Creatine dosing, settled.

What creatine is, in one paragraph

Your muscles run short, hard efforts on a fast-recharging fuel called phosphocreatine. It puts a phosphate back onto spent ATP so you can keep firing. You make some yourself and get some from meat and fish, but your muscle stores aren't full by default. Supplementing creatine monohydrate tops them up, so there's a little more in the tank for those last reps. Across weeks, that extra work adds up to measurably more strength and lean mass. That's it. No stimulant, no hormone, no trick.

What it actually does (and what it doesn't)

• Strength and power. Consistently the largest, most-replicated effect. Meta-analyses put resistance-training strength gains roughly 8–14% above training alone.
• Lean mass. A real, modest bump over time. Partly more training volume tolerated, partly water inside the muscle cell, which is the point: a hydrated muscle cell is an anabolic signal, not "bloat".
• Recovery and high-rep work. Better performance on repeated bouts, and you can do more total work per session.
• Brain. A smaller but real literature on cognitive benefits, most noticeable when you're sleep-deprived or under stress.
• It won't make you fat, dehydrate you, cramp you up, or take your hair. See the myths below.

How much, and whether to load

The ISSN position stand is blunt about it: 3–5 g of creatine monohydrate a day, every day, is all you need. We headline 5 g because it's cheap, removes the guesswork, and comfortably covers larger lifters.

Loading is optional, and you may have heard it's a "myth". It isn't a myth that loading works. It's a myth that you have to do it. A loading phase (about 0.3 g per kg of bodyweight a day, split into four doses, for 5–7 days, then back to your daily dose) fills your stores in roughly a week. Skip it and take 5 g a day from the start, and you reach the exact same muscle saturation in about three to four weeks. Hultman's 1996 study is the classic one: 3 g/day for 28 days matched 20 g/day for 5 days. Same end state. Loading just gets there faster, at the cost of a brief, higher daily intake (which is also why it occasionally upsets stomachs, and why plenty of people skip it). The calculator defaults to no loading; flip it if you want the fast start.

Timing doesn't matter; consistency does. Morning, with food, post-workout, none of it changes the outcome. Missing it for a week does, since your stores slowly drift back down. Make it a daily habit and you can stop thinking about it.

Use plain creatine monohydrate. The "advanced" forms (HCl, ethyl ester, buffered, "nitrate") cost more and have no evidence of being better. Monohydrate is the form essentially every study used. Creapure® is a fine quality marker if you want one; it isn't required.

It isn't just for guys in the gym

Women. Women carry roughly a fifth less muscle creatine than men and tend to eat less of it, so there's arguably more headroom. The strength, power and lean-mass benefits show up the same way. It gets more interesting around peri- and post-menopause, when the drop in estrogen speeds up loss of muscle and bone: a 2021 lifespan review (Smith-Ryan et al.) makes the case for creatine plus resistance training as a low-risk way to push back on that, and a controlled trial in postmenopausal women (Chilibeck et al., 2015) found creatine alongside resistance training improved properties of the hip bone versus training alone. The mood and cognitive angle here is plausible and being studied, but the muscle-and-bone evidence is the firmer of the two.

Older adults. A meta-analysis of creatine plus resistance training in people over ~50 (Chilibeck et al., 2017) found more lean tissue and more strength than the same training without it. That matters: holding onto muscle is one of the things that keeps you independent later on.

Memory and the brain. Your brain runs on the same phosphocreatine system your muscles do, and topping it up has a real, if modest, cognitive effect. It's most visible in people who are vegetarian (lower baseline), older, sleep-deprived, or under mental strain (Avgerinos et al. 2018; Rae et al. 2003; Roschel et al. 2021). Brain benefits, where they show up, tend to need higher doses than the muscle dose (the studies often use ~10–20 g/day), so if cognition is your main reason, 5 g may be on the low side.

Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative disease. There's genuine research interest, because brain energy metabolism is impaired in these conditions and creatine is cheap and safe, so it's an obvious thing to test. But it's early. Creatine is not an established treatment for Alzheimer's, and a large clinical trial of creatine in Parkinson's disease found no benefit. Treat the "creatine for brain health in disease" headlines as a hypothesis under investigation, not a conclusion. For a healthy person, the cognitive upside is the modest, everyday kind described just above.

Things you've heard that aren't true

The science

Every number and claim here traces back to one of these.