Creatine: More Than Just a Gym Supplement
Creatine has a reputation. If you’ve ever stepped foot in a gym, you’ve probably heard it hyped for building muscle and boosting performance. And that’s true—it’s one of the most studied, safe, and effective supplements for athletes. But that’s just the surface.
What if I told you that creatine does more than power your workouts?
It fuels your brain, supports mood, and even helps with recovery, gut health, and aging.
New research suggests creatine may help with mental clarity, memory, and even mood disorders like depression when used alongside therapy.
Your body already produces creatine, and you also obtain some from foods like red meat and fish. But most people—especially vegetarians, older adults, and those under stress—don’t get enough to optimize its benefits fully. Supplementing with just 3-5 grams a day can improve how your body and brain perform. 10 grams and more a day may even have further benefits.
Let’s break down exactly how creatine works and why it’s not just for gym junkies.
What Is Creatine & How Does It Work?
Creatine is a natural compound found in your muscles, brain, and even your gut microbiome. It’s like a rechargeable battery for your cells.
When you need a quick burst of energy—whether for lifting weights, sprinting, or even thinking—creatine helps refuel ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the energy source your body runs on.
When you have high activity or stress, you deplete your stores of creatine and ATP. Taking supplemental creatine can help boost these stores and replenish them following a workout. It can both enhance a workout and help you recover and rebuild from it more efficiently.
Where Does Creatine Come From?
- Your Body Makes It – Your liver, kidneys, and brain produce creatine
- You Get It from Food – Red meat, fish, and poultry contain small amounts. A vegetarian diet can signal increased need.
- Your Gut Microbiome Produces It – Certain gut bacteria play a role in creatine metabolism, which means a healthier gut may improve creatine absorption and utilization. Various healthy microbes are involved in the production of amino acids and cofactors necessary for the production of creatine.
- You Can Supplement It – Taking creatine monohydrate increases your body’s stores beyond what you get from food in as little as 3-5 grams per day.
I use Klean Creatine by Klean Athlete as it is NSF-certified for professional sports and, therefore, you do not need to worry about quality and purity.
How Does It Work?
- Stored as Phosphocreatine – Your muscles and brain store creatine in the form of phosphocreatine, which acts like a backup battery reserve of energy for the body, especially muscles, brain cells, and nerves.
- Rapid Energy for ATP – When your body needs quick energy, phosphocreatine helps recycle ATP, allowing you to keep going. You’ll find you can focus better for longer durations. You can push more weight and more reps when weight training, or run further and faster during endurance training.
- Brain & Gut Connection – Emerging research suggests that creatine may support the gut-brain axis by helping to balance gut-derived neurotransmitters, which play a role in mood, stress, and cognitive function, as well as other bodily functions outside of the brain.
- Cell Hydration & Recovery – Creatine pulls water into muscle cells (1), helping them stay hydrated, recover faster, and grow. This is why some people experience temporary water retention when taking creatine—a minor trade-off for the significant cognitive and physical performance benefits it provides.
Weight Gain Concerns and Creatine
Since creatine causes water retention in muscles, don’t be alarmed by normal 2-5 lb weight fluctuations—this isn’t actual fat gain or loss. Unlike bloating caused by stress or a poor diet, this water retention won’t create a puffy appearance in your face or body.
The performance benefits are equally important: By enabling longer, harder workouts and faster recovery, creatine helps you build muscle more effectively, improving your body composition and metabolism over time.
For special occasions where leanness matters (competitions, photoshoots, or beach events), simply discontinue creatine 3-7 days beforehand to reduce water weight and achieve a more defined look.
Now that you understand how it works, let’s talk about why it’s so powerful for performance and muscle growth.
Creatine for Strength, Power & Muscle Growth
If you want stronger muscles, better endurance, and faster recovery, creatine is one of the most research-backed supplements you can take.
Strength & Power Output
Creatine helps boost short bursts of energy, which means you can lift heavier, sprint faster, and push harder before fatiguing.
- Research shows 5-15% increases in power in activities like weightlifting, sprinting, and high-intensity training (2; 3). Creatine use excels in repeated activities where short bursts are common because it helps restore ATP levels in the muscle faster in between bursts.
Muscle Growth, Endurance, & Recovery
Creatine doesn’t just help you lift more—it helps muscles grow and recover better, while also supporting endurance performance.
- Increases Muscle Hydration – Pulls water into muscle cells, making them look and feel fuller.
- Boosts Protein Synthesis – Helps muscles repair and grow faster after workouts.
- Reduces Muscle Breakdown – Helps preserve muscle mass, especially when you train hard or fast intermittently.
- Speeds Up Recovery – Less soreness, better bounce-back for your next sessions.
- Reduces Fatigue – More ATP means better stamina in long workouts or races.
- Supports Recovery Between Sessions – Helps runners, cyclists, and endurance athletes recover faster between sessions, allowing them to train harder and gain a decisive edge over the competition.
Creatine and Gut Health
Some early research suggests that creatine may influence gut microbiome diversity (4; 5), which is linked to nutrient absorption, inflammation control, and energy production. This diversity then helps the body produce and maintain creatine levels naturally.
Creatine supplementation is now being investigated for support for clients with Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) like ulcerative colitis, and/or Crohn’s disease (6; 7; 8).
ATP fuels nearly every cellular process in the body. By supporting ATP production, creatine helps enhance energy availability, promoting more efficient function across multiple systems.
