How Creatine Works?

How Creatine Works? other information

1.How Creatine Monohydrate works?

Out of the thousands of supplements out there, creatine and protein are the only two which has been scientifically proven to work ti increase muscle mass growth and strength.

2.What was the purpose of the creatine study?

The mechanism by which creatine helps in improving strength is pretty clear; however, the effects of creatine in increasing muscle growth/mass and its underlying mechanisms are still questioned. Hence the study was conducted to find out how creatine helps in increasing muscle mass.

3.What do we know & do not know about creatine?

Water Retention: Creatine has shown to pull water into the muscle which obviously makes the muscle look bigger. This unique ability of creatine seems to have convinced many that the increase in muscle mass with creatine intake is simply due to water retention.

Muscle Fiber Growth: Nonetheless, studies have clearly shown a significant increase in actual muscle cross sectional (across all fiber types) with creatine intake plus strength training.

This creatine study not only shows an increase in fiber cross sectional area but also for the first time reveals an important mechanism behind this increase in muscle mass with creatine intake.

4.What is that unique mechanism of Creatine?

Unique Creatine Mechanism: Unlike other cells in the body, muscle cells (or muscle fibers) are multinucleated. Considering how a muscle cell is way larger and complex than the rest of the cells in the body, it makes a lot of sense to have more than one nuclei to control the complex tasks in the muscle.

Understanding this unique mechanism will also reveal why I picked this study or why creatine is rightly called the “poor man’s steroid”.

For instance, if your favorite restaurant was a muscle and the cooks the nuclei, it’s pretty safe to say that the number of cooks sets the limit to the size of the restaurant. Similarly (or somewhat), the size of your muscle is ultimately limited by the number of nuclei you have in your muscle.

Simply put, you cannot grow bigger muscles without additional nuclei to take care of the extra muscle.So where do we get these nuclei from?

Figure: A muscle fiber with nuclei shown in blue and satellite cell shown in red.

These muscle nuclei sprouts from specialized cells around the muscle called satellite cells. So any increase in satellite cells means some of these cells could be “blossoming” into new nuclei.

Anabolic steroids have clearly shown to increase the number of satellite cells and muscle nuclei even without any strength training stimulus to facilitate the addition of nuclei. Now, guess what happens when you combine steroids with training.

5.What were the results of the Creatine study?

Creatine intake along with training was shown to cause a substantial increase in the number of satellite cells and myonuclei compared to strength training alone and strength training with protein intake.

Further, creatine intake with resistance training showed the greatest increase in muscle fiber size compared to other groups.

6.What was the creatine dosage?

Loading Phase: Creatine monohydrate loading (4 times a day) for 7 days.

Maintenance Phase: creatine (6gms) was supplemented once everyday with carbohydrates (14 gms) for 15 weeks.

Anyhow, to keep a long story short, creatine works in increasing muscle mass, and it works really well too! 

7.some cretein supplements photo are-