Leah:
Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition podcast. I am Leah Higl and I’m here with my co-host Aidan Muir and today we’ll be answering the question, should endurance athletes take creatine? So we have recently talked about this on one of our Q &A episodes, but we figured we’d do a full podcast episode on it, explain it in more detail. If you haven’t listened to that Q &A episode though, I won’t give any spoilers. We’re just going to jump straight into it.
Aidan:
So the starting point I always look at with pretty much every supplement is, is there any downside of this? And that’s one of the common reasons why people would go out of their way to not take creatine. The main common concern is that it will lead to water weight and that will make performance worse. And I could see that it’s pretty easy to dismiss that for a few reasons. So one is that we only really see a noticeable increase in water weight during loading.
If you measure at a random time point more than 30 days after somebody started taking creatine and compare it to people in the placebo group, we typically can’t see a noticeable difference in water weight. I’m not going to say there’s absolutely zero difference, but it’s rare to see a noticeable difference after 30 days of use. So that’s pretty easy. The other angle you could look at theoretically is, would it even be a bad thing if you had a little bit more water weight? Isn’t that just like being a bit more hydrated? We know for longer endurance events that could even potentially have benefits. I won’t say it has benefits there, but it’s just another angle of looking at it being like, it doesn’t really seem to be an issue. There’s no other real downsides that exist of creatine. So at least with the baseline, it’s not going to make performance worse.
Leah:
To add a little bit more context to the rest of the discussion, I’m just going to briefly chat about how creatine works. Even though we’ve covered this to death, I just want to give a really brief explanation. So creatine improves ATP regeneration and ATP is our, basically our body’s source of quick energy production in the muscle. So if we have more ATP available, this means that we have more fuel for bursts of high intensity activity. It’s also something that builds up in the system over tim
e when supplementing appropriately. So it’s not that it has an acute effect, but it’s the chronic supplementation building up in the system over time that has the impact that we are looking for from a performance perspective. People who take creatine consistently and resistance train do typically gain slightly more strength and muscle than those who don’t. That is quite clear in the decades of research that we have around creatine supplementation, but none of that actually directly improves endurance.
Aidan:
In terms of direct improvements, we know that this ATP regeneration aspect can help with like short bursts of activity, short intense bursts and in some endurance events that could be relevant, for example, a sprint finish, maybe a really hard hill, maybe overtaking people. there’s some, some cases. It’s also not even just theoretical. There has been research testing this. So the best example I find if you go super far back, there was a study in 1998 where people had basically done a pre-exhaustion of like 30 minutes of relatively hard endurance work. And then they followed it up with 10 sets of 15 second sprints, and sprinting power output was 18% higher. So we do know it helps with stuff like that.
There’s multiple angles to that. Like one angle is surely we would like to be better in those situations like that makes sense. The other angle is that it obviously becomes pretty specific to the sport. There are a lot of times I talk about supplements and I will say this gives like a 1.5% improvement. And people are like, that’s not much. They’re not that interested in it. If we did the maths on how much this benefit of creatine would have on, let’s say a marathon time, this direct improvement, you’re looking at the 0.00% improvement over the entire time.
But that would be different for different sports. Like for example, cycling, what if somebody once again is going up hills and stuff like that? What if there is a sprint finish and they’ve been like riding in tailwinds the entire way to then get a really strong strength sprint finish? Like there’s multiple angles to this about. In some cases, it’d be way more beneficial than in others.
Leah:
Talking through some of the indirect improvements that could come from supplementing creatine as an endurance athlete is that, most endurance athletes do actually do some form of resistance training. So this can help in a lot of ways in terms of how resistance training plays into endurance sports. So for runners, it could improve things like running economy, power output, and force production in general.
And creatine could potentially help to just improve these adaptations. So if we’re doing strength training, it could specifically improve the outcomes of the strength training and therefore have more of a carry over to endurance. But you can see how that’s like, it’s more indirect. From another angle, strength training can also cause fatigue, obviously. This is part of the reason why endurance athletes typically won’t be training five to six times a week, but more like two to three times a week is a lot more manageable in terms of not overloading yourself with too much activity where the endurance stuff starts to suffer.
So if we think about the context of creatine supplementation, it could potentially allow someone to get the same adaptations from their strength training component with slightly less volume and fatigue, which could potentially mean more energy to spend on building endurance capacity and more sport specific training.
So again, it’s like a very indirect kind of roundabout way, but if you’re doing resistance training, potentially there could be some benefit there to creatine. And taking that further with indirect improvements, we can look at resistance training for rehab specific cases. There are so many cases where when creatine is added as part of a rehab protocol for injury, people often do see benefits.
Aidan:
My kind of like little test on this, and this is so simple, but it’s like, if I see a study looking at injury recovery of large sample size, and they look at creatine versus placebo, before reading the study, I make the assumption that creatine is going to help injury recovery a little bit. And almost every time you see a small improvement. It’s funny, cause we were talking about this with off air with a protein research thing a while back where, although we’ve had these ranges for ages, like 1.6 to 2.2 and so on and so forth.
If I open a study that has like three grams per kilo of protein and they compare it to 1.6, in my head before I read it, I’m like, bet you the three grams gained a little bit more muscle. Even though there’s certain things we say, it’s the same thing with the creatine thing, just being like, we do see these improvements in rehab. And this obviously gets a little bit beyond the nutrition space about like, how much of this stuff matters for rehab? Like for example, if you go really deep down the rabbit hole of certain like physios and pain science and stuff like that, sometimes it gets to point that it seems like nothing matters in the pain space.
But there are cases like, for example, if somebody has a certain injury where having stronger calves would help reduce like the force on that area that the physio might give them a metric. Like you need to be able to do 20 single leg calf raises with your body weight or like whatever it is and creatine likely improves the rate at which they get to that kind of milestone. The next question is just like, how much does that matter from the actual injury and pain perspective? It depends on what kind of philosophy you take with all that stuff.
But if there are any goals of like, need to gain this much strength or this much muscle in this area, creatine would typically help with that. And if that has any relevance for the rehab process, it will speed up recovery.
Leah:
Finishing off with talking about race time assessment or almost like I’m probably going to tie this into a bit of a summary and our thoughts in general on this topic is that Based on the research we have, it’s unlikely that creatine does have a meaningful direct impact on race times. So when we are assessing the supplements that we as dietitians would prescribe to our endurance athletes, it’s not a top tier. It’s not like one of the top contenders we would think about.
However, it could help with all the things that we have mentioned and have that slightly more indirect effect or things where it is those short bursts of high intensity activity as part of the overall event or training. So if somebody wanted to take creatine as an endurance athlete, there’s like literally no downsides to doing so. And there is only potential upside, although more minimal than other sports that we tend to be seeing.
Aidan:
This has been episode 201 of the Ideal Nutrition podcast. I often talk about how much reviews matter, but I still think everyone under appreciates how much they matter. Every time I put a post up on Instagram on my story, just asking for a favour, because I rarely ask for favors, and people go and leave reviews. We have a massive jump in the rankings.
One time we went from like 50 to three, like in the nutrition podcast in Australia. And like this stuff, it doesn’t even take that much to kind of have these big jumps. So if you do feel like doing us a favour, I would love it if you could please leave a five-star review, we’d massively appreciate that. But apart from that, thank you so much for listening.