I’m being asked for my thoughts on creatine everyday, so here’s my take on it…
Almost 20 years ago, when I was working in the trenches of sports nutrition with bodybuilders and athletes’ creatine was already the supplement we’d put in everyone’s hands. The reason was simple: it worked. We knew it could help athletes train harder, recover faster between sets, and pack on muscle. It was, and still is, one of the most thoroughly researched supplements on the planet.
Fast forward to today and creatine is having a real moment. But the buzz isn’t really coming from the gym crowd anymore. Search interest has roughly doubled in the past couple of years, and most of the new attention has nothing to do with personal bests on the squat rack. It’s about brains, bones, and increasingly, women’s health.
I recently listened to a great episode of Tim Crowe’s Thinking Nutrition podcast walking through the science, and there’s enough genuinely interesting research here to make it worth a closer look; whether you’ve been taking creatine for years or have never thought about it.
A quick refresher on what it actually does
Creatine is a compound your body already makes (in the liver and kidneys), and that you also get from animal foods like meat and fish. Most of it is stored in your muscles as creatine phosphate, where it acts as a rapid-fire energy source- helping regenerate ATP for short, hard efforts like sprinting or heavy lifting.
The sports performance case is well established. The biggest wins come from repeated high-intensity efforts; team
sports, interval training, and resistance training where creatine helps you do more work in a session and recover faster between bouts. Over time, that translates into more lean mass, more strength, and more power. None of this is new. But it’s the foundation everything else now builds on.
What to buy:
Creatine monohydrate. That’s it. Skip the fairy sprinkles – they’re mostly marketing. Monohydrate is the form used in nearly all the research, and it’s usually the best value. Always buy a quality brand that you can trust.
How to take it: You can load (around 20 g/day split into smaller doses for 5–7 days, then drop to 3–5 g daily), or just start with 3–5 g daily and reach saturation in about a month. For brain and bone benefits, the literature points toward higher daily doses; somewhere in the 5–10 g range. Around 10 g/day is a reasonable target if you’re chasing the full spread of benefits.
Timing: pre-workout is good for increased power, but honestly, consistently is more important than timing – just take it daily. One small note: very high caffeine doses may blunt some of the effect, so if you’re being precise, space them out by an hour or so.
The brain story
Your brain runs on about 20% of your daily energy budget, and like your muscles, it relies on the ATP system. So, it makes sense that topping up creatine stores might support cognition, particularly when the brain is stressed, fatigued, or ageing.
Several systematic reviews now point in the same direction: creatine gives a small but real boost to memory in healthy adults, and a noticeably bigger boost in older adults. There’s also emerging evidence for improvements in attention and processing speed, especially in people with brain-related conditions. Younger, well-rested people in their 20s tend to see less effect, which fits the idea that creatine helps most when the brain is working under metabolic stress.
More speculative but interesting territory: mood. A 2025 trial in 100 adults with major depressive disorder found that adding 5 g of creatine daily to cognitive behavioural therapy produced a clinically meaningful improvement over CBT plus placebo. The creatine group moved from “moderately severe” to “mild” depression over eight weeks. Promising, though far from settled science.
There’s also early work on creatine for concussion recovery, traumatic brain injury, and even long-COVID brain fog and fatigue. None of it is conclusive yet, but the thread running through it is consistent: when brain energy metabolism is compromised, creatine seems to help.
Bones and the longevity angle
Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone thinking about ageing well. Creatine on its own doesn’t do much for bone density. But combined with resistance training, the picture changes. A two-year trial in postmenopausal women doing resistance training and walking found that adding creatine didn’t shift bone mineral density much. But it changed bone geometry in ways that matter. Specifically, the femoral neck (the part of the hip most likely to break in a fall) became structurally more resistant to fracture. The creatine group also gained more lean tissue and walked faster. For anyone over 50, male or female, that combination of stronger muscles, better lean mass retention, and more fracture-resistant bones is essentially the longevity playbook. Creatine looks like a useful tool in that toolkit, especially when paired with the right training.
Why women may benefit even more
Women on average have lower baseline creatine stores than men and tend to eat less of it through diet. Layer on the hormonal shifts of perimenopause and menopause which affect creatine metabolism, brain chemistry, muscle, mood, and bone and you have a strong case that creatine is one of the more useful supplements women can consider, particularly from midlife onward.
The same hormonal changes that drive cognitive fog, mood dips, muscle loss and bone loss overlap precisely with the areas creatine supports. It’s not a hormone replacement, and it’s not a fix-all. But it’s a low-cost, well researched lever that punches above its weight at exactly the right life stage.
Practical takeaways
Side effects: Mild GI upset early on (usually settles, or improves with smaller, split doses), and a small amount of water retention. That’s about it. The safety profile across decades of research is excellent.
Who might not respond: Around 30% of people don’t see strong effects, depending on baseline diet, muscle mass, age, and what outcome they’re chasing. Treat it as a personal experiment.
Bottom line: Creatine isn’t the miracle powder some social media accounts make it out to be. But it’s also not just a bodybuilding relic. The same supplement we were scooping into shaker bottles 20 years ago for hypertrophy is now showing up in research on cognition, mood, bone strength, and healthy ageing. Particularly for women.
Alone, it may not solve your problems. But if you’re training, ageing, or simply want a low-risk, well-evidenced supplement to consider, creatine has earned a fresh look.