Dose and timing

When should I take creatine?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 20264 sources

Whenever you’ll remember. A small 2013 trial leaned toward taking it after training, but what fills your muscles is the total you take day after day. Take it with a meal you never skip, and on training days have it after your workout if that’s easy.

The timing question gets a lot of attention online. Some people take creatine right before lifting so it’s “in the muscle” for the session, others slam it within minutes of the last set to catch an “anabolic window”, and a few set an alarm. It feels like the kind of detail that separates people who get results from people who don’t.

Why the time of day hardly counts

Creatine doesn’t work like caffeine, where the dose acts over the next few hours. It builds up in your muscles over days and weeks. In the 1996 trial behind the usual dose, 3 g a day took 28 days to raise muscle creatine about 20%, and once stores were full, 2 g a day kept them there for another month. Any one dose is a small part of a tank you’re filling over a month.

It’s like a savings account. What decides the balance is how much you put in every month. The time of day you make the deposit barely shows up.

Taking it with food has some support. The International Society of Sports Nutrition says creatine taken with carbohydrate, or carbohydrate and protein, has been reported to raise how much creatine the muscles keep more consistently. A meal does that for free.

The trial behind “after”

In 2013 two researchers, Antonio and Ciccone, split 19 recreational bodybuilders into two groups. One took 5 g right before training and the other right after, five days a week for four weeks. On the two rest days a week they took it whenever they liked.

Both groups gained lean mass and got stronger. Bench press went up 6.6 kg (about 15 lb) in the before group and 7.7 kg (about 17 lb) in the after group. The standard statistics found no real difference between the two. The authors used a second method that estimates how likely a difference is, and by that one, after training was “possibly more beneficial”.

It’s an interesting lean, but it was 19 men for four weeks, and the gap didn’t pass the usual test. It would take a bigger trial to settle it.

A few practical points

• Rest days count. Take the same dose, since your stores lose a little every day whether you train or not. See rest days.
• Coffee is fine. The first creatine trials dissolved it in hot tea. See creatine and coffee.
• Mix it and drink it. Powder keeps for years in the tub, but creatine slowly breaks down once it’s dissolved, faster in warm or acidic drinks, so don’t make it the night before.