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Creatine: The Plant-Based Athlete’s Guide
Creatine is one of the most affordable and widely used supplements among casual gym-goers and athletes.
Despite the extensive research available on creatine, there is still a lot of confusion and misinformation about its usage, safety, efficacy, and effects on body composition.
What is creatine?
Creatine is a naturally occurring non-protein amino acid found in muscle tissue, most commonly in red meat and seafood. In the human body, creatine combines with a high-energy phosphate group to form phosphocreatine (creatine phosphate) and is then stored in muscle tissue.
When the body needs to produce a large amount of energy quickly, such as during a heavy lift or a sprint, the phosphate part of the creatine molecule splits off. This chemical bond breaking rapidly produces energy for the muscle to use.
Creatine & a plant-based diet
You would need to eat >1kg of beef or fish daily to get optimal creatine via diet alone – so supplementing is key.
Regardless if you’re vegan or not, creatine supplementation is going to be the most practical and feasible option.
It’s worth noting though that plant-based athletes are often found to have low muscle creatine stores. This is because dietary sources of creatine are primarily red meat and seafood. Therefore, plant-based athletes can benefit even more from supplementation.
The benefits of taking creatine
When you start taking creatine regularly, this ‘saturates’ the creatine available in your muscles. The more creatine available, the more energy can be produced.
This rapid energy production enables greater high-intensity performance. In turn, this provides a greater stimulus to the body and overall increases training adaptations – such as increases in strength, muscle mass, and power.
Researched shown results include, but aren’t limited to:
- 5-15% Increase in Maximal Power and Strength: Found in exercises such as bench press, squats, leg press, leg extension, and chest press.
- 1-5% Increased Single-Effort Sprint Performance: Decreased sprint times (15-100m).
- 5-15% Increased Repetitive Sprint Performance.
- Decreased Recovery Times.
- Greater Gains in Strength, Power, and Muscle mass
- Increased Vertical Jump Height and Power Output:
- Reduces decay in performance in jumping ability in sports like soccer, basketball, and football.
- Increased Time to Exhaustion and Work Capacity: You can go longer before fatigue.
- Increased Intramuscular Water Storage: Improves hydration status.
Because of these benefits, we highly recommend that all gym-goers and athletes use creatine.
No matter what your training focus is, you can likely gain some benefit from creatine supplementation, even if it’s just an extra 1-3%.
How to take creatine?
The goal of creatine supplementation is to maximize muscle creatine stores.
When you first start taking it, you have two options:
- Fast Loading: 20g daily for 7 days, followed by a maintenance dose of 3-5g every day ongoing. Most people will need to split the 20g into 3-4 doses across the day to avoid gastrointestinal (GI) distress.
- Slow Loading: Start directly with a maintenance dose of 3-5g daily. You’ll reach maximal saturation in 4-5 weeks.
The benefit of fast loading is achieving the full effect of creatine faster, but it isn’t entirely necessary – as you will still get there in time with a slow load.
Experts in physique transformation, bodybuilding, peak athletic performance, and plant-based health