Dose and timing

Do you need to load creatine?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 20265 sources

No. In the trial that tested both, 20 g a day for 6 days and 3 g a day for 28 days raised muscle creatine by the same 20%. Loading gets you there about three weeks sooner, and it puts more water on the scale that week.

Loading feels like the part that makes creatine work. The tub prints the plan on the side, gym friends swear by it, and the early research started that way too. In 1992, when the physiologists Harris and Hultman tested whether creatine supplements could raise the creatine in human muscle, they gave people 5 g four or six times a day. It worked, and the big first week stuck.

The trial that settled it

Four years later Hultman’s group in Nottingham ran the comparison. They gave 31 men creatine in different amounts and measured how much ended up in their muscle. One group took 20 g a day, and after 6 days their muscle creatine was up about 20%. Then 2 g a day held it there for another 30 days. Another group took only 3 g a day, and their muscle creatine climbed more slowly to the same 20% by day 28. The researchers wrote that 3 g a day was, in the long run, likely to work as well as the higher dose.

A 2021 review of common creatine questions, written by a team of creatine researchers, came to the same answer. It says to take 3 to 5 g a day for at least 4 weeks to reach the same level as loading.

Start on Monday, November 16 and loading fills your muscles by Saturday, November 21. 3 to 5 g a day gets there by Sunday, December 13. After that the two people are the same.

What loading costs you

It’s like filling a bathtub with the tap on full. You get to the line sooner, and more of it splashes.

• Water on the scale. A loading week of about 20 g a day typically adds 2 to 7 lb (1 to 3 kg), mostly water. The slow path spreads a smaller rise over four weeks.
• Your stomach. Big single doses are the ones that upset it. In a 28-day trial of 59 soccer players, one 10 g dose a day gave 56% of them diarrhea, against 29% on two 5 g doses and 35% on placebo. If you load, keep every serving at 10 g or under.
• Creatine you pee out. In the 1992 trial, three people loading at 30 g a day passed 40 to 68% of it in their urine over the first three days.

If you do load

Load at about 0.3 g per kg of body weight a day for 6 days, capped at 25 g, in four servings. At 180 lb (82 kg) that’s 24 g a day, four servings of 6 g. Then drop to 3 to 5 g a day. The dose tool works out your grams and your date, and the loading myth has the longer story.