If protein supplements are the best, then creatine comes as an extremely close second place as a supplement for weight lifters. Creatine has been scientifically proven to be a safe and successful supplement for athletes and weight lifters that want to have more massive muscle gains.
When using creatine correctly, it can help a person gain an additional 5-10 pounds of lean muscle in a short amount of time. There have been a multitude of studies done on the use of creatine, and all of them have shown how safe and effective it is. A lot of these studies were conducted using creatine monohydrate, which was the first and most basic version of creatine in the marketplace.
So you’re probably wondering how creatine works.
Creatine provides two important roles for weight lifters. First off, creatine increases the volume of your muscle cells, which is the amount of water that each individual cell can contain. By slightly enlarging the size of each cell, it will cause your entire muscle to expand too, which will activate additional muscle growth. The second important role of creatine is that it gives the muscle cells ATP (Adenosine triphosphate), which is energy that the body can use to do exercises. When you have extra ATP inside of your muscle cells, you’ll be able to do more reps than normal, which will result in you having much more muscle growth.
The bad news is that creatine is only useful for about 70% of people. There are people who have bodies that don’t respond to creatine due to the fact that there’s already enough creatine phosphate in their muscles and that the extra supplements don’t make any difference.
After the creatine monohydrate was formulated, there have been many more formulations being created. In the rest of this article, I’ll be describing different variations and how they can affect you and your workout.
Creatine Monohydrate
Creatine Monohydrate is the first creatine supplement to hit the market, and is currently the cheapest formulation of creatine you can find. Most people have had great success with this basic creatine powder, but there are some people that have side effects such as bloating, cramps, or diarrhea. The reason is that some forms of creatine haven’t been ground enough into fine powder. If you look at reputable brands of creatine on the market today, you’ll find that most of them are micronized creatine, which is easily mixed fine powder. So when you’re shopping, be sure that it’s the micronized version! This formulation works great for me, and is inexpensive, so I recommend this to everyone starting out.
Creatine Anhydrous
Creatine anhydrous is pretty much creatine without a water molecule. This allows the powder to be a tiny bit more pure, but this is a very slight advantage. You won’t really notice a difference between anhydrous and monohydrate versions.
Creatine Citrate
Creatine citrate came out a little bit later after creatine monohydrate became popular. This formulation is developed by combining creatine molecules with citric acid molecules. Citric acid is normally used for creating energy, and the idea is that when you use it with creatine, the combo would give you significantly more energy than creatine alone. Although this sounds amazing in theory, the truth is that it has never been proven when researched. When you compare creatine citrate with monohydrate, it has been shown that creatine citrate contains 40% less creatine than the monohydrate version.
Creatine Phosphate
Creatine phosphate also appeared shortly after creatine monohydrate. In this formula, it combines a phosphate molecule with a creatine molecule. These two molecules bond inside of the muscle cell in order to work. Creatine phosphate was a very popular version when it was first created, but soon it fell when people found out that it was significantly less successful than creatine monohydrate.
Creatine Malate
This is one of the newer versions of creatine. It works by combining malic acid and creatine. Malic acid is one of the intermediate components of the Krebs cycle, which is the metabolic pathway that produces aerobic energy within the muscle. In other words, malic acid is an important source for energy creation and in theory, it should be much more effective than creatine monohydrate. Due to the fact that this is new, there hasn’t been enough research conducted yet to confirm whether or not this is better than creatine monohydrate.
Creatine Ester
Creatine Ester is another new formulation of creatine, and its full name is creatine ester ethyl hydrochloride. This version is pretty much alcohol mixed with acid. The idea is that this will allow the creatine to be absorbed by the cells much more easily within the intestines and muscle cells.
With so many different versions of creatine available on the market, and with very little research proving that one may be more effective than the other, I would recommend that you just stay with micronized creatine monohydrate.
If you’d like to find cheap and affordable creatine monohydrate, then I recommend taking a look at ebay. Click here to look at Creatine Monohydrate on Ebay. When compared to stores such as GNC, the prices will be much better!
I usually recommend that you consume about 3-5 grams before and immediately after your weight lifting session, and consume about 40-50 grams of whey protein and 60-100 grams of simple carbs.
