18 Science-Backed Creatine Benefits You Should Know About

When creatine first hit the marketplace, the two benefits that almost everyone knew it conferred upon those who consumed it regularly were increased muscle size and strength. Then, as countless examples emerged of prominent athletes who achieved unprecedented success once they began taking creatine supplements, many gym goers flocked to creatine precisely for these few advertised benefits.

Little did these early adopters realize that creatine was improving the quality of their lives outside of the gym just as surely as it improved that quality of their workouts within it. Fortunately, research has finally caught up to many of the benefits that creatine offers, and we have a thorough list to present you with so that you’ll be able to give creatine the recognition it deserves for contributing to your quality-of-life improvements.

1. Creatine increases muscle strength and power during resistance training.

One of its greatest claims to fame, creatine’s ability to immediately increase muscle strength and power output for purposes of training has been replicated and proven in countless studies. (1)

2. Creatine boosts gains in lean muscle mass when combined with exercise.

Alongside the instant increases creatine can produce in applied strength, creatine is also widely praised for its capacity to consistently boost muscle growth beyond what is achievable through strength training alone. (2)

3. Creatine makes you a faster and more durable sprinter.

Aside from being beneficial in obvious circumstances where sustained strength and power are mandatory, like during resistance training, creatine’s boost to your body’s ATP levels extends your viability during all-out-effort exertions, like sprinting. (1)

4. Creatine helps you recover rapidly from intense exercise.

The fact that creatine accelerates your body’s resynthesis of phosphocreatine means that you’ll be prepared for exercise that necessitates rapid recovery so that you can replicate your high intensity efforts. (3)

5. Creatine helps you to recover muscle strength quickly.

In between your workouts, creatine’s presence enables rapid recovery of peak muscle force and function, which helps you to get back to training quickly without feelings of lingering muscle fatigue hindering your performance. (4)

6. Creatine wipes away markers of muscle damage.

As evidence that the muscle recovery prompted by creatine isn’t psychosomatic, and is rooted squarely in the management of muscle damage, creatine supplementation has been proven to reduce the presence of creatine kinase and other enzymes that signal muscle damage 48 hours after exercise. (4)

7. Creatine makes your muscles less sore and inflamed after workouts.

On top of reducing the damage caused by exercise and expediting your recovery, there is also evidence that creatine’s presence can lessen feelings of soreness (DOMS) in the aftermath of strenuous training. (5)

8. Creatine increases short-term memory in healthy adults.

The benefits of creatine aren’t limited to domains that can be directly traced to physical exercise. Even if you’re a healthy adult, the energy elevation that creatine offers your brain will improve your short-term memory. (6)

9. Creatine improves overall mental performance.

Aside from improving your memory under short term circumstances, the energy increase supplied by creatine has been shown to be adept at improving cognitive performance across the board. (7)

10. Creatine accelerates mental processing speed even when you’re sleep deprived or stressed.

Even under less than ideal circumstances, one high dose of creatine may be capable of improving your mental performance and processing speed, including when you’re low on sleep or stressed out. (8)

11. Creatine alleviates depressive symptoms and makes SSRI medications more effective. 

Boosting the energy to your brain through creatine supplementation helps to regulate your levels of dopamine and serotonin, along with your adenosine receptors. This helps to alleviate feelings of depression, and elevates the efficiency of other depression-treatment aids. (9)

12. Creatine counters the effects of sarcopenia in older adults.

While most studies of creatine’s physical benefits to muscles are linked to its potential to enhance strength and muscle mass in people that are young and healthy, several studies have conclusively shown that creatine can slow and reverse effects of sarcopenia — the loss of muscle mass, strength, and functionality — in older adults. (10) 

13. Creatine preserves lean muscle mass during calorie-restricted dieting.

Even though calorie-restricted diets often contribute to a loss of lean muscle mass as a side effect, creatine supplementation has enabled people to maintain a higher percentage of their muscle mass while dieting. (11)

14. Creatine assists with the regulation of blood sugar. 

Whether you suffer from either form of diabetes, or you are simply insulin resistant, creatine intake has been demonstrated to increase insulin sensitivity if combined with exercise. (12)

15. Creatine offsets some of the dietary consequences of veganism and vegetarianism.

Because vegans and vegetarians have lower baseline levels of creatine than those who consume meat, they are more likely to suffer from a host of side effects linked with low creatine levels. Creatine supplementation has been shown to dramatically improve these outcomes in vegans and vegetarians to an understandably greater degree than in meat-eaters. (6)

16. Creatine promotes overall heart and cardiovascular health.

It shouldn’t be surprising that creatine can improve the functionality of the heart in the same way it improves the performance of the muscles we can see. Studies have shown creatine’s capacity to improve vascular function and reduce arterial stiffness, leading to a healthier heart overall. (13)  

17. Creatine reduces the likelihood that you’ll get sick.

Thanks to the increase creatine provides to your cellular energy, it also boosts your antibacterial immunity and anti-inflammatory responses, and makes it less likely that you’ll fight off the invisible organisms that can make you sick. (14).

18. Creatine improves reproductive outcomes for women

Retrospective studies conclude that creatine is able to assist aspiring mothers and pregnant women with hormone regulation, improve the quality of eggs, and optimize embryonic development, all of which contribute to a higher rate of reproductive success. (15)

Conclusion

In most discussions of creatine, the number of benefits that it can provide are limited to the areas that can be consistently trained in the gym. This is a gross underreporting of creatine’s value to your life; there are well over a dozen ways that creatine can improve your life quality, and those known benefits are increasing by the year. 

There are 18 good reasons on the list you’ve just reviewed that might entice you to make a life-changing decision to start taking creatine. However, even if you only decided to supplement with creatine to improve in one of the ways presented on this list, rest assured that creatine will still confer the rest of the benefits to your body as an added bonus. 

Sources

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