If you’ve ever looked at fitness supplements, you’ve probably heard about creatine. This word often appears in gyms, magazines and websites, and your friends must have mentioned it.
Creatine has some advantages. It can supplement the consumption of glycogen, which is also the key to energy generation. Creatine can also relieve fatigue and depression. Some studies have even shown that creatine can also relieve headache and dizziness after brain surgery in children.
However, the most important role of creatine is related to energy supply, specifically to supplement energy. Human energy directly comes from ATP. Unfortunately, cells tend to keep ATP levels very low. Because if too much energy is used at one time, too much acid will be produced, leading to cell dysfunction.
In order to fight against the nature of this cell, you need creatine kinase to help. When ATP is used, creatine kinase inhibits the production of excessive acid by separating hydrogen ions. In addition, creatine kinase will combine ADP, the product of ATP consumption, with phosphocreatine to regenerate ATP.
After that, creatine will be converted into creatine phosphate, but don’t forget that your body doesn’t want too much ATP, so when there is too much ATP in the cell, ATP will react with creatine to generate creatine phosphate. The more creatine in the body, the more creatine phosphate will be generated, and the more energy will be added to the body.
This process of energy generation is called the phosphagen energy supply system. The system replenishes energy within ten seconds after exercise, which is much faster than other sources, such as sugar, fat, etc.
This is also the working principle of creatine as a supplement. Although the human body can produce creatine by itself, the method is to decompose amino acids, glycine and arginine. But research shows that creatine is good for your body, especially for your strength level.
Studies have shown that after taking creatine monohydrate, the muscle strength level will increase by 26%. It should be noted that people usually think that creatine will help muscle growth, but in fact, it will not, at least not directly promote muscle growth.
Two indirect reasons why creatine may promote muscle growth are:
① It provides more energy to the muscle to increase the strength level and improve the stimulation of the training to the muscle;
② This increases the water content of the cells, which makes the muscles look bigger visually.
As for the dosage of creatine, many businesses often suggest that there should be a shock period when using it. For example, the dosage is higher at the beginning, and then 5g daily after several weeks. However, research shows that this way of taking creatine has no obvious benefits except for making your creatine eat faster. The recommended dosage given by scientific research is 3-5 g per day, and you can stop using creatine at any time.
In this case, does the use of creatine have any side effects? Many people will pay attention to whether creatine will affect the kidney and liver, but in fact, there is no experimental evidence that creatine has any side effects on the human body.
Especially after the human experiment, the only side effect is that creatine will increase the cell water content, which will make you look a little edema and gain weight slightly. But don’t forget that the purpose of creatine is to make you stronger.