Creatine’s Role in Brain Health and Mood
Most people associate creatine with muscle growth and athletic performance, but research is uncovering its surprising benefits for the brain.
The brain is an energy-demanding organ, consuming about 20% of the body’s total energy despite making up only a small fraction of body weight.
Just like muscles rely on creatine to quickly generate ATP (adenosine triphosphate) for movement, the brain depends on ATP for essential functions like neurotransmitter release, cognitive processing, and neural communication.
- Neurotransmitter Support – Emerging research suggests creatine may help modulate key mood-regulating neurotransmitters, including dopamine and serotonin (9), which could influence mental well-being. Creatine may serve roles as a neurotransmitter itself too (10; 11).
- Antioxidant Effects – By reducing oxidative stress and free radical damage, creatine might help mitigate cellular stress in the brain (12).
- Lessen Effects of Sleep Deprivation – Most of us can commiserate with the effects of a poor night’s sleep. The good news, at least to animal research, is that creatine may help mitigate some of those losses as it pertains to brain function (13).
- Brain Cell Growth and Connections – Some studies indicate that creatine could promote neurogenesis (the growth of new neurons) and strengthen synaptic connections, potentially supporting learning and memory (14).
Mental Clarity and Performance
Studies suggest that supplementing with creatine can enhance cognitive performance, particularly under conditions of stress, fatigue, or sleep deprivation.
Research has shown improvements in working memory, reaction time, intelligence, and problem-solving ability (15; 16), especially in individuals with lower baseline creatine levels, such as vegetarians and older adults.
For instance, in sleep-deprived individuals, creatine supplementation has been linked to better task performance and mental endurance.
These findings suggest that creatine doesn’t just benefit athletes pushing through an intense workout—it also helps students, professionals, and anyone dealing with mental fatigue maintain focus and clarity.
Creatine Benefits and Depression
Emerging research is exploring creatine as a potential support for mood disorders, including depression.
- Early evidence shows some benefit of taking creatine in conjunction with other antidepressants to improve symptoms of depression (17; 18; 19).
- A double blind, randomized controlled trial in 52 women demonstrated improvements in depression scores when taking 5g of creatine alongside an antidepressant medication compared to women taking the same antidepressant and a placebo (20).
- A 2025 randomized controlled trial published in European Neuropsychopharmacology investigated creatine monohydrate as an add-on therapy to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for depression (21).
- Over 8 weeks, participants receiving creatine alongside cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) showed a greater reduction in depressive symptoms compared to those receiving CBT alone (22).
This suggests that creatine may support neurotransmitter function and energy production in the brain, which are often impaired in individuals with depression. Since creatine plays a role in mitochondrial function, it may also help regulate mood by optimizing brain cell energy production where mitochondria are densely located.
Potential Role in Anxiety and Stress Resilience
Beyond depression, there’s growing interest in how creatine might help with anxiety and stress management, which often have similar overlapping causes, with encouraging study results (23).
Stress depletes ATP stores, leaving individuals feeling mentally drained and emotionally overwhelmed. By ensuring the brain has a readily available energy source, creatine may improve stress resilience, helping people handle challenges with greater ease.
While more studies are needed, the potential benefits of creatine for mood, cognition, and stress management highlight its role beyond sports nutrition, positioning it as a key supplement for both physical and mental well-being.
How to Use Creatine for Maximum Benefits
You’re convinced creatine has benefits, but how do you take it the right way? The good news? It’s one of the simplest and safest supplements to use, but small mistakes can leave benefits on the table.
What Type of Creatine Should You Take?
There are plenty of fancy creatine supplements out there, but creatine monohydrate is still the gold standard. As mentioned previously, I like Klean Creatine the best for quality, purity, and cost.
- Creatine Monohydrate – Most researched, most effective, and most affordable. If you’re going to take creatine, this is the one to choose.
- Creatine HCL, Buffered Creatine, Liposomal, and Liquid Creatine – Marketed as “better absorbed” or “easier on digestion,” but there’s no strong research showing they work better than monohydrate.
- Note on Creatine Gummies
Creatine monohydrate may be delivered in a chewable gummy. The issue with this approach is that you often need 4+ gummies to achieve a 5-gram dose, and each gummy is likely to contain sugar. For instance, 2-5 grams of sugar may not seem like much on a label, but 4 grams of sugar is equivalent to 1 teaspoon, and visually, that’s a lot of sugar.
In my experience, the powders do not have a poor taste or texture unless included in a mixed formulation with other nutrients. If the powder is an issue for you, choose creatine capsules instead.
How Much Creatine Should You Take?
- Take 3-5 grams per day (about a teaspoon), any time of day, preferably before and/or after a workout or heavy mental task (24).
- Athletes, weight lifters, and those performing high-intensity activities can take a loading dose of 15-25g per day over the first 5-7 days, then switch back to the 3-5g per day (25).
- Many advocates recommend taking 10 grams daily—either as a single dose, split between morning and afternoon, or divided as 5 grams pre-workout and 5 grams post-workout—to optimize its benefits.
- Creatine does not cause kidney disease in healthy individuals, but people with pre-existing kidney dysfunction should consult a doctor before using it.
- **While creatine supplementation raises creatinine levels in blood tests, this increase reflects normal metabolism of supplemental creatine—not impaired kidney function—unless kidney disease is already present.
Science shows creatine works—not just for building muscle and boosting workouts, but for brain health and energy too. Safe, effective, and backed by decades of research, creatine powder is something I’ve integrated into my daily stack of supplements, particularly before and after working out.
