Episode 208 – Do Women Benefit from Creatine More than Men?

Key Topic

When it comes to sports supplements, creatine stands out as the most well-researched and consistently effective option available. Its benefits for strength, power, and performance are well established across a wide range of sports. And while creatine is traditionally associated with male athletes, we’re learning more and more about its potential advantages for women — both in terms of physical performance and cognitive function.

What’s particularly exciting is that, despite most sports nutrition research historically focusing on men, creatine is one of the few supplements with a growing body of female-specific evidence. This makes it a rare (and welcome) exception in the field — and an important one to talk about.

Why Women Might Benefit More

Women have baseline stores that are lower than men.
Something that is wild is that I was looking into this and preparing content on the topic and when I was reading studies, a lot said women had 70-80% lower stores. It seemed a bit odd to me that the difference was that large.
I’d seen that range pop up on social media a bit which was part of what made me want to create some of my own content on the topic. Multiple studies said that. The biggest one is linked in the show notes and is very often cited when people make this claim.
Towards the end of writing a blog post on this topic, I was like, I’m just going to double check this with ChatGPT. And basically the consensus is that it is just a mistake that people have consistently repeated and written in research.
For context though, research HAS found that when men and women are the same weight, women do have lower creatine stores on average, it’s just nowhere near that 70-80% quoted figure.
The logic largely is that due to the lower initial stores, there is more potential for creatine to help when muscles are fully saturated.

Why are Stores Lower?

Stores are lower due to a combo of three things: Hormones, size and intake
For background context, we naturally produce some creatine in our body and get some through food.
With food people tend to average 1-2g of creatine per day. It is often found in animal based foods.
On average women have lower intakes than men in general, and a slightly lower proportion coming from creatine rich foods within that.
On average, women also have less muscle mass, which will also reduce how much creatine is produced and stored.
But Note that those two factors are simply averages and can be way different on a case by case basis.
Another factor proposed is that hormonal difference plays a role. It has been proposed that oestrogen can reduce the amount of creatine stored, but I wouldn’t focus on that, particularly since we see so much promising post-menopausal research with creatine.

Outcomes

As with all things, the mechanisms are interesting, but does this matter?
A meta-analysis that we’ve linked in the show notes looking at performance and body composition actually found a huge difference.
This one wasn’t actually designed to compare men vs women, but the data was in there and easy to find.
From a performance perspective, with an average of 10 weeks of creatine supplementation, women experienced around a 15% improvement in performance and men averaged around 6%.
Lean mass gains were also favourable towards women from a percentage perspective.
That’s all pretty compelling. I’m not exactly going to jump on and say women get almost 3x the performance benefits of men. But it’s a pretty compelling argument that there is more benefit.

Summary

One thought on my mind is if the difference is noticeable, why isn’t this more discussed?
Personally we are both not super keen to make a bunch of noise about something unless we see other people sharing a similar opinion, just to confirm we haven’t missed something obvious.
These are also just averages. The differences likely apply even more when dietary intake is lower at the baseline.
I also wouldn’t read too much into that 3x outperformance in that review too, since it almost seems too good to be true.
& overall, it also doesn’t change anything from a practical perspective. If somebody was going to benefit from creatine, I’d recommend it anyway. This is just further incentive, specifically for women

Relevant Blogs / Resources

Relevant blog posts:

Relevant Studies: