating more than I thought? Unlikely, as I have shed pounds with roughly the same protocol many times before with very little issue at all. The likely reality was that I was taking some time to saturate my muscles with creatine and, by extension, water, resulting in my cut’s progress being masked by the gradual water retention.

For some additional context, many perform what is called a “loading phase”, where they ingest something like 4 times the recommended daily intake of creatine over the course of a week or so in order to saturate their muscles with creatine as quickly as possible. I did not do that, meaning that my saturation period was likely several weeks long, and water retention was slow to build as a result, seeming to mask the results of my fat loss.

What cemented this notion in my mind was what I experienced when I cut weight for 2 meets later on in the year. I lost significantly more weight than I expected once I cut creatine. With very modest water and sodium manipulation (no sweating, smaller water and sodium loading phases), I somehow managed to lose ~2.7 kg/6 lbs once and over ~3.6 kg/8 lbs the second time. I still managed to feel and perform pretty much as well as always in the latter case, even in spite of never having competed under the conditions of a 2-hour weigh-in until that day and losing ~3.5% of my bodyweight fairly effortlessly. Historically, those are the sorts of numbers that I would attempt to pull off for 24-hour weigh-ins and struggle a bit to do so. While water manipulation experience was likely a variable, I can imagine that pulling creatine out about 1.5 weeks out also really primed me to shed a lot more water than I normally would’ve been able to.

Nothing Good Lasts Forever

Additionally, the honeymoon phase seems to have run its course. My bench has hardly improved over the last year since those initial bouts of progress, and even when my creatine intake becomes a bit shaky or inconsistent now, I don’t really notice a significant impact. Progress has been steady overall, but nothing earth-shattering. Again, the primary benefit (for me, anyway) seems to be its positive effect on work capacity. More sets of accessories at the same weight, stronger backdown sets, etc. These factors lead to positive outcomes and stack chips in the long term, but they are nothing transformational. As such, it’s hard to really chalk up how much of those initial spurts of progress were coincidental, and how much of that progress was a direct result of the supplementation.

A Psychological Dependency

Strength athletes and coaching circles have popularized the mantra, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Some have taken this to a needless extreme; when training is going relatively well, they will meticulously maintain every variable in its rightful place, even if they are doing something evidently detrimental or leaving progress on the table. I myself am not immune to this, and it made coming off of creatine psychologically difficult for fear that I would somehow hamstring my training. Suffice it to say, laziness and the pursuit of convenience eventually won the war, and for a time, I had taken an unplanned pause from creatine altogether. In spite of knowing better, I was originally a bit apprehensive and superstitious about cycling off of it, but of course, nothing really detrimental happened in the long term. At the very least, it wasn’t as though my progress was suddenly reversed, and progress continued at roughly the same rate.

No Side Effects…?

Creatine advocates will tell you that the supplement is largely side effect free. This is mostly supported by the literature, aside from some rare edge cases, like those with kidney disease, or people who experience gastrointestinal upset during loading phases.

However, in my anecdotal experience, I definitely feel something negative and acute, if brief, when I take creatine, and I speculate it is a result of creatine’s impact on water distribution in the body. That is not to say that creatine causes dehydration, but that it demands more water than you would otherwise require. I am a fairly large person by lean body mass, so my normal hydration demands are already quite high. I can comfortably drink about a gallon and a half a day, and still wake up modestly dehydrated. This problem has only been exacerbated since I began taking creatine, where now I require something like 20-30% more water than before. Especially if I do not consume a lot of water water immediately around the time of taking creatine, I can get a headache and dry mouth pretty much right after consumption, which tends to be in a dehydrated post-workout state.

Your mileage may very, and my assessment is purely anecdotal. Creatine headaches are not a well researched phenomenon, and most people do not report any side effects. In fact, early but promising evidence suggests that creatine may actually be beneficial for brain health in the long term, but my anecdote is still worth considering.

Concluding Thoughts and Recommendations

Creatine can be an effective tool in any lifter’s arsenal. It’s not a must-have, but it is ultimately one of the only available natural substances with a strong track record for its recovery, performance, and mass-adding efficacy. I am currently taking creatine now, but in periods where training is more casual and competitions are on a distant time horizon, or when I need to manipulate water more drastically, I am not opposed to dropping it from my regimen. Ultimately, don’t expect any silver bullets or steroid-tier progress, but it is a small brick you can stack on top of your training and nutritional pyramid for a bit of extra oomph.

If you want to pick up some creatine, you should opt for the most researched variant, creatine monohydrate. I will shamelessly plug Legion’s own Recharge product, which contains the literature-based recommended daily dosage of 5 grams of creatine monohydrate per serving, as well other recovery-promoting compounds, like L-Carnitine L-Tartrate, sold by a company with a prudent and stringent sourcing process. That being said, whether you opt for my favorite brand or not, any way you can manage to get 5 grams of creatine monohydrate a day will suffice.